Add Bling & Legs Teacher Challenge #6
The 6th activity in the Edublogs Teacher Challenge is all about adding bling and legs to your blog. Participants are encouraged to explore their blog’s widgets and sidebar to ensure there is sufficient information about the blog and blogger. Personally I found this activity to be beneficial because it made me take a critical look at my widgets and sidebar and give it a good spring clean. For a while I think I’ve been adding widgets to my sidebar and not really checking them properly to see if they ‘add value’ to my blog.
What I noticed was that many of the widgets in my sidebar were not clustered, or ordered, according to what I’ll call widget categories – to be honest they’re a bit all over the place. So the first step today was to try and group together my widgets down the sidebar to give my readers a more logical flow. The avatar and voki remained at the top of the sidebar because I believe it gives other bloggers a little bit of information about who I am (especially the voki).
A glaring problem (that I hadn’t paid any attention to) was that my recent posts, tags, archives, categories and search box were located too low down the sidebar. This may have prevented readers from really knowing what I blog about and what I think is important. When I read blogs and decide whether to add them to my RSS Reader, I take a look at the tags and recent posts to give me an idea of what they blog about.
Another noticeable problem was that I had embedded two different badges for the International Edubloggers Directory (oops), therefore one was omitted immediately. A further improvement to the sidebar was the grouping of my social networking widgets and membership badges to various education-Nings.
The essential widgets I believe are important for inclusion in blogs’ sidebars include:
- Avatar and/or talking avatar – gives a slightly human touch to the blog and a sense of who I am.
- Blog roll – this is essential because it gives readers an idea of other noteworthy bloggers and provides a link to other people’s blogs.
- A widget that suggests other social networking places that I can be found – excellent for expanding one’s networking
- A visitor statistics widget – is great for seeing where your readers are coming from and how many people your blog is attracting.
- If you use Twitter a widget featuring your tweets is good for letting others know what you have been tweeting.
Hopefully my legs has a little more bling and adequate legs to really show my readers who I am and importantly what my blog is about. Does my blog’s sidebar have a logical sequence? What do you think?
Hi Glenda,
Thanks for participating in the Teacher’s Blogging Challenge and writing this post about “bling and legs”. This activity also made me look more critically at the order of widgets on my sidebar and prompted me to change and delete some. I agree with your list of important widgets – although some are for my readers (avatar, where to find me, badges, my tweets and Flickr photos) and some are for myself (blogroll, clustermap, links to resources and web2.0 tools).
I really liked your video for the Google Academy application and the “Qwiki” application – I’m off to check that out now! Keep up the great work.
Hi Glenda, thanks for sharing your work on adding legs and bling to your blog. I have a lot of tidying up to do on my sidebar, but I feel I probably am a cluttered person anyway. As you say, I like a photo, avatar or voki to share a little of the ‘real me’. This challenge has made me again search how I can add an avatar in a wordpress blog. Tonight I found out how to add the gravatar (as they call it), so I am really pleased. I like your badges for the social networking sites that you belong to. The “Your Name” widget is important if people want to connect further with you on eg twitter, linkedin etc. I have found another good tracking widget called geovisite which has lots of options. One is the revolving globe that tracks the actual countries and visitors to the globe.
Thanks for sharing this post.
Thanks for your insights in this post. I need to figure out what to keep in my sidebar and what to add. I like the “ShowYourself” widget and may add that in this Challenge. Just a curious question–why exactly do you include a blogroll? Since I use Google Reader, I get posts there. Is it just to share with your readers who you read?
Thanks again for some good ideas.
You have made some interesting observations about the order of the sidebar widgets. I had explored these a little earlier in the Challenge but then I managed to make my categories widget vanish – not only from the side bar but from the collection of widgets offered for use with the theme I had chosen. I added the tags widget instead. I agree that the order of the widgets is important as the top ones will always be visible but a reader will need to scroll down to look at any of the others.
I like how you have all of your widgets on one side! I think your avatar looks very groovy too!
Nancy
I like your thoughtfulness in grouping your widgets to make sense for your readers. I need to go and look at mine. I’ve been adding them more at random as I find them. I like how your links show your interconnectedness across the web. Thanks for including me on the teacher challenge links. Now I don’t feel all alone on the web!
I must say I need to look at my widgets as well. There is something to be said about the organization of widgets to assist visitors. I think you have done a fine job in organizing your widgets. Keep up the great work, and you’ve motivated me to re-evaluate my widgets.
Thanks so much for your comments. I did find that activity an excellent one to take a good look at my widgets. I hadn’t thought of it previously. It was great to take a bit of time to grouping them.
Enjoying your blogging journey and I look forward to following you.
You’ve done a great job organising your widgets into a logical sequence Glenda. I like the way you have a widget to gather all of your social networks into one place.
I haven’t written my post yet, but yesterday I changed my blog template and re-ordered my widgets. I actually chose the same template as our LRC blog – I like having the widgets on both sides so you don’t have to scroll forever to see them (not that I have that many!).
Another job you can now tick off your list!
Kim
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