I know I’m a little late to the game, but I’ve finally added tags to my website. Oooo….

We also, if you are inclined to comment, have added some toys to the comment section. If you look right above the comment box, you’ll see a button with two arrows on it. Click that and you’ll get a bank of buttons that will make it easy to add formatting to your post. There’s even a dictionary.

Sorry…no spell check yet.

Well, I seem to have the whole posting by email straightened out. At
first glance, it didn’t seem like something that I needed for my site
to do, but I’ve recently come upon several uses for it. For instance,
I can now post from my cellphone to my website, which is useful in
those cases when I’m stuck in the airport without wifi. Handy, yes?

I also always pasted stories into gmail to convert them to plain text
before copying and pasting them to the website. Now, I can just paste
them in here and post straight away. Such convenience! Granted, it
took me half an hour to figure out why it wasn’t working, but now, now
all is golden and glorious.

I think. I’m about to hit “send” and see if it all really works.

My old theme was having trouble with the new WP install, nothing major, but I was annoyed with trying to track things down and figured, hey, why not try a new one. Your thoughts?

Edited to add: I’ve got the old theme back up, trying to figure out what’s causing the polaroid picture to not display.

Even further edited to add: So… when I moved the random image folder to the main directory it started working again. Got no idea why it wouldn’t work where I had it, but there you go. We are back to my old theme, which I’m now going to tweak to introduce some elements that I liked from the other theme.

I added a link over in the sidebar for “Random page” which will take you to a different random post every time you click on it. I thought it might make an easy way to browse.

Several people have asked me what plugins I use in my WordPress installation, so I thought I would do a list here for reference.

