Recent sidebar additions

Screenshot of the additional sidebar widgets

I’ve added a couple of extra WordPress widgets to the sidebar, which appears on the right of blog posts if your screen is wide enough. For smaller screens, it’ll be at the bottom.

The first is a list of the five most read posts over the past 30 days. This is provided by the Koko Analytics plugin, which I use for analysing visitor statistics. Generally speaking, these will be the posts that seem to rank highest when people use search engines. My post about a free-standing CarPlay unit is perennially popular.

The second is a list of posts written on this day in the past. When I was a Movable Type user, I used Brad Choate’s OnThisDay plugin to achieve something similar. On WordPress, I’m using the Posts On The Day plugin instead.

Both plugins make a widget available to insert wherever widgets can go in your WordPress theme. They’re classed as ‘legacy widgets’ but are customisable in the WordPress user interface.

This does mean that, on shorter posts like this one, the sidebar is now significantly longer than the content. Oh well.

May 25th

Hornbill

One thing Wikipedia is good for is finding out what happens on a particular day in history. For example, on May 25th:

It’s also International Missing Children’s Day, Africa Day, Geek Pride Day, National Tap Dance Day and Towel Day.

And famous birthdays include Jonny Wilkinson, Cillian Murphy, Demetri Martin, Princess Laurentien of the Netherlands, Mike Myers, Anthea Turner, Julian Clary, Paul Weller, Alastair Campbell, Eve Ensler, Catherine G. Wolf and Ian McKellen.

Plus, a not-so-famous birthday: mine.