Groovy Sputum

The Blog That’s Not A Blog

Sunday was supposed to be our launch of the new church website, but due to many things, it has been put off until March 2nd. I think that date is pretty solid, mostly because Pastor Mike announced it from the pulpit on Sunday, gave out the web address, and said it would be up on that day. I figured that I would spend some time explaining a few things about the site that I think are rather unique.

When you think of a blog, even a church blog, you typically think of a Blogger or WordPress layout: a header image that changes with the seasons, one large column with the 5 or 6 latest posts, and a side bar filled with widgets and such. This is fine for a personal blog, but it’s not what I had in mind for our church site. I wanted to have an area where we could put static data (like service times, a map, statement of faith, etc.) but reserve the majority of the page area for posts. Here’s the catch: I wanted to display a number of posts from a variety of categories on the page in a way that readers could see them all.

After investigating many themes available for WordPress, I found that 99% of them don’t separate posts based on category nor do they display posts in multiple places. Then I discovered the phrase magazine style theme. After a Google search with that phrase, I found a number of themes that would do what I wanted. They all are built primarily for newspapers or magazines that display their info in separate categories. Some of my favorites are The Morning After, Mimbo, Structure, and Grid Focus. Others I found are Gridlock, Visionary, and a number of themes by Upstart Blogger.

After trying a few, I finally settled on the Mimbo theme due to it’s classic styling and use of custom fields. If you are a Seinfeld fan, you will recognize the name. Funny stuff. Anyway, I made a few changes to the sidebar and the CSS file, but not many. The first thing you see when you go to the site is the latest post from the pastor. Below it are the three latest testimonies as well as the latest post from the children, youth, and adult categories. The announcements are in the top right corner and are actually posts with only theirs title showing. The nice thing about this is that they show up on the page as bulleted lines, but are sent as posts via the rss feed.

When visitors come to the site, they have access to 12 posts from 6 different categories as well as navigation and special event banners. This is exactly what I wanted. A traditional blog format shoves all of the content to the bottom or the archives and the viewer has to search for the content they want. With a magazine style format, the viewer always sees the latest post from each category, regardless of when it was posted.

The static info that rarely changes is confined to pages and can be accessed via the drop down navigation bar at the top. The titles showing are the parent pages and the drop down choices are children of those parents. The only pages that will change much will be the events. I am planning to create a new page for each special event we have and then link the side banner ads to them. When the event is first presented, it will be written up and categorized into either the children, youth, or adult areas as a post. As the event approaches, I will create a post in the announcement category so that a reminder is sent to any one subscribing to the site feed.

So, that’s it. I think the overall visual appearance is nice (conservative, yet modern in a techie way) and it functions the way I had it in my head. I would love to hear what you think about the concept and design. We haven’t gone live yet, so who knows, maybe something you suggest will be worked into the final product!

Useful Plugins

I hope you have enjoyed reading my Top 5 Greatest OSU Moments the last few days. I have been doing some research about the WordPress platform and wanted to share some of the useful plugins that I have discovered and am using presently. I have found that these plugins really help me as I am blogging.

• Simple Tags: this is a great little tag manager. You can rename any of your tags globally (great for the times you misspell a tag and end up with 3 of the same thing, i.e. word press, Wordpress, and WordPress), have tags automatically generated for each post, or get tag suggestions from Yahoo and the web using the click tag feature.
• All in One SEO: this is a search engine optimizer, hence the name SEO. This will generate unique meta information in the header of each page of your blog based on the content of each page. For instance, instead of every page having the top 10 tags and basic blog description, each page will be tagged with the tags you created for that post and the page description will be the excerpt of your post.
• CyStats: logs just about every data you might want about your blog. Number of unique hits/visits, number of bot hits/visits, search query returns (both internal and external), page usage, trackback data, and on and on.
• WP-Polls: my latest plugin addition, this little guy enables internal polls and is very customizable. I am not a huge fan of external blogging services for things like polls, calendars, and galleries. I just don’t like to log in to a gazillion sites to do something simple.
• Search Everything: this extends the search capabilities of the standard WordPress search bar. The default WordPress search form only searches post content (as far as I know) but this plugin expands that form to tags, categories, image titles, post titles, comments, and more. Basically, it allows your viewers to search everything, hence the name.

If you have never used plugins on your WordPress site, I highly recommend trying them. They are easy to use, easy to install, and very helpful. One thing to note: it is a good idea to get your plugins (and themes, for that matter) directly from the WordPress web site. There have been reports of malicious code being inserted by third party download sites and that is no fun. Get the genuine stuff here.

Tags and Categories

I am fairly new to the blogging realm and so it is natural for me to have lots of unanswered questions. One question that is no longer a mystery is the difference between tags and categories. I used to think of them as one in the same with the differences being that there are more tags and that fonts on tag clouds get bigger the more times that tag appears. After doing some research and adding a nifty WordPress plugin called Simple Tags, I am pleased to say that you will now see a tag cloud on my site.

Here’s a great analogy when thinking about tags and categories: categories are analogous to the table of contents in the front of a book and tags are likened to a word index or glossary at the back of book. There may only be five or six chapters in a book, but key words may be used throughout. Keep in mind that the ultimate purpose of tags and categories is to aid readers in finding what they want to read. If a person wants to look generally at a topic, they should use categories. If someone wants to read about a specific topic, they should navigate using the tags.

Ideally, there should only be a dozen categories at most, but tags should be numerous. One programming blog I read recently had about 50 categories. I then looked at the tag cloud and discovered the same 50 words used there. I thought, what’s the point. If you are not going to differentiate between tags and categories, then why have them both.

So, if you want to read about my family, click on my family category. But if you want to specifically read about Valerie, you can click on her name in the tag cloud and filter out the post’s that don’t include her. Also, you may find that I wrote about Valerie in a post that didn’t fall into the family category.

Now you know. And knowing is half the battle!