Technology, Upgrades, Updates

I’ll start by stating that a fix I made to the ngGallery plugin for WordPress no longer applies, and will actually break your editor window a tiny bit. If anyone did that, undo it. Someone at the ngGallery place fixed it.

With that out of the way, I figured I would list off the plugins I’ve currently gotten running along with validation as to my use of them. So here is the list (thus far):

• AdSense Manager – This baby makes handling, inserting, and the all around management of my Google AdSense advertisements. It allows for me to easily change the styles of the ads (of which I can create an unlimited combination therein) as well as insert them into my posts with little to no effort. Easy to set up and totally worth it.
• Category Cloud Widget – An elegantly simple plugin that allows me to show my categories displayed in a sort of cloud on my sidebar. Many people display these using tags as their cloud feed. I felt that I’d have too many cloud items in there and so I opted for this instead. Maybe one day I’ll swap ‘em up but until then I have this.
• Cryptographp – This plugin is actually disabled at the moment, though I had it running for a while and works like a dream. The idea is that it can stop spam-bots from commenting in your blog by requiring the user to enter a series of characters that are dynamically generated. Works well, I just turned it off for now.
• Google Analytics for WordPress – Simply put, this takes all the hard work out of adding JavaScript to each post as it does it for you. If you are wondering what Google Analytics are, it is a very impressive site statistics management system. Even better is the fact that it’s free, and if you sell ads with Google, it ties in with that as well.
• Hello Dolly – This is a default plugin that recites lines from the song in WordPress. What can i say? i like it
• NextGEN Gallery – A very impressive image gallery system. It allows for the management of images, galleries, and albums. It has additional functionality to display galleries as a flash-based slideshow, and uses some crisp JavaScript to handle the imagry (LightBo, ThickBo, etc). On top of all that it has a wide variety of customization options, and even comes with a sidebar widget to display images from your gallery (this is a separate plugin that I do not have enabled). For the record, this is the same plugin I use for all my posting images, as well as the wallpapers and Photos section.
• Share This – This plugin adds the ability for the end user to share your post on a variety of sites such as Digg and del.icio.us. No interface built into the back-end, which makes me a bit sad. Maybe in a later release.
• Twitter Tools – A plugin that integrates Twitter into your WordPress blog. The end result for this gives you options to create digest blogs of all the tweets you’ve made throughout the day, create tweets when you post, and display your tweets (or current tweet) on your site. I used the custom php portion of it to add a custom Tweet feed to the top of this site. It also allows you to write tweets from your WordPress site, allowing greater ease of use and less site-hopping.
• Smart Update Pinger – This plugin makes sure WordPress doesn’t ping my list of services every time I edit a post. And considering my spelling ability, that’s a lot of pings.

As you can see with the last item there, I have become a part of the Twitter community. What this is is a sort of micro-blog wherein you simply answer the question “What are you doing?” With the added plugin, updating this is fairly simple, though i have noticed that even though I’ve added a new item the plugin does not get it automatically. This indicates to me that it’s cached in some way. I’ll have to see if I can tweak that. I figure it’s a neat way to possibly generate traffic, and it can’t hurt to try and get out into the interweb communities more.

My friend Bart recently brought up the idea of fonts in coding, and what people use. He was flat out disgusted with my choice of “Verdana, 8px” not understanding why I generally choose it. The fact is with the small font i can simply see more code on the page at any one time. My workstation has a monitor that is flipped on its side, allowing me to have a resolution of 1024 x 1280 that I use for coding and branding purposes (1024 width).

I did realize that it is not a monospaced font, and after thinking about it I came to the conclusion that he was probably well-justified in his font-racism. I reviewed the font he uses, and I gotta say that it’s pretty slick. As a result I’ve swapped up for “Inconsolata, 10px.” I also got my hands on the new Komodo Edit 4.2, which I’m going to try out as my source editor to see if it can possibly replace EditPlus as my main IDE. I will state that I work with VS.Net practically all day, so this is more on a personal level.

And to end things off I will point out that I have been making subtle changes to the sites layout to get it where I want it. It seems to be coming along nicely.