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.