I’ve written a number of posts during the past week at my other blog, Patell and Waterman’s History of New York (ahistoryofnewyork.com), a collaborative project with my colleague Bryan Waterman.
So I’ve added a feature that I’m calling “The Past Week at ahistoryofnewyork.com” at the top of the left-hand column of the sidebar. It’ll display the titles of the last seven posts on the blog in the form of clickable links. We’ve resolved to put up a new post each day, so showing the last seven posts should approximate the previous seven days’ work.
Click the continuation if you’re a Movable Type 4 blogger and want to know how to include a similar feature on your blog.
My sidebar is part of my Footer template module. The Footer tempalte includes two widgets called “Left Sidebar” and “Right Sidebar.” (In the particular 3-column design I’m using, the “right” sidebar turns out to be the one right next to the main column, while the “left” sidebar is rotated from the regular three column layout all the way to the far right side of the design, putting it to the right of the “right sidebar”!)
I used the “Feeds.App Lite ” plugin (included with Movable Type 4) to create a widget that draws in the RSS feed from the New York site. Instructions are available here. Feeds.App gives you the option to choose either the last 5 or 10 entries; I chose 5, but then manually edited the HTML code that was created for the new widget to change the number to 7.
I then added the newly created widget to the top of my “left” sidebar column using the “Left Sidebar” widget.
