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This blog is built on WordPress and hosted with JustHost. I’ve been happy with both since moving my blog here from Blogger in September 2009; it was relatively easy to combine the several blogs I had there into this one. The Blogger to Wordpress plugin is helpful here for sending people from the original blogspot URLs to the corresponding posts here.
The blog theme is a tweaked version of Bito 1.0.1 by Tommy Wang. The background is snokeh, a shot I took out my apartment window in December 2008. The mobile version of the site, which is loaded by default when you view it on a smartphone, is the default theme of WPtouch iPhone Theme.
Widget plugins in the sidebar currently include: Dingshow for displaying an Identi.ca feed (buggy, but better than nothing); Twitter for WordPress for a Twitter feed (very good); and the excellent Get Recent Comments. I’ve tested out a number of other widgets, but the well-designed widget that does just what I want it to is rare. For displaying Flickr photos in the sidebar, none of the widgets can beat the standard Flickr badge, which I’m using now. For linking to my profiles on other sites, I haven’t found any I like well enough to use; Find Me On has potential, but it’s hard to add sites that aren’t included by default (I want to include thesixtyone and various wikis) and it has some serious bugs.
The best general Flickr gallery plugin I’ve found is Flickr Gallery, which is in use on the photography page.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, which generates the “possibly related posts” at the end of each blog entry, is quite good. Subscribe to Comments, which lets commenters opt-in to email notification about replies, seems nice and simple.
Behind the scenes, I’ve found these plugins useful: Google XML Sitemaps, Google Analytics for WordPress (for in-depth traffic analysis), WordPress.com Stats (for simple, integrated traffic monitoring), Robots Meta, Redirection, and Login LockDown. Akismet does a great job screening out spam comments.
Design suggestions, compliments, and criticism are welcome.