A New Look Sidebar!

I have changed and edited the look and the feel of my sidebar. All this changes, I thought I will incorporate when I change over to the new theme, but looks that it will take time. So without looking for any excuses, I sat over and did some changes this evening.

These are the highlights:

Best of AshwinR.com

I’ve been blogging for over 14 months, I thought it would be cool to display the best blog posts featured in this site little earlier. As of now I’ve limited to 8 posts, and as time goes on I will add on 10 post to this list. I’m planning to have categories and list the best post there after I get enough posts and this blog gets matured. I intend to have something like what Digital Inspiration has.

By the way, I didn’t list the posts manually. It’s powered by Top Posts by Category Plugin. It’s a cool plugin for you to add your top posts, if you don’t know know to do manually or you’re just plain lazy.

Recently Watched Movies

I watch a lot of movies and I must be the biggest movie buff in my family. I want to have a review of the movie that I watch and also have a sort of archive as to what all movie I have seen at what date. Now head over and check out my recently watched movie and a short review of the same. Movie Review. Click on the [+] button to see my short review of the movie.

I think after some time I should have a lot of movie listed there it, should be a serious competition to IMDb! Heh? Not really.. just Kidding. Anyway my wife/kids/grandkids must be amazed to see such a lot of review and would be freaked out!
By the way, that page is powered by this WP Movie Rating Plugin.

Trying out Text Link Ads

Text Link Ads is an alternate way to monetize your site. The best thing about it is you don’t need to place any ugly animated/graphic ads, we need a neat link to the sponsor site. For long I was using AdSense in this site, even though getting some sort of OK traffic. (By the way,highlights of my stats: PR 5 blog, 20,000+ unique visitors per month, 50,000+ unique page views per month, around 250+ daily RSS subscribers). I was in fact waiting for some time before I get decent stats to add on the Text Link Ads, but better late than never.

Links in the sidebar are for grabs. If anyone wants to advertise, they can do so and get $100 in free promotion!

MyBlogLog - AshwinR’s Readers community
I never knew how cool this MyBlogLog thing was until I tried it out for this blog. Visit this s blog community and become a part of AshwinR.com’s readers community. We can see who are all reading this blog, what other site they’re reading, leave comments and generally getting to know the readers of this blog. Other than that, we get to track the stats of our sites, an additional

Trimmed my Categories Tags and removed the clutter
I just removed some category tags, merged some tags. Now I think all the tags are independent and not related to each other. This site being my personal blog, I don’t want to have something like ‘Reviews’ under the Technology/Computer category. I was trying out Visu Polls, and as it didn’t work out well in this site, I’ve removed it. Plus I have also changed the order of the items in the

Other than that, I have cleaned up the mess and changed a few things here and there. Uploaded 4 plugins including the wp-cache plugin which should increase your browsing speed considerably.

Seems that it’s going to be a lot of work when I switch over to the new theme. I’m not happy with this themes any longer and it’s just matter of time before I switch to a new theme.

Did you like the changes that I made over here? Is there any other ways that I can improve it? I would love to hear from you guys!

Related Articles:

• AshwinR.com turns one year!
• Things that keep me Inspired and Motivated
• Importance of Paid Hosting and Domain name