Entries From 'website'

Favorite Plugins

…just another list of WordPress Plugins…

The difference is this is my list ;)

These are the plugins that I’ve come to love and use on this site and/or one of my other sites.

I have to comment though that I don’t think I’ve used one of these without some sort of code modification, tweaking and customizing. Not to say they wouldn’t work - I just always want something a tiny bit different than what I find.

In no particular order…

  • Adsense-Deluxe: Place Google AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts. By Acme Technologies.
    note: no tweaking required
  • Exec-PHP: Executes code in your posts, pages and text widgets. By Sören Weber.
    note: no tweaking required
  • NextGEN Gallery: Photo gallery. By NextGEN DEV-Team
  • Now Reading: Allows you to display the books you’re reading, have read recently and plan to read, with cover art fetched automatically from Amazon. By Rob Miller.
  • Popularity Contest: This will enable ranking of your posts by popularity; using the behavior of your visitors to determine each post’s popularity. You set a value (or use the default value) for every post view, comment, etc. and the popularity of your posts is calculated based on those values. By Alex King.
  • Dagon Design Sitemap Generator: Generates a fully customizable sitemap By Dagon Design
  • Quotes Collection: Quotes Collection plugin with Ajax powered Random Quote sidebar widget helps you collect and display your favorite quotes. By Srini G.
  • Random Image Selector: Selects a random image from a specified folder, and provides By Keith Murray. note: if you are not using NexGEN - this is a perfect, simple random photo generator.
  • Event Calendar: Manage future events as an online calendar. Display upcoming events in a dynamic calendar, on a listings page, or as a list in the sidebar. You can subscribe to the calendar from iCal (OSX) or Sunbird. By Alex Tingle.
  • Sobek`s Posts in Category: Displays a list of the posts in one or more categories in virtually any way you want. Lukasz Sobek.
  • My Category Order: A Wordpress plugin to finally let you set the explicit order of post categories By froman118.
    note: In the versions I originally played with, “My Category Order” and “Fold Category List” did not play nice together without serious modification. Unless updates have changed this - I recommend one or the other
  • Fold Category List: Provides PHP functions to display a folding category tree By Rob Schumann.
    note: In the versions I originally played with, “My Category Order” and “Fold Category List” did not play nice together without serious modification. Unless updates have changed this - I recommend one or the other


My philosophy on donations for plugins….


I will donate based on few things:

  • Did it accomplish what I wanted and now running on one or more sites?
  • Does the author have a history of keeping the plugin updated to the latest WP version and addressing bugs in a timely manner?
  • Is the documentation provided by the author sufficient and valuable?

If the answer to these questions is “yes” and there is a donate button - I happily give a little.

How much?
Well that too depends.
Depending on the value of the plugin to me and the amount of trouble (if any) I had customizing it, anywhere from $5-20USD

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Productivity Found in Procrastination

In my procrastination of finishing up my own site (see my list of things to do on my site), and being motivated by my recent rides, I did a complete redesign of another site I started for a cycling friend a couple years ago.

So for the last couple weeks, in my spare time, I’ve been working on a much cleaner, user friendly, database run site redo for Cycling4fun.com

The site went live on Friday the fifteenth, but ironically also now has a list of things to finish up. :roll:

I went from this….

old site index old site training

to this….
(click on the thumbnail to go check out the new site)

new site

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Site Redesign

I decided as my ‘end of the year’ resolution, to finally redesign my very outdated personal site. I started once in 2005 but was distracted by other projects and life in general.
Felix’s recent redesign made me realize how sadly outdated and neglected my personal site had become. When I started my 2005 redesign, I took a lot of info off line and since I never finished it never came back.
A lot has happened in the past couple years so after my launch on Jan 1 2008, I will strive to catch up with the content.
Hope you enjoy the new look! ;)

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