Spiffing up Deep Sand a Little

I’m taking this week, so today I gave myself a little time with my hobby, Deep Sand. If you’ve watched the stream, you noticed a number of posts sort of catching up on some movie reviews, and I still have a couple to do. I also incorporated some new functions into the front facing parts of the blog.

To start with, we can now keep the featured posts “featured” for a little longer. We’ve added a java script “slider” that will scroll through the four most recent posts to the featured category. This took some work, and I had to learn a little more about programming, as I wanted to incorporate another plugin into the scrolling plugin. This captures the first image attached to the post and automatically converts it to a thumbnail and displays it in the featured area. I think it’s kind of cool.

I also added a Social Stream page which catalogs all my social site activity such as Twitter and Facebook. Why, I don’t know…mainly because there was an intriguing plugin that does that, so I decided to play around with it.

I’ve also cleaned up the side bars a bit using an according tabbed widget plugin. I hope you like what we’ve done.