The site looks a little different. This is another consequence of the lack of required commitments the summer provides. Anyway, WordPress (the blog software I use) has undergone an upgrade that offers the opportunity to use widgets. I suppose I could get by without widgets but when the alternative comes down to playing with the server and reading another academic book my weakness for exploring kicks in.
Only some of the themes (the general look and feel of a blog site) turn out to be “widget aware” so I selected a different theme. The change to a different theme is really the reason the appearance of this blog is so different. Cindy thinks the new look is too “spartan” (translate boring). “It always works for Apple”, I reply. Maybe there are some other design issues I don’t understand.
Anyway, here is a brief intro to how widgets are applied (see the image that appears below). Widgets are chunks of code that a system allows you to manipulate at a higher level. At least, that is how I would describe it. The software on the server automatically inserts the chunk of code associated with a widget into a framework of code representing a part of the display. In the case I am using as an example here, the framework is the sidebar (the right hand part of the total display you are looking at). If you examine the image below, you will note a collection of available widgets (the section at the bottom of the image) and the vertical space within which the selected widgets have been placed. This is a simply process of drag and drop. You should be able to match the list of widgets applied with what you see in the sidebar.
There are limitations to this approach. The system works by assigning an insertion point within the base code for a segment of the final page (the sidebar in this case). It is not possible to mix the functions provided by the widgets with functions that are already part of the base code. I ended up hacking the basic code for the sidebar so that the “search blog” box could appear at the top of the sidebar. This is a function I assume may be most useful to visitors and I wanted it to be obvious. I also added some other features at the bottom of the sidebar by inserting segments of php and javascript. You can’t always find a widget to do what you would like done.
Manipulating objects rather than writing code is becoming a popular way to personalize many services (personal portal, Google Creator). It must be a successful approach because the trend toward this method seems to be accelerating. I guess it is very much like the move from authoring web pages using a tool such as Dreamweaver rather than writing html code by hand. While you can’t always create exactly the look you want, the efficiency is a tremendous advantage.