Nr.	Plugin	Version	Description
1.	µAudio Player	0.6.2	Converts links to mp3 files to a small flash player and a link to the raw file. Player by 1 Pixel Out. By Christopher O'Connell.
2.	Akismet	2.4.0	Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need an API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under "Comments." To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin. By Automattic.
3.	BookLinker	1.0	Automate the creation of book links to IndieBound, Powells, Amazon, and WorldCat. By Michael Hartford.
4.	BuddyPress	1.2.5.2	Social networking in a box. Build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community all based on the power and flexibility of WordPress. By The BuddyPress Community.
5.	BuddyPress Template Pack	1.0.2	Add support for BuddyPress to your existing WordPress theme. This plugin will guide you through the process step by step. By apeatling.
6.	Comment Quicktags +	1.1	Inserts a quicktag toolbar on the blog comment form. js_quicktags is a slightly modified version of Alex King's newer Quicktag.js plugin modified from original found here. By Dan Cameron.
7.	Comment Timeout	2.1.1	Automatically closes comments on blog entries after a user-configurable period of time. It has options which allow you to keep the discussion open for longer on older posts which have had recent comments accepted, or to place a fixed limit on the total number of comments in the discussion. Activate the plugin and go to Options >> Comment Timeout to configure. By James McKay.
8.	Comvatars	2.4	Shows avatar images on user comments to uniquely identify the author much like various bulletin board systems do. The Gravatars plugin by Skippy and the Favatars plugin by Jeff Minard must be installed and activated to achieve the full functionality. Please visit the plugin homepage for further documentation. By Sören Weber.
9.	Dagon Design Form Mailer	5.4	The WordPress plugin version of my secure php form mailer script By Dagon Design.
10.	Exclude Pages from Navigation	1.9	Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation. IMPORTANT NOTE: This will remove the pages from any "consumer" side page listings, which may not be limited to your page navigation listings. By Simon Wheatley.
11.	FAQ-Tastic	1.0.16	Create and manage FAQs. A short overview is given on the help page. By John Godley.
12.	FD Feedburner Plugin	1.42	Redirects all feeds to a Feedburner feed By John Watson.
13.	Follow Me	2.1	The Follow Me plugin is designed to allow users the ability to add links to their social media profiles in their blog. To get started activate and visit the Settings Page. By Brian Chappell @ Ignite Social Media.
14.	Google Ajax Search	1.003	Adds a Google AJAX Search box on your site. Example found here. Options include searching your site through Google Blog Search and/or straight up Google, a second search option is available that is perfect for flickr. Widgetized for your pleasure. MAKE SURE TO CONFIGURE your options and enter your API key. By http://dancameron.org.
15.	Gravatars	2.6	This plugin provides an administrative interface to control default gravatar options. Registered users can also (optionally) define local gravatar images that will override their gravatar.com default. Copyright 2005 Scott Merrill; Licensed under the terms of the GPL. By Scott Merrill.
16.	Hello Dolly	1.5.1	This is not just a plugin, it symbolizes the hope and enthusiasm of an entire generation summed up in two words sung most famously by Louis Armstrong: Hello, Dolly. When activated you will randomly see a lyric from Hello, Dolly in the upper right of your admin screen on every page. By Matt Mullenweg.
17.	In Series	3.0.12	Gives authors an easy way to connect posts together as a series. By Travis Snoozy.
18.	JournalPress	0.3.3	Mirrors your WordPress blog to any number of LiveJournal-based external journalling sites. Supports per-journal-per-post userpics and custom permission levels via the separate WP-Flock plugin. By Alis Dee.
19.	KB Advanced RSS Widget	2.8.02	Gives user complete control over how feeds are displayed. By Adam R. Brown.
20.	Library Thing widget	1.0	Adds a sidebar widget to display your LibraryThing widget By Chris Rose.
21.	My-Plugins	0.2	Displays all the plugins - just insert [my plugins] in post where you want to display a table of plugins that you use. Example here. By Matej Nastran.
22.	Organize Series	2.1.7	This plugin adds a number of features to wordpress that enable you to easily write and organize a series of posts and display the series dynamically in your blog. You can associate "icons" or "logos" with the various series. This version of Organize Series Plugin requires at least WordPress 2.8 to work. By Darren Ethier.
23.	Organize Series Publisher	2.1.7	Allows an editor to publish an "issue", which is to say, all pending posts with a given series. Until a series is published, all posts with that series will remain in the pending state. Credit really needs to go to Jonathan Brinley for his original Issue Manage plugin because all I did was modify it for use with series rather than categories. Also NOTE that this REQUIRES Organize Series to be installed or something could go wrong... By Darren Ethier.
24.	Page Links To	2.3	Allows you to point WordPress pages or posts to a URL of your choosing. Good for setting up navigational links to non-WP sections of your site or to off-site resources. By Mark Jaquith.
25.	Photopress	1.8.1	Photopress adds some image handling tools to WordPress, including a popup upload and browse tool, a random image template function, and a simple album. Installs and uses new database tables. Tested and working with WP 2.9.1. By Isaac Wedin.
26.	Photopress widget	1.8.1	Adds a sidebar widget to dispay random Photopress images. By Isaac Wedin.
27.	PollDaddy Polls	1.8.8	Create and manage PollDaddy polls and ratings in WordPress By Automattic, Inc..
28.	Random Quotes	1.3	This plugin allows you to embed random quotes into your pages. It also has a spiffy management tool in the administrative console. By Dustin Barnes.
29.	Random Redirect	1.1	Allows you to create a link to yourblog.example.com/?random which will redirect someone to a random post on your blog, in a StumbleUpon-like fashion. You can also specific in the URL `random_post_type` or `random_cat_id`. By Matt Mullenweg.
30.	SexyBookmarks	3.2.4.2	SexyBookmarks adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts. See configuration panel for more settings. By Shareaholic.
31.	Simple Tags	1.8	Extended Tagging for WordPress 3.0 ! Suggested Tags, Mass edit tags, Autocompletion, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Related Tags, etc! By Amaury BALMER.
32.	Subscribe To Comments	2.1.2	Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. Based on version 1 from Scriptygoddess By Mark Jaquith.
33.	Surveys	1.01.6	The Surveys WordPress plugin lets you add surveys to your blog. You can let the vistors take surveys and see the result from the admin side. By Binny V A.
34.	Theme Test Drive	2.7.5	Safely test drive any theme while visitors are using the default one. Includes instant theme preview via thumbnail. By Vladimir Prelovac.
35.	Twitter Tools	2.4	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. By Crowd Favorite.
36.	Twitter Tools - Bit.ly URLs	2.4	Use Bit.ly for URL shortening with Twitter Tools. This plugin relies on Twitter Tools, configure it on the Twitter Tools settings page. By Crowd Favorite.
37.	Twitter Tools - Exclude Category	2.4	Exclude posts in certain categories from being tweeted by Twitter Tools. This plugin relies on Twitter Tools, configure it on the Twitter Tools settings page. By Crowd Favorite.
38.	Twitter Tools - Hashtags	2.4	Set #hashtags for blog post tweets sent by Twitter Tools. This plugin relies on Twitter Tools, configure it on the Twitter Tools settings page. By Crowd Favorite.
39.	WordPress.com Popular Posts	2.4.2	Shows the most popular posts, using data collected by WordPress.com stats plugin. By Frasten.
40.	WordPress.com Stats	1.7.3	Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key. By Andy Skelton.
41.	WordPress Database Backup	2.2.2	On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Navigate to Tools → Backup to get started. By Austin Matzko.
42.	WordPress PDA & iPhone	1.2.8	This plugin helps the users to view your blog in a pda and iPhone browser. By Imthiaz Rafiq.
43.	WP-Footnotes	4.2	Allows a user to easily add footnotes to a post. By Simon Elvery.
44.	WP-Polls	2.50	Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress's blog post/page. WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers. By Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan.
45.	WP Ajax Edit Comments	3.02	The most powerful comment-editing solution for WordPress. Users can edit their own comments for a limited time, while admins can edit all comments. By Ajay D'Souza, Ronald Huereca.
46.	WP Super Cache	0.9.9.3	Very fast caching plugin for WordPress. By Donncha O Caoimh.
47.	Yet another threaded Comments plugin	0.6.5	This comment allows to have newly created comments relate to existing comments, so you can comment on a comment. This information allows to display the Comments in a hierarchical fashion (e.g. a Tree). By Joachim Praetorius (yatcp@organisiert.net).

