Blog Tech

Basics

I use Word­press because it’s pow­er­ful, open source, and easy to use.

This blog is hosted at Dreamhost because it’s afford­able, their cus­tomer ser­vice is great (and human), and they put a lot of work into their admin panel so I can min­i­mize my time putz­ing around on a command-line. When an upgrade comes out, they send me an email to click on one but­ton, and voila, I’m upgraded. Hard to argue with that.

This blog uses the Dis­ci­ple, tweaked it a bit here and there.

I use Feed­burner for sub­scrip­tion to posts via feed or email, sim­ply because they have great tools for man­ag­ing feeds. I look for­ward to tighter inte­gra­tion with google some­day. Like gmail + adsense + feed­burner + ana­lyt­ics? Mmm, that would be nice.

World of War­craft links pro­vided by Wow­head.

Avatars

In the com­ments sys­tem, I use gra­vatars, which is short for “glob­ally recog­nized avatars”. Go and get one at the web­site, and most word­press sites will mag­i­cally use it.

Peo­ple who don’t have a gra­vatar get a wavatar, which is pro­gram­mat­i­cally gen­er­ated based on your email. The wavatars come in many fla­vors, but I’m using the mon­ster one.

Word­press Plugins

I use the fol­low­ing Word­press plugins:

Stuff You Can See

  • Search Unleashed — Makes the search func­tion suck less, although there are clearly still some issues to work out. This is very much like a buggy WoW addon: I like it enough to live with the junk. I’m on the look­out for a bet­ter search enhance­ment, any­one know of anything?
  • Clean Noti­fi­ca­tions — So that when you sub­scribe to a thread, the email mes­sage isn’t a mess.
  • Clean Archives Reloaded — The fancy Archives page.
  • Com­mentLuv is joy.
  • Sim­i­lar Posts / RSS Footer — Help­ing you read more… of me.

Stuff That Helps Run the Blog

  • Akismet — You know that your anti­spam mea­sures are pretty good when you can adver­tise which one you use. :)
  • No Self Pings — Let’s me link to myself or com­ment on my own posts with­out clut­ter­ing up my @#$%@#$ email telling me that “hey, some­one linked to you!”  “O rly?”
  • Sim­ple Tags — Lots of advanced tag­ging rules and tools. Also puts related posts in the RSS feed. Really, it does a lot.
  • Unfancy Quote — Because fancy quotes are unfriendly.

I’m always on the look­out for ways to improve the blog, so if you have a sug­ges­tion, please con­tact me!