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.	Ajax Edit Comments	5.0.5	Ajax Edit Comments allows users to edit their comments for a period of time. Administrators have a lot more features, such as the ability to edit comments directly on a post or page. By The PluginBuddy Team.
3.	Akismet	2.5.5	Used by millions, Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and trackback spam. It keeps your site protected from spam even while you sleep. To get started: 1) Click the "Activate" link to the left of this description, 2) Sign up for an Akismet API key, and 3) Go to your Akismet configuration page, and save your API key. By Automattic.
4.	All in One SEO Pack	1.6.13.8	Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. Options configuration panel | Upgrade to Pro Version | Donate | Support | Amazon Wishlist By Michael Torbert.
5.	BAAP Mobile Version	2.0	The BAAP Mobile Version is a complete toolkit to help mobilize your WordPress site and blog. It includes a mobile switcher, filtered widgets, and content adaptation for mobile device characteristics. Activating this plugin will also install a selection of mobile themes by BAAP, a top UK mobile design team, and Forum Nokia. These adapt to different families of devices, such as Nokia and WebKit browsers (including Android, iPhone and Palm). If enabled, your site will be listed on mpexo, a directory of mobile-friendly blogs. Also check out the documentation and the forums. If you like the plugin, please rate us on the WordPress directory. And if you don't, let us know how we can improve it! By BAAP.
6.	BookLinker	1.0	Automate the creation of book links to IndieBound, Powells, Amazon, and WorldCat. By Michael Hartford.
7.	Comment Timeout	2.4.0	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.	Dagon Design Form Mailer	5.4	The WordPress plugin version of my secure php form mailer script By Dagon Design.
9.	Disqus Comment System	2.70	The Disqus comment system replaces your WordPress comment system with your comments hosted and powered by Disqus. Head over to the Comments admin page to set up your DISQUS Comment System. By Disqus .
10.	Easy Spoiler	1.6.2	Creates an attractive container to hide a spoiler within a post or page. Works in comments and widgets as well. Also supports clustering spoilers into groups. By dyerware.
11.	Events Calendar PRO	2.0.3	The Events Calendar PRO, a premium add-on to the open source The Events Calendar plugin (required), enables recurring events, custom attributes, venue pages, new widgets and a host of other premium features. By Modern Tribe, Inc..
12.	Exclude Pages from Navigation	1.92	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.
13.	FAQ-Tastic	1.0.16	Create and manage FAQs. A short overview is given on the help page. By John Godley.
14.	FD Feedburner Plugin	1.45	Redirects all feeds to a Feedburner feed By John Watson.
15.	FD Footnotes	1.3	Elegant and easy to use footnotes By John Watson.
16.	Follow Me	3.1	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.
17.	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.
18.	Jetpack by WordPress.com	1.2.2	Bring the power of the WordPress.com cloud to your self-hosted WordPress. Jetpack enables you to connect your blog to a WordPress.com account to use the powerful features normally only available to WordPress.com users. By Automattic.
19.	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.
20.	KB Advanced RSS Widget	2.8.02	Gives user complete control over how feeds are displayed. By Adam R. Brown.
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	2.4	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 3.3 and PHP 5.2+ to work. By Darren Ethier.
23.	Page Links To	2.6	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.
24.	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.
25.	Shareaholic | email, bookmark, and share	4.0.6.5	Shareaholic adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts. See configuration panel for more settings. By Shareaholic.
26.	Surveys	1.01.8	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.
27.	The Events Calendar	2.0.3	The Events Calendar is a fully featured event management system with multiple views, 3rd party integrations, and a slew of premium add-ons. By Modern Tribe, Inc..
28.	Theme Test Drive	2.8.2	Safely test drive any theme while visitors are using the default one. Includes instant theme preview via thumbnail. By Vladimir Prelovac.
29.	W3 Total Cache	0.9.2.4	The highest rated and most complete WordPress performance plugin. Dramatically improve the speed and user experience of your site. Add browser, page, object and database caching as well as minify and content delivery network (CDN) to WordPress. By Frederick Townes.
30.	WordPress.com Popular Posts	2.5.2	Shows the most popular posts, using data collected by By Frasten.
31.	WordPress Backup to Dropbox	0.9.2	WordPress Backup to Dropbox automatically creates a backup of your entire website, including all files and its database, within Dropbox. By Michael De Wildt.
32.	WordPress Database Backup	2.2.3	On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Navigate to Tools → Backup to get started. By Austin Matzko.

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.