For those curious about the behind-the-scenes on this blog (current as of 8/28/10).
Host: Drak.net (now part of A Small Orange)
I’ve hosted websites with Drak since sometime around 1998. I stayed with them because I like supporting a women-owned technology business (they’re still more rare than they should be!) and because I’ve been incredibly impressed over the years by their willingness to communicate with customers – not only about the individual account stuff, but about general developments and technology. Very reasonable prices, too, given the responsive service when I’ve needed it.
Drak.Net’s blog is well worth reading, even if you don’t host with them – lots of interesting tips and tricks.
Engine: WordPress 3.x
I like WordPress for its ease of use, and the ability to do both posts (time-dependent) and pages (static). It’s easy to add categories and tags when I want to, and it’s easy to edit and move things around. There’s also lots of support and other materials out there that make it easy to try new things out.
Theme: Atuhualpa
I discovered this theme a couple of months ago, and like it for its ease of use, its many different possible options, and the management of some specific resources. I’m comfortable editing straight CSS by myself (and slowly working the skills to write my own blog themes), but for this blog I wanted to include a number of widgets: something this theme does very well.
Plugins:
- About Me displays links to profiles on social networking sites.
- Akismet is the widely used spam filter for comments.
- Clean-Contact is what I’m currently using for my contact form – quick, simple, spam filters through Akismet, but not editable.
- Del.icio.us for WordPress snags my most recent Delicious links and puts them in the widget.
- JournalPress mirrors the content from here to my protected journal (on Dreamwidth and Livejournal) so that personal friends can comment more easily.
- Simple Tags lets me format my tag list the way I like. (I find tag clouds really hard to read, something about the variable font size.)
- Socialize This adds social widgets to my blog posts, and can also be used to do Twitter updates of a new post.
- WordPress.com Stats shows blog stats on my admin dashboard. Very handy.
Widgets:
- GoodReads provides code you can copy into a text widget to produce the current reading shelf (and a few other options.) I use the Flash version. You can find it under the Feeds tab in your account settings.
Things planned:
- I’m interested in finding a form plug-in that will let me edit what’s asked for a little more (for example, having a drop-down for the subject of the contact.)
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