Newly Installed Plugins:

• Full Text Feed – Prevents WordPress 2.1+ from adding a more link to your website’s feed.

  I added this plugin coz for the mean time I’ll be using the < more > tag while I work on something to customize the way my posts are displayed.

• Impress – Impress your readers with statistics on the number of users, posts, comments, pages, categories, words in posts, words in comments, and words in pages you have.

  I installed the Impress plugin to display some of my blog stas on my About page.

• Leprekhauns Word Count – Adds a word count to your backend without having to submit the data

  This plugin comes very handy especially if you’re into paid reviews and sponsored posts where you need to meet a minimun number of words per post.

• Permalink Redirect – Permalink Redirect ensures that pages and entries are always accessed via the permalink. Otherwise, a 301 redirect will be issued.

  Installed this to make my permalinks prettier and search engine friendly.

• WP-Page Navi – Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog.

  Makes it easier for visitors and readers to navigate and access different pages.

Aside from these plugins that I’ve installed I also did some changes to the layout and design.

• Increased size of the default text and post title.
• Removed the bottom bar.
• Added icons for RSS feeds, Sideblog, Categories, Archives and Top Commentators.
• Created a new custom header

I did the first two changes thanks to K‘s comments and suggestions. I think he’s the only one who has the guts to make suggestions or comments regarding my blog theme and layout. I appreciate it man!

If you have any comments, suggestions or feedback regarding the current layout or to the changes I’ve made, please do let me know. I would be happy to hear them. You can leave a comment here or use the Contact page.

Lastly, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the loyal readers, rss subscribers, other supporters, and sponsors. This blog won’t be where it is right now without you guys.

You might or might not have noticed the changes in some parts of my blog so I’m gonna talk about it in detail, the parts that I’ve updated, changed and tweaked.

First stop is my About page. This one got it’s much needed and long overdue update. You see, I have a difficult time writing stuff or talking about myself. Since I started my blog, I’ve never had the chance or motivation to write something for this particular page.

A few days back, as I was sitting in front of the computer, I don’t know what got into me but all of a sudden, I decided to edit my About page. As soon as I started typing, it all just flowed so smoothly and what you see now is what I accomplished that day. It’s not that much but it’s way, way better than my previous one. I might just add a few more things one of these days.

Next thing I did was to tweak my sidebar. If you can see, not all sidebar elements show up in every page. Some only appear in the index page and others in posts or pages. Some of you guys might have already done this with your blog but it just hit me the other day when I was looking at my theme. I noticed how it displays the RSS feeds and the “share this post” buttons. I hope you know what I’m talking about. Anyways, I got to work and started looking the sidebar code. I found out that it was using the “If, Else and Else If” statements. After several minutes, I figured out everything and then implemented it on my blog.

One of the newest plugins I installed is the MyAvatars plugin which I used to replace the Gravatar plugin. I decided to replace it because I’ve been wanting to change my avatar but Gravatar has been closed to users for a long time because it was under development. MyAvatars uses the avatar from MyBlogLog. So if you’re part of the MyBlogLog community your avatar would show in the comments you leave on my posts.

Cruise was the first to comment about this next one, my favicon. Previously, I was using the my theme’s favicon. I thought that it would be better to have a unique favicon for my blog and what better way than to use my own picture, right? So I created one online using this site. You can also create one here.

I have been trying to find a way to improve how the links were displayed in my Links page. Before I had all links in one long column. I know that it could be a hassle for visitors to go all the way down just to go through the list. Thank goodness for the IMP Links plugin. If you take a look at my new Links page, you’ll see that the links are nicely and neatly arranged into two columns. You can also edit the IMP Links’ css to make it fit to your theme or preference. To go with the new look, I also created new categories and assigned each link to the different categories.

Last but not least, I installed the Top Commentators plugin and it appears in the sidebar everytime you read a post. It’s quite easy to customize and install. You can choose whether to display the top commentators on a daily, monthly or yearly period. Mine is configured to display the all-time top commentators. You can also choose whether or not to link the commentator’s name to their website. You filter out users and urls that you don’t want to be included in the list. I filtered out myself from the list so it would only show comments from you guys.

There ya go. That’s the most recent updates or changes that I’ve done to my blog. If you have any questions regarding the usage, implementation or need help in installing the mentioned plugins, just send me a message and I’ll do my best to help you.

UPDATE:
I’ve just fixed the comment avatars. I edited and configured the MyAvatar plugin so that it would also fetch the ones from Gravatar.com. Now, comments can display both avatars for both MyBlogLog and Gravatar.
Btw, the plugin looks up Gravatar first so if you’r e registered with both, your Gravatar image will be the one displayed. Next, I’ll try to figure out how to fetch the ones from WordPress.com accounts.