Zo’C: The Science of Web Art, Design and Development
There I was at Facebook, when I received a message from Guilherme of Zo’C.
“Cat” he says. “Whoooh, what a big blog roll” he says. And he was right. My blog roll was tipping over and into and all over the place.
“Have I got a treat for you” he says. And he was right. He did.
Guilherme’s ZoC powerblogroll plugin for Wordpress improved the new design for DWB immensely.
His plugin enabled me to take my honker of a blog roll and move it to an inside page, like so.
It also allowed me to put my links in tidy categories. Which I did.
Advertising Pros, Animators, Artists, Blog Designers, Book & Magazine Designers, Branders, Business of Design Conversations, Design Organisations, Designers, Graphic Designers, Green Designers, Illustrators, Logo Designers, Marketeers, Miscellaneous, Photographers, Podcasters, Programmers, Tutorials, Typographers, Web Designers and Writers.
And you know what? In telling this tale, I was going to rant on about the difficulty I had with choosing which category to put each blog. But I won’t. I was also going to tell you that at one point I threatened to create a category called mystery meat. But I won’t do that either.
I’d rather tell you about Guilherme. About how he generously came to my rescue when DWB was updated to WP 2.5 and I ran into difficulties. Thank you Guilherme, it works great.
And, yeah, well, ok, you can still say “Whoooh, what a big blog roll”. But WHAT a blog roll it is. Right?
Thanks again Guilherme. Without your talent and generosity today, I’d be on my second bottle of wine this Friday night.
Technorati Tags: Advertising pros, Animators, Blog Designers, Book & Magazine Designers, Branders, Business of Design Conversations, Design Organisations, Designers, Graphic Designers, Green Designers, Illustrators, Logo Designers, Marketeers, Miscellaneous, Photographers, plugins, Podcasters, Programmers, tutorials, Typographers, Web Art, Web Designers, Writers
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You are totally welcome, it is my pleasure to see such a useful blogroll become even more useful.
The plugin has been written to help big and useful blogrolls like yours.
Guilherme Zühlke O’Connors last blog post..Categorizing Pages and Posts in Wordpress
Loving the super-organised blogroll. ilovetypography.com is my suggestion for your ‘typographers’ section.
David Aireys last blog post..Marks of Excellence by Per Mollerup
Guilherme, I’m so chuffed now that it’s clean, organised and so very tidy! Thanks, it’s beautiful :-)
David, you are so right. I contacted him about a feature but he hasn’t gotten back to me yet (maybe I should give him a nudge?)
Great plugin. I love anything that is clean, works, and is concise and easy to use.
Eric Browns last blog post..Call for Submissions in Indigo Blue…
Though my own blogroll hasn’t gotten as big as yours (yet!), this is an excellent plugin, and I’m off to download it right now! Fantastic idea, thanks for sharing.
shannons last blog post..Incorporating Organic Artistic Textures (plus freebies!)
The Zoc powerblogroll plugin does look pretty darned fine in use at DWB – but what I particularly admire is how a simple list of links turns into a truly useful resource for the reader – a blogroll page that’s well worth bookmarking.
rjleamans last blog post..How Well Does Your Website Work for its Users?
Eric, it’s amazingly easy. Guilherme even rewrote it so I didn’t have to use a second plugin to turn on php within a post (I was having problems and that was one of the culprets)
Shannon, I was advised NOT to have a large blogroll. Everyone wrote that it’d harm my page ranking. But, DWB is about the bloggers, so, how?
rjlearman, “a blogroll page that’s well worth bookmarking.”
Thanks! And it’ll keep on growing and changing as well. I know of two more categories needed – CSS and Design thinking.
There’s one more but I just woke up and the caffeine hasn’t kicked in yet.
What the categories has done is show me which subjects I need to concentrate on in the future.
[...] could tell you myself the story of how this happened, but yesterday I’ve been the featured designer on Designers Who Blog and since Cat decided to tell it in a much funnier way I’d be able to, then you’d [...]
“What the categories has done is show me which subjects I need to concentrate on in the future.” That’s a bit of an unlooked-for bonus – I wouldn’t have thought of that.
As for having a large blogroll, good on DWB! Reader service will trump page-rank obsession every time, over the long haul: DWB is just one of many fine blogs that give proof of that.
rjleamans last blog post..How Well Does Your Website Work for its Users?
Yes, that was a plus. Also, since I’m now in the 3rd year os blogging, there are sites I see daily but haven’t featured because I believe I’ve already done so. The new archives as well as the blog roll help me to play catch up.
Keeping up on what blogs are still around will continue to be a bane of course.
Yesterday I put almost 500 of the blogs into a dedicated Bloglines account to keep check. Now I’ll be able to announce anything interesting going on (a new feature).
I think it’s a good idea to have blogrolls on another page. If someone wants to see it they’ll look for it and it does look nice and neat. If you are worried about page ranks, then you could tell robot.txt not to look at that page.
I don’t want to diminish Guilherme’s efforts – I think anyone who can make a working plugin is pretty great. :) However, I was wondering how this is different from using the built in parameters of wp_list_bookmarks. Since Zoc gets all it’s info from the info that you manually put into the links manager. All you’d need to do is put wp_list_bookmarks and your desired parameters into a page template, like I’ve done on my links page.
I’m having a weird problem with layout, things should be next to each other and under each other instead of next to each other and under the longest list, but it’s a CSS issue, not PHP.
Hi kristarella. Well, not everyone is great at messing with their WP themes. Every time I do, it usually doesn’t work as it’s supposed to and later on I find not one method fits all or there is something missing from the codex that they assume everyone knows.
Btw – love your blog roll. There’s about six high quality blogs I’ll be adding to DWB.