Comments on: Asides Are Mucking Up My Theme. And Are Addictive. Yoinks.

By: Maria

Maria — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 15:49:04 +0000

I’d like to put my latest tweets in my sidebar. I know that Alex King has a plugin to do that, but it’s for WordPress 2.1 or later and I haven’t had the time to upgrade. I guess I should make the time!

By: engtech IDT

engtech IDT — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 15:45:41 +0000

When I did asides I ended up filtering from the feed… and then eventually giving up on them.

There are plugins that will let you show your latest tweets as asides.. that might be useful.

By: Tony Hung

Tony Hung — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 15:01:15 +0000

Its all good, as they say, Maria … its all good. I take a great many things with a dash of metaphorical salt, and I trust my readers will tell me if the seasoning is too … uh … strong (to flog that metaphor).

By: Maria

Maria — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 14:55:57 +0000

Oh! I hope I didn’t offend you. Didn’t mean to. Just feedback.

I do like the “partially developed brain fart.” That’s usually what my comments are. :-(

By: Tony Hung

Tony Hung — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 14:48:29 +0000

Hi Maria,

Well, its an experiment and one that I’m still … uh, experimenting with. Maybe there’s a way to offer “aside-free” feeds.

Or, maybe I should title each “aside” with the prefix: “ASIDE” or “MICROTHOUGHT” or “Partially Developed Brain Fart”.

As I say … still experimenting. ;)

By: Maria

Maria — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 14:30:44 +0000

I peeked at your Home page to see what you were talking about. I assume the italicized text with the bar beside it are the asides?

Asides, when used this way, are a LOT like microblogging. (Or perhaps “miniblogging,” since the entries are more than 140 characters.) They come across in your feed as short posts and there’s no way to distinguish them from other content.

I’m not sure about the benefit of this. Why not call a post a post and allow yourself to write short posts when you only have a little bit to say? There’s no rule that says all of your posts need to be long, well-developed thoughts.

I’ve seen Asides displayed a different way — for example, in a sidebar. Not sure how they appeared in a feed — I wasn’t a subscriber.

It’s easy with WordPress to get caught up in site development tricks. I can’t tell you how many I’ve tried and rejected. Although asides have been on my list (near the bottom, admittedly) of blog features to try, your experience with them has removed them from the list altogether. Sorry!