2015 Update: You can safely ignore pretty much everything on this page, as it’s basically all criminally outdated now. It does show a kind of snapshot of what things were like around here back in 2006 or 2007, perhaps. It’s still WordPress, so that part remains true. The blog is almost as old as WordPress itself (less than a year younger) and has been running on that platform the entire time.
This site is powered by WordPress using a custom theme built from scratch for this site. When I say “from scratch” I mean to say I “borrowed” a lot of ideas. The calendar graphics are copies straight out of the WordPress Jakarta theme, which is a beautiful design but didn’t convey quite what I wanted. The map is an ancient version of Asia Minor — I located this and the book image in the header thanks to Google’s image search. A few tweaks in The GIMP, which also did all the hard work in creating the text images for the header, as well as the translucent image which forms the background for the content portions of the site (if you’ve got an older browser you’ll see it as a solid colour, but really it’s semi-transparent). That colour and the link text colours are actually drawn out of the map in the background image. The background image tiled behind the title headings in the sidebar is a selection from an image of Guinness…. so in the relatively unlikely event that it ever occured to you that the colour is the exact same as the head on a well-poured pint, you’d be right. The background image I use to denote the beginning of a block quote is nabbed from someone else’s blog theme and once I remember where I got it, I’ll post a better credit here.
Plugins currently in use:
- BDP Referral Tracker (I have the output hacked into my WordPress Dashboard)
- Category Visibility
- Favatars (Nabs a site’s favicon for use as a comment avatar if people include a url when posting)
- Referrer Bouncer (anti-spam; mainly since WordPress 1.5 I rely on my word lists)
- Post Teaser (WordPress supports this already, but this plugin automates it with a customizable “more” line)
- Recent Comments (Several useful plugins from this source)
- StatTraq (a fairly common stats tool)
- Subscribe to Comments
- Related Posts Link (Links related posts or posts in a series)
The Technorati tag links which comingled with with the WordPress category tags that follow each post are not a plugin per se, but a few lines of php hacking inspired by Justin Baeder. The section in my template looks like roughly this:
<!-- Recreated Metatdata Section -->
<p class=alignright floatright"postmetadata">
<span class=alignright floatright"technorati">
<a href="http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&fc=1&url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Search Technorati for links to this post">Inbound links</a>
| Tags:
<?php foreach((get_the_category()) as $cat)
{ echo '<a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/' . $cat->category_nicename . '"
title="Search Technorati for posts tagged ' . $cat->cat_name . '">
<img src="/images/technorati.gif" alt="Technorati Logo"></a>
<a href="/wordpress/index.php?cat='. $cat->cat_ID . '"
title="More posts from the ' . $cat->cat_name . ' category">' . $cat->cat_name . '</a>'; } ?>
</span>
<strong> | <?php comments_popup_link(__('Leave a Comment'), __('One Comment'), __('% Comments')); ?></strong>
<?php edit_post_link(__(' | Edit This')); ?>
</p>
<!-- End Metadata Section -->
Other non-plugin or standalone tools I use include Webalizer, BBClone, and a standalone trackback.
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