Tag, date, and category archives have a new format: they show the first 100 words of each post, including HTML and images. To read more you have to click “CONTINUE READING.”

Before, they were full-text just like regular pages, basically becoming a holding pen for posts. Most people browsing archive pages don’t want to read everything; they’re skimming for information. But the reason I refused to use WordPress’ the_excerpt tag is because it strips images or HTML. Since my Thripp.com blog is a photo-blog with the photos at the top of each post, that is unacceptable.

After much searching, I’ve found …

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I’ve been working hard on redesigning the Thripp.com comments system as of late. I don’t have a screen cap of the old one, but it was ugly. All the basic functionality was there, but the colors and dividers and layout and sorting wasn’t up to snuff with the new design. All that changes today. This is my new vision for blog commenting:

This is my gift to everyone on Thripp.com. Do you not see the beauty?

Let me tell you the features:

• The same wonderful threading interface through a modified version of WP Thread …

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This is a small touch, but in your sidebar, there are now these little icons next to your RSS feed links:

You’ll get more subscribers now, I’m sure, because that’s like the internation icon for RSS feeds. Read about RSS on Wikipedia for info; basically it brings your content to your readers instead of them having to check your website often. I use them in through Firefox, and then when I go to the folder in my bookmarks, I see all the latest posts from a blog as “live bookmarks.” Very handy.

I made the edit entry link more prominent. When you’re logged in, you can edit any entry on your blog(s) right from the page they’re normally viewed. Before, this link looked like this:

Now, it looks like this:

Isn’t that more noticeable? You won’t see anything unless you’re logged in on your blog, of course, because only you can edit your entries.

Enjoy!

I changed the template so the tagline of a blog pops up when you hover over the title in the header:

Set your tagline under Settings > General. Most people leave it to the default, “Just another thripp.com weblog.” But you can be different.

I wrote about it when I added the printing function before. To start, it was off by default (you’d have to activate it by going to Manage > PLUGINS. Now, I’ve turned it on for all blogs, and new blogs have it automatically enabled. So you can print any post or page you see by clicking “Printable Version” at the end of it, where you’ll get a clean version of the text with footnoted links.

If your a Thripp.com blogger, there are a few things you can customize. If you hate it, deactivate it for your blog under Manage > …

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Hello everyone. I updated the stylesheet so it caps the width of the text at 830 pixels. I was under the belief before that I should use as much as the screen as possible, but after noticing how hard it is to follow a line on a big monitor (anything bigger than 1024×768), I’ve changed my mind. If you’re viewing in a wider window than that, the lines get no longer and just stay centered on the page with white on the sides.

The sidebar is anchored to the top-right of the page no matter what, but if you have a …

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In the administrative section, go to Write > Page and you’ll see a new check box on the right, below related functions, titled “Include this page in user menus.” It’s checked by default, but if you uncheck it, the page will be just like normal, except it won’t appear in your sidebar. This is great if you want to create a page just to link to in a post, or to tell your friends, or you have a page you want to keep around but it doesn’t deserve the valuable space on the right of every page.

2008-06-25 Update: This is now enabled for everyone by default.

I added the WP-Print feature in the plugins directory. Check it out on this post, by clicking “Printable Version” at the bottom. Another good example is the blogs directory (55 and counting).

It’s off by default. To use it, go to Manage > PLUGINS in the admin menus, scroll down to it and click “Activate” on the right, then go to Settings > Permalinks and click “Save Changes” without changing anything. A printer icon with text: “Printable Version” will pop up below every one of your posts and pages. …

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I changed some of the link colors by CSS. Now, if you’ve visited a link, it shows up light green (so you can keep track of where you’ve been easily). For the meta areas (the spot above saying “By Richard X. Thripp at …”), the links and text stay gray, but in the sidebar, the links turn from black to gray if visited. And the ones in the sidebar are lightly underlined now, so you know their links.

I also changed the links in the header (”thripp.com beta on thripp.com” here, for example) to be black and …

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