Archives for January 2010

How many archives should I show?

If you’ve been blogging for some time, then your archive list will be getting quite long.  I’ve been having that problem on some blogs, as the list of months in the archives was getting longer than the rest of the sidebar put together.

So I started wondering about how I could improve the situation.  I’ve come up with two possible solutions:

– use yearly archives instead of monthly ones

– limit the number of listed months

For blogs that have been going for a number of years, the yearly option is not bad, as long as the posts can still be found without going through too many pages.  I solve that using tag clouds or category lists.

But for most of my blogs, I’ve gone for the limited month option, and have set the limit to 12.

To do this, I’ve edited the sidebar.php and changed the call to wp_get_archives to

wp_get_archives(‘type=monthly&limit=12’);

or

wp_get_archives(‘type=yearly’);

Which do you think is the better option?  Of is there an even better way?

Keeping the sidebar visible in WordPress

One of the default settings in WordPress is for sidebar on the right-hand side only to be visible when you enter the site from the start page, but not if you are on an individual post.

This makes it rather difficult to add a newsletter registration box there, if you want it to appear on every page, and also means that other important items such as the Feedburner icon are not always visible.

So I will be going through my blogs and making sure that the sidebar is visible at all times.

To do this, I need to edit the file single.php in the theme.  I then turn the content part from a widecolumn into a narrowcolumn.   Finally, at the end of the file I need to add the get_sidebar() function.

I know that some of my blog themes are already set to do this, but I will be going through them all to make sure.  I’ve made a start with this one, so you should definitely see the newsletter box on the right-hand side.  Have you signed up yet?

Should I add a newsletter?

I’ve heard so many different views on having newsletters on blogs.  It is not as if I don’t like newsletters as such.  Indeed, I have my own and have been running them for different companies over the past 10 years.

But I often wonder why a blog needs a newsletter, and am particularly careful if a client asks me to create one for them.

I have two reasons for caution.  The first one is that in Germany there are very strict laws on sending newsletters by e-mail, and I want to make sure that someone doesn’t just want to send out a mailing to a set of e-mail addresses who have not agreed to it.

The other one is content.  If you are putting all of you effort into a blog and having the articles delivered automatically by Feedburner, then then why do you need a newsletter as well?

However I have heard a different view so often now, that you should start your newsletter on a blog as soon as possible, because that way you are collecting e-mail addresses that you can write to later.  You might want to send out some information that isn’t in the blog, or launch a new product and tell everyone about it by e-mail rather than waiting for them to read about it online.

So for a while I’ve been trying out different newsletter registration styles and also different bits of software.  I shall return to the software at a later date, today I shall concentrate on the newsletter registrations.

Some blogs have the registration field on the right-hand side.  Others (like this one) have footer ads and a few have dedicated pages.

I want to make sure that you can sign up to my newsletter from all of my blogs, and will try and make sure that the space to do so is always on the right-hand sidebar.

I’ve made a start with this blog, so please, if you are reading this, enter your e-mail address in the field and click on “submit”.

You’ll notice that I only ask for you e-mail address.  I don’t even ask for your name, so although I won’t be writing to you with your first name as many bloggers do, it also means that I am storing as little personal information as possible.

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