I love widgets, those easy drag-and-drop plugins, copy-paste pieces of code that form customizable apps. But I think I’m just going to call them thingumabobs from now on.

I just love these synonyms for widget.

I’ve been working with WordPress for about two months now and I am still getting used to it. My blog seems like an open-ended project, one that will never finish. Maybe that seems like a rather obvious statement, since a blog is a tool for continuously expressing your thoughts. What I actually mean is the form or shape of the blog. I feel like I am building a house and even though the framework is done, the house itself is under constant construction.

The framework itself feels restrictive and I have been looking for tools to accomplish what I want. In the case of WordPress I have been looking for Widgets and Plug ins that can achieve what I want. Or rather, the backend tools that shape and form my blog. Plugins and widgets are solutions to the restrictions in the WordPress software, but are restrictions being reproduced on another level? What kind of constraints are built into the internet on the content level? How does software control meaning (content). These are several questions I am planning to ask myself in my MA thesis.
I recently came across two related posts: Ranting on WordPress Plugin Development by Justin Shattuck and Ranting on WordPress Plugin Development by David at Blogger Pro

So I decided it is time to finally implement the Ultimate Tag Warrior. I am not a php wizard, but I am patient and eager to learn new stuff, both of which help a lot when installing WordPress plug-ins. Although all the plug-ins come with instructions I am often experiencing difficulties.

Adding tags to my posts was easy, but creating a tagcloud wasn’t. I was able to create a tag archive page which would display a tagcloud (following the instructions), but that wasn’t quite what I was looking for. I wanted to display my tagcloud in my dynamic sidebar which uses widgets. So I put the php code in the (empty) Text1 widget, but it turned up empty. So I tried adding list HTML tags, which didn’t help either. After some googling it turns out that you cannot put php code in your widgets. But of course there is a widget to help me fix this widget problem.

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