Output generated by My-Plugins plugin by Matej Nastran.

It’s the simple things in life that make me happy. I love the idea of ReCaptcha, which stops spam and helps identify the text in hard to scan books, so I’ve been wanting to implement it on my contact form for awhile. Finally, today, I found Secure Form Mailer Plugin For WordPress by Dagon Design which does exactly that. It was easy to install and seems to work like a charm.

I uploaded to the new WordPress 2.5 last night and was aggravated to discover that my beloved crossposter was incompatible with the new version. Fortunately, my googlefu is strong and I found a hacked version of the plugin that works around the incompatibility issue. For those of you who also crosspost from WordPress, you can pick up the new version of the LiveJournal Crossposter plugin, here.

For some reason, since I upgraded to the new WordPress, I haven’t been getting notifications when people comment on posts. Could you help me out by commenting here? I’ll update this when I get it figured out.

Also, if you use the subscribe to comments feature, are you getting notifications?

Thanks!

Edited to add: Thanks to Jim Stitzel who told me to add wordpress@[mydomain] to my server. Miraculously that fixed it.

The subscribe to comments also seems to be working just fine.

Spending an hour after I get home from work to clean out a list of porn from my site is not my idea of a good time. It was code hijacking on an otherwise perfectly good plugin. The plugin is uninstalled. I’ve reinstalled WordPress and am now going to bed.

You’ll have to wait one more day to hear about the boat and the harpy.

Edited to add: The compromised plug-in seemed to be PodPress.

There is a lovely list of insults at Angry 365 Days a Year. I don’t think one should re-use these insults, but I do think that they will serve as a useful model for creating a classic insult of one’s own.

Some of my favorites:

“Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time in reading it.” –
Moses Hadas

“He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others.” –
Samuel Johnson

“He had delusions of adequacy.” –
Walter Kerr

“He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.” –
Billy Wilder

Oh happy day, I’ve been looking for a while for a Word Press progress meter that doesn’t require me to update the code all the time. Behold Deborah McDonnell made ProgressFly, which is available on her site, scribbling damselfly which does everything I could ask it to do. There’s an easy control panel for customizing the look of the meter and updating your wordcount. And the output is very clean and simple. See.

[pfmeter id=1]

If you use WordPress and want a wordcount meter, I highly recommend this.

Tobias S. Buckell Online » Blog Archive » Listen to a story of I read: Waiting for the Zephyr can be heard online for free at the Spoken Alexandria Project.

The story is narrated by the talented Mary Robinette Kowal of the Willamette Radio Workshop.