Discreet References to Previous Posts

In bootScore Top­pings, I’ve already offered two slim land­ing pages: mylap-sp1r­p1 and mylap-sp0r­p1. Both show the impor­tant things first: The blog top­ic. And the most recent post. One of them addi­tion­al­ly puts the most recent Sticky Post in front of the oth­er. But if we nev­er­the­less want to show our read­ers the one or oth­er sticky post more, we need a solu­tion for inte­grat­ed dis­creet ref­er­ences to pre­vi­ous posts:

Solution

• Install the Recent Posts Wid­get With Thumb­nails plu­g­in.
• Open Appearance/Widgets.
• Copy the wid­get Recent Posts with Thumbnails into your gen­er­al Sidebar Widget and con­fig­ure it:
  • Set the num­ber of posts to show to 1, max­i­mum 2.
  • Select Show only sticks posts.
  • Enable Show excerpt.
  • Set the num­ber of char­ac­ters to show to 144.
  • Set the width of the thumb­nail to show to 120, the height to 75.
  • Enable the option Use aspect ratios of orig­i­nal thumb­nails.
• Set up your site to use your own spe­cif­ic land­ing page.
• Down­load the land­ing page mylap-sp0r­p1.
• Copy it into your child theme under the name mylap.php.

Background

The idea of this change is sim­ple:

We only mark posts as sticky posts that out­shine top­i­cal­i­ty any­way. That’s why we also want to point them to our read­ers. But we leave it at one or two posts. Sticky posts should not dis­place our recent posts.¹ Our pre­vi­ous land­ing page mylap-sp1rp1 put the sticky posts in front of the most recent ones. This can be done more ele­gant­ly and dis­creet­ly:

We install the plu­g­in Recent Posts Wid­get With Thumb­nails. It claims to be Open-Source soft­ware, in the repos­i­to­ry the file Readme.txt refers to the GPL‑2.0 and the GPL‑2.0 license text is also locat­ed there. So we are on the side of the good guys here.

After that, we con­fig­ure the plu­g­in to help our read­er. True to the max­im, less is more. And because we’ve thus moved the sticky posts to our gen­er­al side­bar, we no longer need the land­ing page that shows both. So we can move to my-land­ing-page-stick­posts-0-recent­post­s‑1.

Bin­go.

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And how does this …

… sup­port our migra­tion to bootScore? Well, when the web design­er has com­plet­ed her work on good illus­tra­tions, she can relax and inte­grate tags and clouds into her site, improve her overview page and design her own land­ing page. Whether the result­ing full­ness real­ly ben­e­fits her own read­er, whether it can become slim­mer and how, whether more dis­creet ref­er­ences and spe­cif­ic fonts also increase the read­abil­i­ty, all this she should nev­er­the­less con­sid­er while imple­ment­ing these fea­tures. This post sup­ports these steps towards a per­son­al­ized bootScore site.

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1. And yes, that also means that we imple­ment our sticky tags over and over again. Oth­er­wise, it gets bor­ing. [↩]