Blog Update

I’ve had it on my calendar for years to update this site. It hasn’t happened in the past because I’ve modified the theme so heavily that I knew it would take a long time to cleanup. This week I have started the process. Over the next week or two things are going to change. All these changes are going to take a couple of weeks to get in place. So until it’s all done you might see some strange things on this site. Bear with me while I do this. The site will be much better when it’s completed.

  • I’m removing the tweet digests. These tweets can be found on Twitter and they don’t really add anything to the site.
  • I’m shortening up the list of categories. The new list of categories will be:
    • Me: About me.
    • Family: About our family.
    • Work: About my work.
    • Around: Issues around the house.
    • Media: Photos, Videos, Books.
    • Editorial: News, rants, and editorial content.
  • Each post is getting cleaned up. I’m removing any hard coded styles on photos and videos and using classes to size them instead. Tags are getting added to each post also.
  • To make things easier to update in the future, I’m removing my modifications from the theme and using plugins to replace the functionality. A list of the plugins I’m using are:
    • Disqus comments: The DISQUS comment system replaces your WordPress comment system with your comments hosted and powered by DISQUS. Head over to the Comments admin page to set up your DISQUS Comment System.
    • Executable PHP widget: Like the Text widget, but it will take PHP code as well. Heavily derived from the Text widget code in WordPress.
    • Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.
    • MyOpenID: MyOpenID plugin allows you to use your blog as your OpenID identity by delegating it to an external provide such as myOpenID, myVidoop, and claimID.
    • PuSHPress: PubSubHubbub plugin for WordPress that includes the hub
    • ShareThis: Let your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites.
    • Twitter Tools: A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter. Show your tweets in your sidebar, and post tweets from your WordPress admin.
    • Ultimate Google Analytics: Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site.
    • wp-cache: Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system.
    • WP Simple Adsense Insertion: A simple Wordpress plugin to insert Google Adsense into posts, pages, sidebars.
  • Even with these plugins, there are still things on the site that require me to modify the theme. Instead of modifying my new theme I’ve picked I’m going to use theme inheritance and put all the modifications in a child theme.