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WordPress Plugin Rundown

Adam Chernow has a blog on his own site, but tends to use Tumblr more… He also asked me what plugins I use.

chernowachernowa @raster WP is what I have my blog on right now… http://www.chernow.org/blog. What plugins are you running to do everything? →

So I thought I’d give the rundown of the current plugins I’m using. Many of these were added fairly recently. As a bit of history, I started this blog in 1997, first using UserLand Frontier as the publishing tool, and later using a Perl-based system I developed, until about 2005 when I moved to WordPress. I used my own custom theme since then and just within the past few months got around to fixing a few issues that prevented a few plugins from working properly.

So… here’s the list:

  • Akismet – stops comment spam. (From the fine folks at WordPress.)
  • Clean Archives Reloaded – used on the Archives page – it works. Not much more to say.
  • Comments with OpenID – it seems to work. Is there a better one? I don’t know…
  • Configure SMTP – my mail goes through an SMTP server.
  • Foursquare – provides a widget in the sidebar with my most recent check-ins.
  • Google XML Sitemaps – generates a sitemap.xml file used by Google to assist in indexing the site.
  • I Like This – provides a ‘Like’ button on each post. I didn’t want to outsource the ‘liking’ of posts to FaceBook, so I added my own thinking people who didn’t want to leave a comment might use it. (Almost no one uses it.)
  • Inline Tag Thing – I use this on occasion when I go through old posts adding tags. I hacked up my version a bit…
  • OpenID – supporting OpenID. (Thanks DiSo!)
  • Subscribe To Comments – pretty basic functionality that should be included with pretty much any blog nowadays. (Even though everyone says “email is dead.”)
  • WordPress.com Stats – added recently, just testing it out. I go on these kicks where I keep a close eye on stats, and then I completely ignore them for months at time.
  • WordPress Gravatars – adds Gravatar avatars to comments.
  • WP Simple AdSense Insertion – I’ve been experimenting with adding ads to old blog posts that get a lot of views. We’ll see how it goes.
  • WP Super Cache – great caching plugin to speed up page delivery. (I even donated some cash for this one!)
  • WPtouch iPhone Theme – provides a more mobile-friendly version of the site.
  • XRDS-Simple – I think the OpenID plugin required this to work properly…

I am by no means a WordPress expert (though I know a few!) and this is just the current snapshot of what plugins I’m using here. As I said, some have been added pretty recently, or I’m sort of “test driving” them for a while.

(I’d love a BarCamp session talking about WordPress, and it’s plugins, and overall best practices…)

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Developer Perspective

Swirly

I’ve come to realize that when I think about some tool I want to build, it’s typically driven by that “scratch your own itch” idea, where a developer does something because they want to solve their own problem. You’ll most often hear this idea attributed to open source software. Often my ideas come about when I think about who controls my data, or the software that I use. I tend to work towards maintaining my own freedom.

But there’s a whole other side… There are developers who develop something, and it’s not because a client hired them to, but because they think it’s a great idea, and sometimes they do follow the “scratch your own itch” idea, but they also think there’s a great money making opportunity worth exploring. Some developers within this realm are fine with creating something, and either selling it off, or letting it die if it “doesn’t work” or doesn’t become popular.

I’m not suggesting that one idea is better or worse than the other, it’s just an observation. I’m really interested to hear what others think…

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The Dumbing Down

The Dumbing Down

(consider it cc:by)

“I sometimes feel that in our quest to make things easier for the dumb people, we’ve made things harder for the smart people.”

I know that making things simple and easy to use is a good thing, but when it takes options away from the people who have great ideas, that’s not good. The closing and locking and restricting in the name of “progress” or “quality” is often a lie, and it’s one I really don’t like to see

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BarCampMadison: KidsCamp

BarCampMadison The idea of KidsCamp is to have kid-friendly activities within a BarCamp event. Since BarCamps are often on the weekend, some of the people who attend have children, and may prefer not to abandon them in favor of BarCamp, so are seeking ways to get them involved. There’s also the idea of getting kids interested in technology, and how we could foster such a thing.

At BarCampMadison3, Scott Fradkin led a discussion about this topic. I sat in on it, as did Bob Waldron (and at least one other person, though I didn’t get his name.) We talked over the idea, and Scott got “elected” to explore it more and try to do something for the upcoming BarCampMilwaukee5.

Here is the audio from the session. (There’s a part in the middle of this audio file where the fire alarm went off. We had to leave the building for 10 minutes during that time. I cut that out because it was most unpleasant. If the topic seems to veer in one direction quickly, that is probably why.)

You can also download an MP3 file if you’d like. (And for our freedom loving friends, enjoy an Ogg file.)

(Related: See the mention of BarCampMilwaukee2 and “Popsicle Sticks 2.0” in this post.)

Also, if you want to get all of the audio automagically downloaded podcasting style, subscribe to the feed. I’ll add in more BarCamp stuff as I get it all edited and published.

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What is “mostly open source”?

I read a description of a piece of software and someone used the phrase “mostly open source” which I found interesting… So I asked the following question via Twitter…

How do you decipher the phrase “mostly open source”?

cruiskeencruiskeen @raster related to “a little bi pregnant” →

cjibocjibo @raster 50.1% meaning the rest is crap code →

gregtarnoffgregtarnoff @raster They started using open source code, until they got to a point where using it meant they couldn’t make money off it. →

genehackgenehack @raster I read that as “we have no idea what we’re saying but think this advances our agenda” →

mattressmattress @raster You can alter the parts that are superficial →

tomhenrichtomhenrich Partly super-uber-top-triple-secret. RT @raster: how do you decipher the phrase “mostly open source”? →

I know I’ve spent time in the past arguing what constitutes “open source” and I probably won’t do that here again. At least not right now. I mean, I figure if you make your code available under an open source license, then it’s open source. There’s a whole series of follow-up questions such as: Are you a good steward of the code? Do you manage the community? Do you accept code from others and roll it back into the project? Those could all be considered parts of being a good “open source citizen” but really, the code, available under an open source license, is what probably makes something open source.

(In other news, the tweet quotes included with this post are something I’m working on to make it easier to reference tweets back on my own blog. I’ve wanted a tool similar to this for years now and haven’t seen one that does what I want. I’m sick of just using screen shots and typing things into the alt tag. There’s got to be a better way, or I’ll try to make one.)