tewha.net

I think of WordPress’s tags as free association. I try to just start thinking of related things and type as many in a short period as I can. And I’ll often go back and type more in later. I know this isn’t a great system, but I figure over time I can build enough of a tag library that I can start reusing terms.

But I didn’t realize they could have spaces in them. That’s right; if you’re using WordPress, you don’t need to limit your tags to URL safe characters. Give it a try.

I plan on updating my tags in the coming weeks to add spaces, capital letters and such. The tag “hall of shame” is much more appealing to me than “hallofshame.”

It wasn’t until I started hacking at this iPhone theme that I realized an odd thing about WordPress themes:

Almost everyone includes massive sidebars in their themes, filled with stuff that nobody ever uses. What do I mean? Well, as mx pointed out (though not online, I think), the sidebar is the ultimate vanity. Although he went on about this at some length with antipode, I was mostly left to think through the implications on my own.

It’s true. Most people who will read this post are either already my friends, have been linked to a post, or have found the post through a search engine because I mentioned something really obscure. The number of people who will want to see my archives is vanishingly small. So I don’t want to waste main page space.

So where do we put it? Well, I’ve noticed that the people who don’t put this stuff in a sidebar typically include a link to their archives, a link to their tag map, etc, etc. Why? If someone’s interested, why can’t I include all of that information? Isn’t that information, in a nutshell, what the blog is really about?

So instead of putting all that junk in a sidebar or in separate pages, I’ve put it in a single page. I’m not really happy with “archives” as a name for this, but it’ll do until I pinpoint exactly what this page really is. Maybe it’s just “other postings.”

A few times I’ve started with a complex theme and tried to adapt it. But it hasn’t worked for me. So instead, I’m trying a different approach: I’m starting with the simplest, clean theme I can find and adding the features I miss. I picked iWPhone, a theme for the iPhone.

This theme started with no archives, no tag map, and no search function. I’ve reintroduced archives, but that’s it for the moment. Other features will be added as I have time and learn PHP.