About this blog: thanking those who helped make it possible

I hope few of you noticed, but I implemented a change in blog theme this week.

I’ll be implementing a few small details in the coming weeks to optimize the speed of this thing (I am not pleased with my host, but there are a few things I can do about this myself as well).

Changes you may have noticed:

• There is now a tagcloud on the main page. This should be a help for new visitors and old timers alike find articles interesting to you.
• I’ve also created an archive page. (with the help of the Simply Yearly Archive plugin)
• The comments look way better now.
• All pages have navigation. So you can go from a specific blogpost to any category easily.
• I changed the place of the advertisements.

The rest of this post may be illegible for those of you who aren’t bloggers. So you can just ignore it.

My thanks goes out first of all to the wordpress blogging platform for making this blog possible at all. Second of all: My theme is based on the thematic framework, which will make updating this blog a breeze. Specifically, I adapted the childtheme Monochromatic to my personal use.

To test this blogtheme and make it work without messing up the blog for readers, I actually installed a server on my grandmother’s home pc [thank you grandma for letting me use it 🙂 ]. I’m quite impressed by that, but XAMPP made it doable.

Customizing thematic was a great learning experience, made easier by these tips.

Other plugins I’m using:

• All in One SEO pack
• Feedburner
• My RSS feed is enhanced with the better feed plugin.
• The Google Analytics for wordpress plugin helps me keep track of statistics. Thanks Yoast my famous countryman Joost.
• Joost is also responsible for the Meta Robots wordpress plugin, which helps my blog avoid duplicate content. (which helps in SEO).
• A great find and headache preventer is the wordpress automatic update plugin.
• Should my blog get suddenly popular, the wp super cache plugin will be there to help postpone the moment my server bails out. (I’m not very confident on that score, given how often my blog is down without major traffic surges. I’m seriously thinking about switching bloghosts).
• One of the first plugins I installed was the Yet Another Related Posts plugin, which automates the links at the bottom of each post.

A big thank is also due Narayan from Effect Works blogging consultancy for pointing me in the right direction on some of the plugins, pushing me to set up a host on this pc and helping troubleshoot. It’s thanks to him that I know for sure some of the problems on this blog are not my problem, but those of my host (which will remain unnamed for obvious reasons).