There were a few things with my theme that had been bothering me for some time. Tonight I managed to take an hour or so out of my evening and clean a few of them up. The first thing I did was shrink the items on my sidebar a bit. I also ditched the previous comments since I couldn’t figure out a nice way to show them. The area on the sidebar that used to be dedicated to the last ten entries has now been moved to the individual post page (which makes more sense).

I also added the related entries plugin that Dale, Matt, and I threw together over at matthewgood.org. The nice thing about it is that it’s fairly accurate for determining posts that are related based on all the taxonomy relationships. You should see those show up on the single post pages as well.

The end result of all this is that everything looks a tad cleaner, and there are now internal cross-links between items on my site, something I didn’t really have before. Should be interesting to see how this affects traffic over the next few weeks, and if it changes the bounce rate from people coming in on search engines.