Faced with a sizable yard screaming to be mowed, I decided the site needed some tweaking. I’ve added a few new features and played around with the theme a little bit, so I’m curious what you all think.

I’ve installed a new plugin called Extended Live Archives. Instead of the ever growing monthly archive list in the sidebar, there is now a single link to a new archives page. This page gives you an interactive tool (JavaScript required) to browse the archives by date, category, and tag. By moving to the Ultimate Tag Warrior 3 plugin, the tag data is included in the archive page automatically. More common tags are shown in a bigger font. The tags also are included in the RSS feed as XML elements instead of tag links.

I’ve also moved the RSS feed to FeedBurner. In addition to letting me know how many people are reading via RSS, it adds some functionality to the RSS feed including email links, comment counts, and tags. Plus the dynamic RSS Reader graphic is pretty cool:

I also added a number of syndication/portal links so you can add the site to places like My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines, and others. Plus with the new Google Analytics/Feedburner Reporting Plugin from tantan, I can track all the site statistics from within the WordPress administration screens.
If you already read the site via the old RSS feed, no worries. It will still work, but you can update your RSS reader to the new feed URL if you want some of the goodies that FeedBurner adds to the feed. UPDATE: You’ll get the new feedburner feed by default now so there’s no need to update your feed link, we took care of it for you!

Since the Archive section was removed from the sidebar, I’ve shifted things around in the sidebar a bit. Nothing too drastic.

As for the theme, I was never really comfortable with the red links. That was how this theme originally came, but I always felt the grass theme would look better with green links. So I tried to pick a green that was light enough to stand out as a link and dark enough to read easily. I think I got it right but let me know if you have trouble with it. The red still shows up when you hover for old time’s sake.

All in all, nothing too drastic, but a few positive additions I hope. Let me know if anything is broken or the changes don’t sit well.