How My Design Came to Be and the Wordpress Plugins I’m Using
When Mel was asking me what I wanted my new design to look like, I basically said something like I want it clean, but I want it fun, because I’m trying to break out of my personal inclination towards boxes and lines and order and crispness. And I told her I like red, blue, and orange. The word “bubbles” or “lava lamp” may have come up somewhere in the process, I don’t even remember anymore.
And this is what she came up with. I could not have imagined this, but it is so perfect. It’s fun, it’s bright, the color palette is pleasing to my eye, it’s cute without shmoop.
So that’s the front end.
On the back end, as a Wordpress noob, I’m playing around with plugins. What I’ve currently got installed is a combo of recommendations and toys I’ve seen on other folks’ sites. Here’s what I’ve got installed right now:
- Akismet. Spam catcher. Default. No brainer.
- All in One SEO Pack. Seemed prudent.
- Feedburner Feedsmith. ‘Cause I wanted to use Feedburner for some nifty RSS feed tricks and tracking.
- flickrRSS. ‘Cause I wanted to put my latest Flickr photos in the sidebar.
- Facelift Image Replacement (FLIR). That’s how Mel puts the funky fonts in my headers.
- Google XML Sitemaps. Index my site! Please!
- Live Comment Preview. Because I think it’s neat, I like using it on other people’s sites, and it helps remind folks to close your damn tags.
- One of my big questions was what to do with my former linkblog. It was its own entity with it’s own funky formatting. The Sideblog plugin has saved my bacon. It’s even better than what I had before. Long story short, linkblog posts are in the sidebar, regular posts are in the main column, but they all show up together in the archives and the RSS feed. Brilliant!
- Simple Tags. Wordpress sucks at bulk editing of any kind, so I’m using a plugin to help with tag management.
- Subscribe To Comments. If I ever hit on a particularly hot topic and you want to follow it, you can.
- Twitter Tools. I have a presence on Twitter, Twitter has a presence on this site. (I won’t ever be posting the daily tweet digest; that’s way too redundant for most people.)
- Ultimate Google Analytics. Tasty, tasty data.
- WordPress Related Posts. I’m just curious to see what pops up. I can see an influence as I go back and add tags to the older stuff.
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4 Responses to “How My Design Came to Be and the Wordpress Plugins I’m Using”
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October 3rd, 2008 at 8:02 am
I like the new look, and I like when people mention what plugins they are using. It makes me wonder if I need to ad any more.
October 3rd, 2008 at 10:15 pm
I swore I’d stop at four. I think I’m up to 10 now.
October 5th, 2008 at 10:54 am
[...] by this list at the all-new Swirlspice, here’s a list of the WordPress plugins being used at this here Intarwebs [...]
October 5th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
It makes me wonder if I need to ad any more.
I’ve got as many installed, deactivated plugins as I have active ones. I’ve been trying really hard to think about what functionality I want and not just add stuff because I can.