How to set up a sideblog
Published February 18th, 2008 in How to.I like the idea of a sideblog- there are always little things that I think are cool, or posts I’ve written for other sites that I’d like to link to here, but they’re just not worthy of a full post. I know quite a few people put asides in the main body of the blog, but that’s just too cluttery for me. I’ve been doing a little sideblog manually using a text widget for the last couple of months, and I knew there was a plugin for it, but just didn’t feel like messing with it. Recently, a client for whom who I did a header design and some other work requested that I set up a sideblog for her, and I was glad to have the chance to play with the sideblog plugin by Kate Gasis.
The plugin is great and if you use it as a widget, it’s pretty easy to use right out of the box, but my client wanted some customization to the sidebar section, so we needed it to be outside of the widgets in the sidebar. There were a couple of coding tweaks that were necessary, which I’ll list here, just in case you run into some of the same problems I did as you install the plugin.
- Be sure to call your sideblog category ‘Asides’, otherwise it won’t work properly. The category name doesn’t show up anywhere except the permalink anyway. If you don’t want to call it Asides, be sure to change the name of the category in the php tag that calls the widget.
- The posts in the Asides category were also showing up in the main body of the blog for some reason. This page in the WordPress codex will be helpful if you have that problem as well.
- If you don’t want your Asides category to show up in your main category listing, you can check out these instructions in the codex. This only works if you’re not using sidebar widgets. If you’re using widgets, this post in the WordPress forum gives the answer to excluding the category from the list.
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31 Responses to “How to set up a sideblog”
- 1 Pingback on Feb 29th, 2008 at 1:57 am
Also, one more codex link that might be helpful:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Adding_Asides
thank you for this plugin:)
Hello, i found this site while searching for asides at google. i liked this article,and use it in the future. Thanks.
I prefer a fully separated sideblog, for PR networking purposes.But thanks for the article anyway.
Thats really interesting, I think I might set one up as I always have things worth posting but not a full post.
Thanks.
That is a great idea! It looks great on your page and not clutter -y at all. Im sure it will save a lot of people from making one sentence/too short blog posts.
I’m considering this, but, not sure how to set it up exactly.
Perhaps i’ll set up an extra html frame for it, rather than a full RSS blog.
What a terrific idea! I’ll have to see how it fits in with one of my client blogs — it could be a nice touch for inclusion.
Thanks for posting this article..it helps
Good post, I do like a sideblog to be honest and it allows for more content to be displayed. Noone wants to look at a page just full of text…
great idea and thanks for the widget. Would try it on my blog.
Thats very helpful and useful. I will try to set up a sideblog now, thanks!
What a terrific idea! I’ll have to see how it fits in with one of my client blogs — it could be a nice touch for inclusion.
I have been looking at your articles. And they have provided me with some great input.
Thanks for sharing this with us.
Never heard of a sideblog. May be useful for a blog that me and my son run. Hmmm… Will check it out. Thanks for the link and the info mate.
:O)
Thanks for sharing. Another of the many things I can’t do until I migrate to WP.
thank you for this plugin:)it’s good;)
I have never heard of a side-blog,,, what is the purpose/value?
Will it help with SEO? Page Rank?
I’m glad I ran across your site. I will have to see if this will be of value to my clients.
Interesting plugin. I suspect some people use Twitter + some kind of twitter-plugin for the same purpose. In my opinion, it fits the “micro-blogging” idea (or whatever it’s called) more closely.
This is new and I like what its called - Asides. Now I’m considering one for myself. Thanks for the info.
This looks like an interesting plugin, although I’m not sure if I would want to use it for my site or not. I may be able to use it for linking “feature” articles directly from the home page, or perhaps I could put other types of informational pages in there that would not normally be included as regular articles.
This is extremely useful - thank you so much for sharing.
Great post about the sidebar. I am adding a blog to my site now and forwarded this post to my webmaster so he could add it for me. He actually was up to date with it and said it would be no problem. He was actually a little surprised I knew what it was until I sent your post. Thanks
I agree that sideblog can become clutter, not in a sense of visual design but on the information retrieval side. What if the sideblog is completely has different theme than the main post (or blog theme). The thing one should consider is to put coherent issue on the sideblog.
I really don’t think this sideblog have something to do with pagerank. mm…No, what I mean is that this plugin is kinda fun, and make someone forget about how it affect pagerank. If it’s a cool feature, why don’t we just use it
i didnt know about the sideblog widget. I will defintely look into this. thanks!
It’s groovy, Baby, as Austin Powers might say. I like the look of a little Mini me blog in the side as it looks cool and delivers a little extra content. Yeeh!
Someone beat me to the punch and mentioned Twitter. I would if you could just modify a shout box to do the same thing.
thank you for this plugin it’s cool
we are currently in the process of setting up a blog on our site. Thanks for the useful tips..