Luke Gedeon

I guess it is pretty obvious what my choice for blogging platform is. WordPress is actually quite amazing. I have used a lot of open-source software for the web, and this is in a class of it’s own. It has become such a part of daily life I almost forgot to list it as a separate tool. I have a one-key shortcut to start, type a little, and click post. It just happens. I don’t even think about the fact that I am using software to do it, much less online software. Actually, the highest complement technology can receive is when someone can say, “I don’t think about it. It just works.”

Part of the power of WordPress is that it lets you pick just the features you need. Every development team has to make choices about what to include and what leave out. The more features you include the slower your software. More features also increases the learning curve and usually makes the software more difficult to use, but everyone still wants more features. The challenge is that each person wants a different set of features.

WordPress solves this problem with plug-ins. You can pick from hundreds of features and only install the ones you actually want. At first they were a bit of a pain to install but then I found “OneClick Installer”. Now adding features is pretty easy. Here is a list of the plug-ins (features) that I use.

About Me widget – Adds an “About Me” widget to your sidebar. – By Samuel Devol.
Akismet – checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”
OneClick Installer – Installs any plugin or theme without having to upload them manually. – By Anirudh Sanjeev.
ShareThis – Let your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites. – By ShareThis and Crowd Favorite (crowdfavorite.com).
Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. – By Mark Jaquith.
TD Word Count – Tells you how long each post is and the total number of words in you whole blog – By TDavid.
Twitter Tools – A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter. Configure your settings here. – By Alex King.
WordPress.com Stats – Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. – By Andy Skelton.

I am looking at a few others right now but I am not going to recommend them until I have had a chance to test them.

In other news: We recently re-wrote a popular kid’s song by switching two words. Our family enjoys playing with spoonerisms (switching the first letter of two adjacent words) and other similar things like switching final sounds. So switching words around is nothing special, but this time it came out a bit humorous if you already know the song. If not, don’t forget that you did not pay for the privilege of reading this. Have you ever heard this song before? “Don’t throw your back in my trash yard. My trash yard is full”