Spring Cleaning the Blog

It’s officially summer here (and don’t we know it with the temp reaching 47°C yesterday!) so I’m a little bit late for my spring cleaning. Not only are we turning the house upside down while we pack to move back home, but I’ve also been doing some spring cleaning on the blog.

I’m getting ready for a new blog design, which has been in the works for a while now. I’ve had this current theme for over 6 months and given how much I like tinkering around with the design (and teaching myself CSS and PHP) I figured it was time for a change. Plus all those photos of Mexico in the header will be old news when we move back to Perth, so… new country, new life, new blog design!

The new design will be fairly similar in layout but since they all work a little bit differently, I have to move a few things around to keep the flow going. It’s also a good opportunity to weed out all the plugins, widgets and other doo-dads that I don’t really use. I always like trying new things out so I’ve got quite a few plugins loaded up that I decided not to use or really haven’t added any value. I thought I’d record here what I’ve been doing in case anyone else is looking for tips, and also to keep track of my own design changes. My ultimate goal is to have a design page, listing all the theme tweaks, plugins, widgets and tricks I use so I can easily remember what I did in the design phase.

Part 1 - Spring Cleaning the Blog

Now is a good time to think about cleaning up the back-end of the blog, before loading the new theme. Some things won’t work as well with the new design, and some things just need regular maintenance.

The main areas I needed to work on were my blogroll and categories.

Blogroll

Previously, I had a standard blogroll page (My Faves) - a long list of blogs I like to visit. I used the default template which didn’t allow for any styling. What I really wanted was a few lists of categorised blogs (personal, blogging, photography etc) and the ability to put some other “Faves” on there too.

After a bit of searching around the WordPress codex and googling, I came across a plugin that allows you to insert a line of PHP code with criteria for which links on your blogroll to display. Now I don’t profess to really understand the intricacies of all this so I’ll give you the simple steps that I took to make it work. You don’t need to know PHP to do this!

1. Generally when you’re writing posts and pages in WordPress you can’t enter PHP straight into the text. PHP is a code language that controls the functions of the blog, rather than the design. To get your visual editor (the box where you write your posts/pages) to accept PHP you need to install a plugin. I used Exec-PHP which was very easy to install.
2. Once Exec-PHP has been activated, you are ready to insert PHP code into a post/page. There are lots of things you might use this for and the WordPress codex does have a section on categorised blogrolls. However I found I couldn’t get the right result so I installed the Blogroll Links plugin.
3. This plugin gave me some code to pop into my blogroll page so I could put my categorised links in whatever order I want, wherever I want. I can also put any other text or images on the page so I have now moved the buttons from my sidebar to the My Faves page.

Categories

I have been meaning to clean up my categories for ages! I’ve never really got the hang of the difference between categories and tags but I know that I had too many categories and the list was ridiculously long! I had been using a drop down box because there were so many, but wanted to switch to a list so I finally got around to cleaning them up. This was a pretty big job because almost every post was listed under several categories and I was trying to consolidate the categories and have only one for each post.

For the most part this involved the tedious task of going through every post and changing the categories. I did find one plugin, Batch Categories which allows you make changes to multiple posts but even using that it was still a big task because there were so many redundant categories.

I’m really happy with the result though, and I now have a nice neat list of 12 categories in my sidebar. I am even starting to use tags, but I need to do a bit more research on the best ways to do that.

A lot of people out in the blogosphere spend a fair bit of time thinking and talking about things like categories and tags and how it relates to SEO and your blog’s success. Obviously that’s important to a lot of people, particularly if you’re trying to make money from your blog, but for me re-organising my categories and blogroll is as much about the aesthetics and function of the blog. I really like a blog that’s easy to navigate around, find out more about the blogger, easily got to posts on a particular subject or wind your way back through the archives. For me, I think the navigation tools on blogs (archives, categories, lists of recent or popular posts) are really important - I am much more inclined to stick around a blog and find out more if I can easily click my way through the posts.

So, that’s about it for Part 1 of my Blog re-design. The next step is the fun part - making the new theme look pretty! I’ll fill you in on all my Photoshop, colour wheel and custom CSS adventures soon…