A few weeks ago, my brother-in-amateur-web-development Doug noted that he was having problems viewing my blog’s sidebar. I had been wanting to implement a variable-width theme with 3 columns so I could have more features, so I decided to move on the process and here are the results.

New stuff:

Feedburner - According to JohnTP’s How to increase your blogs traffic, Feedburner is a great way to monitor site traffic via feeds. My web host has lots of stats and includes some of this information, but I figured I’d try it this way and see what I find. I subscribed to my own blog using the Google Reader and I think, if I can export my bookmarks, it might replace my current blog reading method of Firefox’s Live Bookmarks. Also, Feedburner supposedly maximizes the feed for any type of feed reader (RSS or Atom). I’m not sure this is an issue if people are bookmarking me or not, but to catch folks who already have my site bookmarked, I installed a plugin from Orderlist.com that will forward old bookmarks to Feedburner. If you are a regular reader, you might have to make a new bookmark, but I hope not.

Wordpress Widgets - this new theme is maximized for WP 2.0+ so I can utilize drag-n-drop sidebar “widgets” in the site admin section. It’s handy and I’m learning how to modify widgets to get what I want in my sidebar - I specifically am happy to introduce Recent Comments and Posts and my blogroll to each page. Though at times it can be a frustrating to not have the exact items you want on any given theme (I have to re-configure my Upcoming and Flickr), I really appreciate all the support and access to information and code from the Wordpress community. Thank you developers! Open source rocks!

Comments and feedback are always welcome but will be especially helpful now as I’m fine-tuning! Thanks y’all…