Jason & Susan

Susan’s been busy working on and revamping our website. Too many hours and many late nights have been spent on tweaking our website already. It’s her new hobby now.

Some new features:

• Archives—Added this neat AJAX plugin called “Extended Live Archive.” Readers can view or search archives by year, month, or tag.
• Google search bar—Added a Google search bar at the top so you can search Google anytime.
• Contact Us—Instead of displaying our email address so that spammers clutter our mailbox, readers can click on the “contact us” page and fill out the form.
• Popular Posts—Added “Daily Top 10 Posts” plugin because our previous post count plugin stopped working after we installed the new template. Basically, the plugin keeps count of each page/post view and ranks them daily as well as cumulative.
• Latest from NISH—On the right sidebar, there’s a feed for latest posts from Susan’s work blog.
• Search It—Also on the right sidebar, you can search for posts by keyword(s).
• Tags—Both on the left sidebar as well as the Tags Cloud page, you can view posts about various tags (topics). The cloud on the left sidebar includes only the most popular tags. The Tags Cloud page includes all the tags. This uses the Ultimate Warrior plugin.
• On This Day—This is a plugin Susan created (her very first!) to generate past posts of the same day but different months. The links are listed at the bottom of every post. The plugin mentioned in a previous post only generated past posts based on current date so they change everyday and we didn’t want that. It also displayed the exact same links for every post! Instead, we wanted to show static past posts based on entry/post date so we can reflect/remember/reminisce on posts relative to the date of the current post. There weren’t a good plugin available since most of them generated past posts by year (not months), so Susan created her own plugin. If anyone is interested in this plugin, please contact us through the contact us page. Many hours were put in writing this plugin, so hopefully, someone else can find it of use.
• Related Posts—Also displayed at the bottom of each post, this is slightly different from the previously mentioned feature. Related posts are generated by the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin and list past posts of similar topics/tags.
• Google Adsense—Not exactly a new features, but we’ve revamped how Google ads are displayed on our website. We have our own website and server, so we don’t really need to post ads. However, since most of our hits/visitors come from random people searching the net, we thought to take advantage of that and include a few penny-generating ads. It’s just about enough to cover the cost of web hosting ($100 USD/year)! Don’t you just love Google?

Okay, that’s it for now. This post is getting slightly too geeky for most of you. As you all know, Susan is now a geek technical writer by profession and this is the kind of stuff she does and writes about all day long, except blogging is a lot more fun than writing documentation. Just not sure if anyone has made it this far in reading this entry! Ha ha…