The observant might have noticed a new section has sprouted at the top of the left hand sidebar called ‘Latest reading’. This is just a little link dump for interesting articles and blog posts that have caught my eye in recent days but I don’t have time or inclination to write proper posts about them. The links are not likely to hang around for very long at a time, so if something sounds interesting, click on it now, don’t leave it till tomorrow!
Update: Originally I was listing these links using the WP Links facility. But I just found a nifty miniblog plugin, and I liked it so much that I’m displaying them using that instead. It could clearly be used to do much more than just display links. I recently tried to do something similar with the miniposts plugin that Jeremy uses at Clioweb but the problem was that the miniposts would show up in the Recent Posts list, which I didn’t want, whereas posts in the miniblog don’t.
I might install have installed this stats plugin over the weekend (hat-tip: clioweb). It could be useful to have detailed and easily accessible stats specifically for the blog (the ones I have are for the site as a whole). And it must be, oh, 2 whole weeks since I added any new bells and whistles.
Unrelated cricket business: is The Great British Weather going to save our hides this weekend? And is that good or would we rather have something to watch even if we’re doing badly? Opinions welcome. (Even from Aussies.)
Early Modern Notes 
The ShortStats plugin is kinda nice. The guy who originally developed ShortStats (not the plugin) is Shaun Inman who just recently released a new site statistic program called Mint, which looks sweet.
Done it! (And fixed next/previous page navigation of front page/categories/monthly archives too, which I’ve been meaning to get round to for a while.)
The back and next buttons drive me nuts…I can’t ever get them to look the way I want.
With the styling? I didn’t have too much trouble with that (I just took the div styling I already use for the Next/Previous at the top of single posts and adapted it slightly to put these at the bottom of the page instead).
That’s true. I’m just lazy I guess. I haven’t figured out how to reformat the way pages of posts display either.
The mini blog thing is cool. I’ll have to add that too…as if I need another plugin. Though I am liking the miniposts plugin, mainly because I want to be able to write short, “Hey, look what I found!” posts and keep them somewhat separate from longer, relatively serious posts.
On the surface, I think the two plugins do pretty much the same thing, although they work quite differently behind the scenes. With the miniposts plugin, I think they’re part of your main database (which is why they show up in the Recent Posts list); the miniblog one stores them separately (and has its own admin page). So you probably don’t really need both of them… Though it’s possible – there seem to be several different tags to insert miniblog posts on the index.php file – that miniblog is more flexible than miniposts.
I initially stopped using the miniposts plugin because, like you, I didn’t want them showing up in my archives as posts. Now, instead of using them essentially as remainder links I’m actually using them for “mini” posts.
It would be really cool if you can subscribe to a separate RSS feed for the miniblog…can you do that? I couldn’t find a separate feed on your site for them.
I think there is an option to do it. I’ll check it later…
Jeremy, there’s now a ‘miniblog rss’ link at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar now. I think I have it working right, but let me know if there are any problems with it.