One of the things that I am going to be doing on this site is monthly updates on the backend of the blog.  It is in these posts that I will be talking about the plugins that I have installed, explain why I have each installed, any tweaks to the site that I may make.

I have a rather selfish reason to be doing this.  I have a habit of continously tweaking a site and not really keeping track.  By documenting everything that I do it will both slow me down, and teach you on what works and what doesn’t and more importantly why.

Since I just completed a major overhaul of the site and have moved hosts this post will not cover everything.  In subsequent Blog Updates I will do reviews of the plugins and talk about the advantages and disadvantages of them.

I am also thinking about a permanent blog brand that I will be developing over the next 6 months.  At the end of this time I will have a new theme designed that will work on top of the framework theme that I have installed now.

The Host:

Well I moved the site from my old host to ThisWebHost. I yelled out to Twitter and a couple of my followers suggested them. I have read as much as I could online about them and they seem to be an up and comer that is either going to grow huge or get bought up by one of the current big players.

I bought the smallest account that they have for this blog for now.  It is just a tester and if I like what I see then I will be buying larger accounts from them and moving my other sites.  This is not an insignifcant task, so I want to be sure that it is the right move so that I won’t have to do it again for a long while.

The Plugins:

• Akismet
• Google Sitemaps
• WordPress Mobile Edition
• WP Super Cache
• OIOpublisher Direct 2.0
• Pretty Link
• Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form
• Feedburner Feed Replacement
• Google Analytics for WordPress
• Twitter Widget Pro

So these are the plugins that I have installed and activated right now, a lot of them are self-explanatory for anyone that has been around Wordpress for a while, but they are all very basic and with the exception of OIOPublisher and WP Super Cache.  However not all of them need to be installed on every blog, in fact the only plugins that I install on all of my sites are the first 4.  These I will give a little more explanation.

Akismet:

Akismet is a comment spam plugin that comes right from the makers of Wordpress.  When it is installed it takes a look at every comment that someone makes on your site, compares it to a hug DB of comments, IPs, emails, etc and decides whether or not that comment is worthy on your site.

This plugin will save you hours of maintainence on your blog when you are approving comments.

Google Sitemaps:

This plugin is relatively self explanatory, what it does is create a Google friendly sitemap of your site that you can submit to Google using their webmaster tools.  It helps Google with finding the relevant information on your site and indexing what you want.

WordPress Mobile Edition:

This is a newish one to me that I have been using a lot more.  It takes your site and if it notices that your visitor is on a mobile phone it will output a page that is very light and vry easy to use on a mobile.

The importance that I see in it is that it allows the use of social networks to link your site that people may be using on their mobile.  All the major social networks have mobile programs and this allows your friends, follows, etc to click through to your site and not feel sorry about it.

WP Super Cache

This one may not seem that important to the small blog, but you never know when you are going to “go viral” and you want to make sure that your site can handle the load for as long as possible.  There was a couple of times over the years that I either got Stumbled hard or was linked to on Fark that my site died after a couple of hours.  Who knows how large of a lost opportunity that was now.  But I do know you don’t want that to happen to you.

I will review/explain the other plugins in future posts.  Keep reading here, add the site to your RSS reader, or follow me on Twitter to stay current on everything Bluenoser.

Cheers,

Jeff M