plugins Archives - THOMnottom

Apartment Fail

This is far from the funniest picture ever put up on FAIL Blog, but it might just be the coolest (at least to me):

Obviously it was taken in Hoboken, but those who have known me long enough should take a closer look. The storefront isn’t as recognizable since Hobos closed up and took their pink awning, but see that place behind the tree? That’s my old apartment. Well, the below my old apartment.

So kind of FAIL Blog to provoke a little nostalgia today (although the picture is originally courtesy of Hoboken 411). More importantly, they gave me an opportunity to test the Wordbook plugin…

Ohhh, shiny and new

In case you haven’t actually checked out this site outside of Livejournal or a feed reader, I switched out the theme again. As much as I liked Silhouette, it felt a tad too “professional” for me. I needed something with… I don’t know… some curves. And why did I start feeling this way? Because last month, Joen announced the release of version 1 of his Fauna theme.

Look at it! It’s glorious!

Not only is Fauna totally awesome in its sleek blackness (customizable by the way – I liked the dark version) but it immediately fixed a couple issues I never bothered addressing. It actually displays the tags on each post, plus you can navigate via links at the top of each post.

On top of that, I also finally installed Zenphoto – something else that Joen first brought to my attention (albeit about 2 years ago). You can check out the current meager beginnings of my photo gallery in case you haven’t found it yet – I’ll integrate it with my WordPress install soon enough. Populating it with photos of things other than my mug is a higher priority.

Now I’m just starting to play around with plugins, again. The photos in my last entry were added via ZenphotoPress, but I really want something that integrates that with a Lightbox functionality. Who knows, maybe 2008 will mark the year that I actually get this site organized again!

Beta Beta Beta

So in the past month I’ve upgraded WordPress three times thanks to the 2.3 betas – and yet I’ve only updated the website… what… once? Strike that, I’ve now updated it for a fourth time before I could even get out of this first paragraph. I’m beginning to believe that my writing career may never take off and I should get a real job…

Anywho, THOMnottom.com is now rocking the first release candidate of the next version of WordPress. Of course my main reason for deciding to take the plunge forward is the new built-in tag support. And, of course, my current theme does not show tags by default and I’ve yet to add tags to any posts. Then again, considering this is only my second post with that possibility (well, I had a bunch tagged before thanks to a plugin, but I wiped them all out), that’s not a big deal.

There have been a few other changes of late and I just thought I’d point them out. I now have a real Archives page once again. And much better than ever before, thanks to Justin Blanton’s Smart Archives for WordPress. Now you can easily scroll through the previous 850 posts I’ve written over the past 4+ years. Wait, 850?!?! I’m not sure if that’s totally awesome or totally lame, but that’s a big freakin’ number. I sure hope there’s something worthwhile in those archives.

I also started to close comments on older posts again. Akismet has crushed most of my spam problems (just check out the counter on the main page currently at over 25,000 blocked), but a few continued to slip by. While this didn’t bother me that much, an e-mail from my sister Kathleen made me realize that anyone subscribed to the comments on older posts would end up getting spammed through my site. That’s a big no-no. Thankfully I found James McKay’s Comment Timeout. Not only does it let you decide how long to wait until comments are turned off (currently set at 90 days), but it also lets you hold off on popular posts. So if I ever have 12 people comment on a single post, that one will stay open for an additional 90 days. That’s totally rad.

Hmm… I had a few other things. There’s a link back to my host Site5.com in case anyone is looking for a good deal (and excellent service). I decided to ditch the blinking one in favor of a more subdued look – because I’m clearly a subdued guy. Oh, and I started to write something lame for my About page. I really need to be inspired, because right now it sucks.

So, yeah, that was a lot of boring site stuff, but I needed to get it all out there before I could get back to writing about my boring life. Uh, welcome back to me…