Blog Tweaks

I can’t believe how many options there are with WordPress. I am very impressed.

I have spent pretty much all of my spare time this past week tweaking and re-tweaking this site. I thought that I would share my configuration as of today and give credit to those who deserve it.

THEME:
I have decided on the theme Pixel 2.0.1 By Sam over at samk.ca It seems to be the best layout and look that I’ve found yet for my purposes. Since I like this so much I have also downloaded Motion 1.0.4 and Function, but haven’t had time to play with them yet.

WIDGETS:
The hasn’t been enough time for me to really get deep into the world of widgets. There are just so many and the descriptions for a lot seem very similar so I need to take a day and just play around with what is out there. The search cloud that you see to the left is WP-Cumulus with the primary author Roy Tanck I love how this looks on the blog. It’s actually the best tag cloud that I’ve seen anywhere. My only complaint with this widget is that I could not change options from the settings page, but instead had to make my tweaks (size, speed, etc) on the widgets page. Not really that big of a deal once you figure out that the settings page doesn’t work. The only other widget that is in use as of today is the twitter feed at the bottom. That was a simple cut and paste from the Twitter Widgets Page.

PLUGINS:
I have tried so many plugins that I was getting nervous about how things would be impacted by installing, activating, deactivating, and deleting as much as I did. I’m sure that I’m not done yet, but I feel pretty happy about my setup at this point. I will provide a complete list of what I have active below:

1) Ad Integration by ThaSlayer. This is a very easy to use implementation for pretty much any advertising requirements. I have no real aspirations of making any money off of advertising on this site, but I wanted to at least have a better understanding of what it takes to get ads onto a blog. On the other end I set up a Google AdSense account and I was up and running the same day I installed the plugin. Everything works beautifully. I haven’t yet figured out how to get the ads out of my main content into the right rail, but I’ll figure that out at some point.

2) All-in-One SEO Pack by Michael Torbert. I checked out a few of these SEO options and this seemed the easiest to install / use. I’m not sure how to tell if it’s working for me yet, but it’s only been a few weeks.

3) Digg Digg by Yong Mook Kim This is the best looking of these social buttons apps. Easy to install and customize. I really wish I would have searched for this plugin first instead of trying to pick up the code for the buttone independently … would have saved me a lot of time.

4) Facebook Connect by Adam Hupp I never imagines it would be so easy to connect my blog with facebook. The instructions were great, even for someone like me who likes to try and just turn it on first to see shat happens. The few points where I wasn’t sure what to do, the instructions and options page were intuitive enough to allow me to work through what probably should have been somewhat frustrating.

5) Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachold I’m not sure that I actually need this plugin with the All-in-One SEO Pack installed, but it sounded different enough that I thought it could be useful.

6) Ultimate Google Analytics by Wilfred van der Deijl With one touch of the button I was able to connect to Google Analytics. I was surprised how easy it was to get a Google Analytics account and transfer the needed info into this plugin. Literally, within 5 minutes I was up and running. Now I just need to figure out how to get some traffic to the site!

7) WPtouch iPhone Theme by Dale Mugford & Duane Storey Once again, this is a true turn-key solution. After activating, I was able to visit the site from my iPhone and immediately the touch version was able to detect the mobile platform and serve the mobile version as default. It also has a quick button at the bottom allowing users to toggle back and forth between the mobile and full versions of the site.

And that takes us to today. I’m sure that I’m not done. This seems like the kind of project that can evolve into a hobby that is never really done. At some point I want to take a look at what other people are doing on their sites and pick up some best practices.

In the meantime, I’m pretty happy with my setup.

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