Added some WP Plugins
PhotoMatt pinged me last night about whether I had installed the stats and spam plug ins yet and how they were working. (Gotta love personalized service like that. :-) ) I actually hadn't yet because I tried one plug in and couldn't get it working - turns out I had permission problems. Once I got those working, I went crazy checking out all the plug ins for cool stuff.
So far I've installed:
Very cool stuff! I'm impressed with how easy it is to install a new plug-in (once I got things working). I now have a lot of functionality I had in my old blog - the ability to see who's linking to me directly, and the popular search engine queries. I also added back my "recent comments" link at the top of my site so both you and I can keep track of updates. Cleaning up the Admin interface with the Tiger theme and cutting out the feeds on the main page make the whole system that much more usable. Happy, happy.
I have to figure out how to add back (or find) the comments feed. And I have to figure out how to disable the per-post comment feeds. I think that's a *really* dumb feature. Yeah, it'll let some people keep track of updates to a post's comments, but after a little while you'll have all these aggregators pinging your site for updates that never appear. It's crazy - after only a few weeks of using WordPress, I have over a two dozen aggregators pinging for new comment entries on old posts that will rarely, if ever, get updates. That's a great way to bring a site to its knees. I think the site barely keeps up with my RSS traffic as it is without adding more.
Lots of Bloglines folk have pinged me about the fact that my site isn't updating. Not much I can do. I've emailed them several times to fix their "jsession" bug (where they include Java Server Sessions as part of the URL) or to just delete every feed of mine except for the index.rss main feed. But that doesn't seem to happen. I've done redirects on old feed URLs so it should work. I think Bloglines is starting to get crufty - there's lots and lots of things that aren't working, and the site is starting to bog down like crazy. I was really hoping that the move to Ask Jeeves would accelerate updates and improvements, not stall them.
Anyways, the WP plug ins is very cool. I'm going to have to explore how to make an XHTML-MP mobile version of the blog as well using the plug ins. I found a WAP 1.0 version, but I'd like to get a WAP 2.0 version up and running instead. I'd also like to figure out a way of publishing my stats, as I constantly get people asking about them. Slowly but surely.
-Russ
Update: oooops. Right after I posted this, my Apache server went nuts and I got a WP error. I had to wack the process and restart. I have think that one of the plug-ins did this as it was working fine before. I disabled BAStats for now, we'll see what that does, if it happens again, I'll disable another one and continue from there... stay tuned.