Basics

This blog runs on Wordpress and is hosted at Dreamhost.

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

I like 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 Typo-XP theme, updated by me to work in the modern Wordpress era. I’ve also 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

• IntenseDebate - The threaded, nested comments that follow you everywhere. Amazingly awesome. Also helps me manage comments!
• 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.
• Random Redirect - The random post link on the front page.

Stuff That Helps Run the Blog

• Adminimize - Makes admin command panel navigation easier.
• 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.

I’m always on the lookout for ways to improve the blog, so if you have a suggestion, please drop me a line using the email shown in the sidebar.