You Got Here How??

Image via Wikipedia

It occurs to me that I haven’t done a navel gazing post in ages. Which means we are long overdue one and, because it’s both my site and my rules, you have to sit through another one. Lucky you.

So, how people got here. Filthy minded people are still my primary resource. Welcome perverts and teen boys. Yes, Lesbians is still the number one reason to come here. Despite there being no lesbians on this site (as far as I know – if I am wrong, welcome Lesbians!)

Incidentally, if you did arrive here looking for helpful advice on working out your sexuality, I’m sure you’ve realised by now that this site is not that sort of site. I would advise you to look up your nearest LGBT organisation (I’d suggest trying “LGBT <your town>” or “LGBT <your country>” via your favourite search engine). There is no reason to make that decision on your own and a good local organisation can help you deal with the issues and help you come through it with minimal issues. There is no rush to come out immediately and they will help to do so in the right time and at the right pace. They can also put you in touch with people who can tell you what happened to them when they did it and help you make an informed decision.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Because I hold you all in such high regard (*pause, gesture, sincere forehead*) I’m going to come clean about a few things.  Things you need to know about. (*pause, gesture, furrowed brow*).  Some of these things you will have noticed immediately, others you may not have (*look around, meeting everyone’s eye, sincere half-smile*).

My all-knowing dashboard kindly informed me that WordPress 2.7.1 was out and that I had to upgrade.  No problemo, thought I, piece of cake.  The 5 minute install and upgrade instructions are very clear and a complete idiot can follow them and do it all.  Right?  Guys?  Yeah, I got distracted.  Only for a second but it was enough.  I was ssh-ing and moving stuff with panache and then I realised, I had cunningly managed to overwrite the wp-content folder with a fresh one.  This is the folder that contains the theme (and any changes) and all the plugins.  So yeah, I am a true genius.

So there you are, a cautionary tale and all that.  Fortunately, it gave me the opportunity to make a few changes here.  Much of this is in the background, I was able to take out a bunch of plugins that no longer work and update a few others.  I also enabled IntenseDebate and it imported everything very quickly indeed this time – it will only really matter to you if you comment on other blogs that also use it.  SpamKarma2 has been sadly discontinued, so I have gone with the default Akismet.  There are a few other bits of functionality that I’m missing, but I’ll get that sorted.

Finally, and most obviously, you’ll see that I have a smallish (200×200) AdSense ad.  This is not my new money making scheme.  After seeing one of Dominic’s latest posts, I became curious as to what I would see on my own site.  You will, hilariously, see lots of ads for psychics and other snake-oil salesmen.  Here’s the deal, click the ads or don’t – this really is up to you.  I have a day job and everything and it pays well enough that I only need one paying job.  On the other hand, if you do click the ads and go through to these places, you will be making a psychic donate to an openly skeptical site.  As I said, the choice is entirely yours, there are no tip jar or donate buttons here and this was simply to see what comes up.

There may well be other changes and tweaks coming up, but these are the most obvious.

The Plugins I Use on this Site

Ever wondered how I get the site to do any of the things it does? Mmm, me too. The joy of WordPress (really, most decent blog engines) are the plugins you can use to make your blog do a variety of tricks. Some of the things here are hand-coded, which is a good way of saying “found and copied and tweaked“, but the vast majority are done via plugins: small programs, often one page of php scripting, which add to the functionality of the blog.

I know who the coders are, because I found and downloaded the plugins, but you may not be aware of them. So this is my “credits” post for the people and the tools that make this site work.

Firstly, mine host, Drew very kindly offered me server space and did all the backend bits like setting up the SQL database and configuring everything so that this site is even visible – Thank You Drew. Secondly, thank you to Srini G for the Fluid Blue theme I use here. I’ve seen other sites use it (including Srini’s own) and, at first, I was a bit miffed that I wasn’t a unique snowflake but frankly it’s such a clean and attractive theme I’m surprised more people don’t use it. Srini also helped with suggestions when I had problems with formatting. So Thank You. And thanks to Hari for suggestions for fixes when I broke this place. Thank You Hari.

And now the list:

Spam Protection

• Bad Behaviour – this plugin blocks access from automated spam bots
• Comment Referrers – when I receive email notification of a comment, a section of the email tells me where the commenter found my site. Another layer of protection against spammers.
• Digital Fingerprint – detection of scrapers. Adds a piece of text that is only seen outside this site and is searchable.
• Email Shroud – Prevents email address harvesting by replacing mailto: references in anchor tags with obfuscated form.
• PHP Contact Form – *new* This replaces the obfuscated email address in the header with a customisable and secure contact form
• Spam Karma 2 – I have used this for quite a while. Does what the name implies – assigns karma levels to posts and traps spam. First installed when Akismet was playing up.

Commenting

• Browser Sniff – detects your browser and operating system and puts icons under the submitted comment
• Commentluv – places a link at the bottom of your comment to your latest blog post
• Comment Quicktags -Reloaded – *new* This adds the little buttons at the top of the comment writing text box to allow for easy html insertion.
• Gravatar – the little pictures next to the comments. If you have a Gravatar account, your image shows up.
• WP AJAX Edit Comments – *new* as the name implies, this plugin allows commenters to edit their plugins within a timescale.

Site and Writing Plugins

• Anarchy Media Player – suggested by Corey Thompson, this alows insertion of a variety of media to any post.
• Feedburner Feedsmith – allows Feedburner to create stats to track subscribers. Useful for high traffic sites, unlike this one.
• Google XML Sitemaps – this is the tool that generates the site map for this site.
• More Paragraphs – the plugin that creates the “Continue Reading ……” link for posts of more than 3 paragraphs (number of paragraphs is configurable).
• Similar Posts – generates the list of posts from the archive that relate to the post you are reading at the time. Requires Post-Plugin Library.
• Wikipedia NoFollow – *new* searches for links to Wikipedia.org, and adds a rel=”nofollow” tag if necessary. With Wikipedia discussing adding advertising to their site, do you really want them to be able to generate traffic from your site without generating traffic to yours? This redresses the balance.

I would like to thank John P for this post – I was reading his site and found his post on his own plugins. He is a perfessional, so it seemed like a good idea to follow his lead. And it’s always a good thing to thank the people who help you.  So thank you all for the help you have provided and the work you have put in to create things for me to use.

Slight (Site) Changes

In the continuing spirit of openness, I thought I’d let you know of two (2) recent changes I made. Recent as in within the last hour.

The first is very obvious, you will see it as you enter the site: I have joined the ever growing ranks of people who make it easy to add stuff to social bookmarking sites. You will now see the “Share This” icon at the bottom of every post. And it looks like this:

I got this via the WordPress dashboard and from Alex King’s site. Simple to add and customise and it has a number of sites you can link to. If any social bookmarking site you use isn’t on there, leave a comment to let me know and I’ll see if it can be added.

Secondly, I added the Blog Voyeur plugin. This let’s me know what my visitor’s are looking at when they visit. There is a good reason for doing this – lately I have been getting a number of visitor’s who seem to have done an image search for this image. I have no real reason to assume that there is any problem with this, apart from massive paranoia, but I just want to see what’s going on. The plugin works using the cookies on your browser, so feel free to delete them after you visit if you feel a wee bit nervous about this.

And that’s it for this update. 2 (two) plugins added and otherwise everything is pretty much as it was. More posting to follow at some point…..