Apathy Sketchpad

I’ve been playing about with the new version of Wordpress, with FriendFeed widgets, and my skin and so forth.

I’m going to get all Ann Maurice on my sidebars’ collective ass (I imagine they have one collective ass, much like two legs do, assuming they’re the same person’s legs) and do a major de-clutter on them. First plan is to widgetise both sidebars and thereby collapse the frankly ridiculous archive list into a drop-down menu. After that, I don’t know what I’ll do. I should really fix the search page, although I doubt anyone sees it much. Suggestions welcome, even after I’ve done it (such is the joy of widgets — non-Wordpress users, you don’t need to know what I’m talking about, just trust that this all makes sense).

The FriendFeed widget on the left is one I found on the internet somewhere and have hacked and modified to show comments, and I use it primarily in place of Google’s practically unstylable, commentless and Javascript-dependent Reader Shared Items clip. I much prefer my new version. You may have also noticed a “recent comments” panel has appeared beneath it.

To be honest, I’ve found Friendfeed more useful for syndicating to other sites, such as here and Facebook, than for actually using as a website. This may be because I have two ‘friends’ on Friendfeed and neither has shared a single item. If you would like my customised version of the widget, then email me and I’ll send it to you. Note that my nickname is hardcoded into it so unless you change it, it’ll display my comments about your items, not your own. (This is more a feature than a bug, really.) Google Reader, on the other hand is fantastically useful, and I keep meaning to put up a post about the clever system I have slowly evolved with about four Google services and a Firefox plugin that have between them made my online life so much simpler.