In So Many Words

Just the other day, a comment was left on my blog regarding a new service for allowing readers to link up to your blog, called inlinkz. Since I am just getting ready to start using that sort of thing with the 365 Days of Decluttering Challenge, I decided to check it out.

Here’s where you can read the whole story about how impressed I am with the people behind this, or you can jump down for the bottom line.

When I first went to the site, most of the links to more information weren’t working, but within a couple of hours, I had a comment from one of the site developers letting me know that they were actually in the process of going live at that moment and that the links would be operational very soon.

So I went back and signed up and did a test list on a draft blog post. When I entered my link and name, both items showed up as a two-column list on my blog. I realized that could get very long and messy, especially if people were linking to a specific blog post. Since the developer had left me a comment, I emailed her and let her know my initial thoughts.

To my amazement, she emailed me back and said she would add more options to the site for how to display each list and asked me to let her know about anything else I was looking for. (You can follow inlinkz on twitter to keep up with them as well.)

The Bottom Line

Inlinkz is very simple to use and configurable in terms of what shows up and how much space it can take up on your blog. You can put end times on your lists, moderate them, edit the configuration and even see stats of how much each link was clicked on.

I’ve put a simple one-column list with an end date of January 31st down below if you’d like to try it out. Just click the “add your link” button and enter a link to your blog homepage. (Fine print: links going to any weird locations will be deleted!)

I entered my own link so you could see how it will look – the text shown will be whatever you put in the “Description” field.

Bonnie Sayers, who brought us the awesome Autism Twitter Day back in December, is celebrating her birthday on April 3rd by organizing a Gluten Free Twitter Party.

The hashtag to be used is #gfree, and Bonnie has lots of information on ways to follow the conversation in her RSVP post, which also has a Mr. Linky where you can put in your Twitter ID to sign up.

There will be three panel discussions throughout the day, with prizes given out during those times. The party is not just about being gluten free, but will include other food allergies and intolerances as well. Some of the topics to be discussed are:

• preparing lunches for school
• implementing a diet or lifestyle change with the whole family
• how to handle birthday parties, school parties, holidays, visiting relatives
• how to inform other parents at school if contamination is a life threatening issue
• where to get recipes
• how to cook from scratch
• which sites sell the mixes and other food related products

I was frankly amazed at the amount of information shared during the first twitter party Bonnie hosted, and at how well organized it was, and I am greatly looking forward to this one. Another bonus is getting to connect with other Twitterers who are also dealing with special diets in their lives. So go RSVP today!!

Isn’t this the neatest button? I can’t remember where I first saw it, but I got it from twittercounter.com. I have gone on and off Twitter over the last few months, but I am starting to get back into the socializing mode again now.

If you are on Twitter, please feel free to leave your username/link in the comments, and you can follow me if you’d like – my user name is wheresthebox.

Have you joined Plurk yet? Like Twitter, only different, Plurk offers an easy way to see who is responding to each plurk and has interesting features like qualifiers, emoticons and karma.

With both of these, I find I am a casual user and can tend to lurk more than participate, but I will say that I have found a couple of new blogs and some cool websites just from reading plurk conversations, which was an unexpected benefit to me!

One of the things I found through a response to a plurk from user DaisyOlsen is Plurktionary, which is an unofficial plurk dictionary and help page. There is a video on the front page which is a really clear explanation of how it works, and she has a pretty insightful review of Plurk on her blog. From clicking around to some of the other pages on the site, I found a link to a FriendFeed Greasemonkey script for Plurk, which is awesome! This blog, The Inquisitor, also has scripts to place a tab for several other services inside FriendFeed.

If you are on any of these networks, look me up and follow me/subscribe to me/add me as a friend!

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the social media site sk*rt. Well, they have just changed their name to kirtsy and want to get the word out. In fact, they are having a huge giveaway with $1000 in prizes to one lucky winner who helps spread the word about the new name.

So, if you haven’t already, go check it out. I always find interesting stories there, and one thing I really like is how easy it is to express your opinion. Just clicking on a story takes you to the source while voting for it at the same time. If you don’t feel it is worthy, you can “lose it,” or “unvote” if you have already clicked on it.

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!