In So Many Words

Edited to add: I realized later that I forgot to put a link to the new blog (although I do have a widget with the feed in my sidebar). Anyway, it’s at Autism Interrupted.

I wasn’t sure I was even going to mention this here, but I started a new blog. It’s really a place just to ramble and let it all hang out. I found a really cute, girly template from BlogU (it’s pink, which I normally avoid!).

Here’s my first post from the blog, just to give you an idea:

Why start a new blog? Well, there are actually a few reasons why I decided to start a second blog.

The main one is that I keep finding myself hesitating over things I want to share on my original blog (Another Piece of the Puzzle). Sometimes it seems too personal, or too rambling, or even too negative, so I talk myself out of it. I don’t want to be the person who writes down everything that happens to her and posts so much mundane stuff that people don’t want to read it. So here I can let it all hang out and not worry about whether anyone will want to read it.

I also struggle about how much of my blog is about autism. Yes, my son has autism and, yes, it takes up a good deal of my time and energy. But there is so much more to life, and discovering who I am behind the autism mom image is another reason I started blogging almost 11 months ago.

I think what I am finding is that I do have a passion for autism and special needs, but I also want to explore my other passions. That’s not to say I won’t talk about autism here, because I probably will, but I will likely write more about the journey and the things I am trying to figure out. I may also write more about my faith, which I haven’t done too much because it is also such a journey of changing understanding and revelation.

A smaller reason is that, even though I am glad to have moved my blog to WordPress, I miss Blogger and keeping up with all the new stuff they are working on over here! I loved playing around with my template all the time and learning new things about the code. I am too intimidated by my WordPress template to mess around with it very much.

What did you give yourself for Christmas?

This is a backdated post to insert a favicon into my blog. See Blogger Buster for instructions.

I have been having fun playing around with various features on my blog and have had a couple of questions about them, so I thought I would post about what I have done and where I got the information from.

Archives, Recent Posts & Recent Comments

First of all, I started thinking that the archives were looking a little long to scroll through, since they defaulted to having the current month open, but I didn’t like the weekly one any better, so I decided to put up a widget for recent posts and then just use a dropdown menu for the archives.

There are various tutorials for recent posts and recent comments, but before I got around to trying them out, I saw that Blogger had the option to add a feed to your blog. So I just added one page element with my posts feed and another page element with my comments feed and put them where I wanted them. Blogger will only show up to 5 items, so you probably need to use one of the tutorials if you want more than that or a different layout.

Label Cloud

When I first started blogging, I wasn’t sure if I liked tag clouds, but over time have grown to appreciate them. As I began using more labels, the list seemed too long and cumbersome to be user-friendly, so I used the instructions from phydeaux3 to make my Blogger labels appear in a tag cloud and then tweaked the color and size until I was happy with it. I think it is more visually appealing and intuitive that a straight list.

Table of Contents

I found this through Blogging Tips (this post has links to 15 different widgets or scripts for Blogger blogs, including the label cloud above). The Table of Contents instructions are from Beautiful Beta, and there is an update I will have to look at when my posts get over 100. I had to configure it a little since my column width is different from his, but it worked perfectly and was the easiest to install of everything I have do so far.

What’s cool about the TOC is that you toggle it on and off from the sidebar, but it shows up in the posts column. You can sort the list ascending or descending by post title or by date, or you can click on a label to see all posts with that label. To return to the full list from one label, you simply click the label header. Even if nobody else ever uses this, I will, and it only shows up if you click on it, so it doesn’t detract from the appearance of the site.

Related Posts

I have seen this in some of the feeds I read and inevitably find myself clicking on one of the related posts and usually finding something of interest that way. As Amanda mentions, there are two versions of this; I chose to go with Hoctro’s original hack. It is set to show up at the bottom of both the main page and the individual post pages, and I limited the number of labels and posts that would show from the original code to keep the list shorter. I’m not exactly sure how to put it in my feed, but that can wait for another day!

Other than being a lot of fun to learn, all of these things will hopefully work together to help people easily find what content is of most interest to them. So that’s what I have been up to lately, in between all the stuff of daily living.

Oh, I almost forgot, one other change I am making is to my user name, changing it from Holding It Together to WherestheBox. The choice of WherestheBox comes from my URL and the fact that I have been using that name in other places around the net, but the primary reason for the change has to do with a revelation I had recently about my need to just be myself and not try so hard to “hold it together” all the time. If I am going to do that, I felt I needed to let go of the name. Anyway, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!

UPDATE: Just a reminder, you have to be signed into draft.blogger.com to use this feature at this point.

I know I already mentioned Blogger in Draft when I posted about my new Blogroll, but I have learned about another new feature and wanted to share it. When you are creating a new post, you can change the post options and specify the desired date and time you want it to be posted. Once you click “Publish Post”, it will show up in your post list as a scheduled post and will automatically be posted at that day/time.

Thanks to Blogger Buster for the heads up! I’m sure there are more cool things yet to be discovered, so let me know what new stuff you other Blogger bloggers find.

I added the new Blogger blogroll to my site tonight, and it is pretty cool! I found out about it on Google Operating Systems, which is an unofficial blog with news and tips about Google. I clicked on the link that said Blogger in Draft and from there was able to access the new blogroll as a page element.

You can add URL’s manually or import from your Google Reader (by simply checking the ones you want to add from your subscription list), and you can have them show up in alphabetical order or by how recently something has been posted on the blog. There are also choices to show the blog’s icon, the title of the most recent post, a snippet from it and how long ago it was posted.

It does make the list longer to scroll through, but I think it also makes it easier to decide if you want to click through to another blog. Let me know how you think it looks, and feel free to share your newest blogging find!

I have been learning so many new things about blogging since I began this adventure and decided I wanted a 3rd column to separate links to websites and stuff like that from blog-related items. So after looking at all the online templates I could find, I realized I kind of like the simple one I started with and just wanted to change the layout. Thanks to this wonderful resource, I was able to add a third column and even put a second box at the bottom of it. Even thought it is not exotic, it works for me and feels like a great accomplishment to figure it out. Not bad for an HTML newbie like me!

Edited on 2/24/08: I have since switched to an entirely different template because I found one with a puzzle piece design that I really liked, so the layout described here isn’t shown anymore. But I still love Tricks for New Bloggers and the companion blog mentioned above.