I’ve been making tweaks to this blog by adding a few new plugins, and taking advantage of some of the easy customization featues provided by the “K2”:http://getk2.com theme I’m using.  I’m hoping that the changes will make content on the site more available to both repeat and one-time visitors.

First off, I sometimes post links without much comment to a category called “links.”  These posts used to show up in the main column of the front page with a slightly smaller size on the title.  I’ve since moved them into the sidebar on the front page because I thought that they needed to be better differentiated.

Next, I’ve removed the list of my latest posts from the sidebar on the front page, where it was placed by default.  I figure that listing links on my front page to posts that already appear on my front page doesn’t make sense.  In turn, I’ve added it to the sidebar on pretty much every other page figuring that readers who come to my site via search engines, which typically deposit them on one of my individual entires might also be interested in some of my other posts.

I also added the “related entires plugin”:http://www.w-a-s-a-b-i.com/archives/2006/02/02/wordpress-related-entries-20/ to help searchers find other posts of potential interest on my site.  The technique it uses is  pretty simple minded  — to find entries related to a given post, it takes the title of the post and uses it to do a search for other entries that contain the same words in the title and body of the post — so the results aren’t always great, but I think it’s better than nothing.  I suspect anything better would be significantly more computationally expensive, and would have to be cached somehow.

Finally, I added a bunch of ugly-ass subscription buttons for adding my feed to various web based RSS aggregators.

Oh, I’ve also listed the wordpress plugins I use for this blog in my list of links on the front page.
None of these really make a lick of difference to those of you subscribed via my full-text RSS feed.  I could probably add the related entries links to the bottom of each RSS item, if you are interested.

I’m interested in your thoughts and comments.