This weblog started out a couple of years ago (first post retained from that era was July 2002 ) as a personal project, run under a beta of Blosxom, and published to my .Mac account. Most of the "early" posts from this era have been dropped, but I kept the ones relating to the projects I was/am working on.
Since then, it evolved to be hosted as a MovableType weblog, and ran on that software for over a year. It was switched back to Blosxom 2.0 in May 2004, and switched once more in September 2004 - this time to Wordpress (which is running the weblog now).
Wordpress is a great weblog management system. It's free, it's open source, it's mature (been around for a while in various versions), and has a vibrant community around it. All excellent things which can be invaluable to anyone running a weblog.
I've modified my Wordpress installation so that it varies from a "stock" deployment in the following ways:
- Kubrick theme by Michael Heilemann
- Easy on the eyes, with a non-specific default layout, which is highly customizable...
- NiceTitle by Stuart Langridge
- An amazing little javascript that adds contextual thingies to every link that has a title - no code required.
- Breadcrumb Navigation by Mark Shields
- Breadcrumb-style navigation. Shows current viewing post, search results, category, and author. Originally created by lennart (http://www.lennartgroetzbach.de/blog)
- Brian's Latest Comments by Brian Meidell
- This shows an overview of the articles and who commented on them. Based on Michael Heilemanns feverishly scribbled notes.
If you have Dunstan's Time Since installed, this plugin uses it for the title="" attributes on the comments and posts. - Search Hilite by Ryan Boren
- When someone is referred from a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or WordPress' own, the terms they search for are highlighted with this plugin. Packaged by Matt.
- Kitten's Spam Words by Kitten
- This plugin adds a "Delete comments as spam" button to the comments mass editing page. When used to delete unwanted comments, the email address, url, and IP address, and any links in the comment body, will be added to your spam words list. Future comments matching any of those items will automatically be moderated.
- Post Referrers by Jonathan Foucher
- shows the last referers to a specific post
- Related Posts by Alexander Malov
- Returns a list of the related posts. Please refer to the included readme for installation instructions.
- StatTraq by Randy Peterman
- This plugin should allow you to keep track of every hit on your public site (note that it does not track admin activity)
- Subscribe To Comments by Jennifer - Scriptygoddess
- Allows users(readers) to recieve notifications of new comments that are posted after their own.
- ThreeStrikesSPAM by Mark Ghosh (LaughingLizard)
- Deter Spammers with the three strike rule. If a comment has more than x (wordpress options) number of URIs, if they have no referrer AND if they have at least one match from your spam words, deny the comment from ever touching your blog. No muss, nothing to delete.
- Word Statistics by John Watson
- Computes Gunning-Fog, Flesch, and Flesch-Kincaid readability indexes about posts as they are edited for the purpose of improving their readability.