Place of Stuff

Ever wondered how I get the site to do any of the things it does? Mmm, me too. The joy of Wordpress (really, most decent blog engines) are the plugins you can use to make your blog do a variety of tricks. Some of the things here are hand-coded, which is a good way of saying “found and copied and tweaked“, but the vast majority are done via plugins: small programs, often one page of php scripting, which add to the functionality of the blog.

I know who the coders are, because I found and downloaded the plugins, but you may not be aware of them. So this is my “credits” post for the people and the tools that make this site work.

Firstly, mine host, Drew very kindly offered me server space and did all the backend bits like setting up the SQL database and configuring everything so that this site is even visible – Thank You Drew. Secondly, thank you to Srini G for the Fluid Blue theme I use here. I’ve seen other sites use it (including Srini’s own) and, at first, I was a bit miffed that I wasn’t a unique snowflake but frankly it’s such a clean and attractive theme I’m surprised more people don’t use it. Srini also helped with suggestions when I had problems with formatting. So Thank You. And thanks to Hari for suggestions for fixes when I broke this place. Thank You Hari.

And now the list:

Spam Protection

• Bad Behaviour – this plugin blocks access from automated spam bots
• Comment Referrers – when I receive email notification of a comment, a section of the email tells me where the commenter found my site. Another layer of protection against spammers.
• Digital Fingerprint – detection of scrapers. Adds a piece of text that is only seen outside this site and is searchable.
• Email Shroud – Prevents email address harvesting by replacing mailto: references in anchor tags with obfuscated form.
• PHP Contact Form – *new* This replaces the obfuscated email address in the header with a customisable and secure contact form
• Spam Karma 2 – I have used this for quite a while. Does what the name implies – assigns karma levels to posts and traps spam. First installed when Akismet was playing up.

Commenting

• Browser Sniff – detects your browser and operating system and puts icons under the submitted comment
• Commentluv – places a link at the bottom of your comment to your latest blog post
• Comment Quicktags -Reloaded – *new* This adds the little buttons at the top of the comment writing text box to allow for easy html insertion.
• Gravatar – the little pictures next to the comments. If you have a Gravatar account, your image shows up.
• WP AJAX Edit Comments – *new* as the name implies, this plugin allows commenters to edit their plugins within a timescale.

Site and Writing Plugins

• Anarchy Media Player – suggested by Corey Thompson, this alows insertion of a variety of media to any post.
• Feedburner Feedsmith – allows Feedburner to create stats to track subscribers. Useful for high traffic sites, unlike this one.
• Google XML Sitemaps – this is the tool that generates the site map for this site.
• More Paragraphs – the plugin that creates the “Continue Reading ……” link for posts of more than 3 paragraphs (number of paragraphs is configurable).
• Similar Posts – generates the list of posts from the archive that relate to the post you are reading at the time. Requires Post-Plugin Library.
• Wikipedia NoFollow – *new* searches for links to Wikipedia.org, and adds a rel=”nofollow” tag if necessary. With Wikipedia discussing adding advertising to their site, do you really want them to be able to generate traffic from your site without generating traffic to yours? This redresses the balance.

I would like to thank John P for this post – I was reading his site and found his post on his own plugins. He is a perfessional, so it seemed like a good idea to follow his lead. And it’s always a good thing to thank the people who help you.  So thank you all for the help you have provided and the work you have put in to create things for me to use.