Tuxkids

I added a few blocks to my tuxkids Drupal 6 site tonight to show different ways a blog might be spiced up a little. First, the block on the right called Twitter chrisindallas is an example of a piece of custom php code that can add functionality to Drupal.

First, I found the URL to my Twitter feed at the bottom of my Twitter profile page. I could have also subscribed to the feed with all my friends. Once I copied that, I entered it in the aggregator module that is part of Drupal core by going to Administer->Content management->Feed aggregator. There I created a new feed called Twitter chrisindallas and pasted the URL and set the Update interval to 15 minutes.

Next I created an empty block under Administer->Site building->Blocks Then, I borrowed a piece of php code from the Drupal website. Instructions on setting up the code are there. Make sure you set the input format to php and update your cron tables to run every 15 minutes. That way your tweets will be fresh.

I also found a del.icio.us widget that uses Javascript on the del.icio.us website. This very small piece of Javascript can be placed in a empty block just like the Twitter php code. The main difference is that the input format need to be changed to Full HTML. I didn't add a title to the block because widget supplies its own.
Next I added another twitter widget. This time it is a Flash badge that is a little more colorful that blue text on a white background. I got the code from Twitter. Place it in an empty block and you are ready to go.

Several more Twitter badges can be found on their download page.

I also added a tag cloud using the Tagadelic module for Drupal 6. This common widget is simply a list of all tags used with an larger fonts given to the most used tags. After decompressing it into sites/all/modules and enabling, a block is added with php code from the Drupal website.

The last badge I added is also Flash, but this one has some animation. The Flickr badge can be found at http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne This one required the input format be be set to php code.

There are a lot more things you can do to dress up your blog. A list of 50 is available in the Mashable article.