Hopefully I am closing in on the last of the more technical posts for this blog. I wanted to steer away from these topics as they tend to bore the average reader. On the other hand, I will add that technically-related writings tend to bring in a large reader base - especially if you write about something obscure or unusual. With the past two weeks of fiddling with this website, website setup and installation has been foremost on my mind so it is an easier topic for me to hit upon.
In setting up Mightyfunk for Wordpress, I wanted to extend the functionality of this website beyond what a default WP installation provides. At the time of writing, I am using the latest Wordpress version 2.5.1. The initial installation is great and does what 90% of all WP users intend to do. However, as I am an Internet junkie and a frequenter of commenting and reading bulletin boards often for technical reasons - there were a few things the default Wordpress setup lacked. Here’s a quick run-down of this install:
Initial setup:
- The website hosting company that I use is Total Choice Hosting. They provide a very low monthly hosting fee ($8 will get you more than you ever need.) The up-time is fairly solid and I very rarely experience any problems. If there are any problems with things being down or laggy, simply writing or calling them tends to fix things up in a snap. But I haven’t had to do that in about a year. Since using them, I’ve been very happy and have recommended their hosting services to any friends that want a site set up.It beats the days of when I used to serve my own websites using Apache over dialup on a dedicated home phone line (at the time, hosting a website would have run you $300+/month easily.)
- Total Choice Hosting comes with an excellent program in the back-end called Cpanel. Cpanel allows you to add email addresses, check your email, monitor traffic, monitor logs, set up databases, and etc. The ‘etc’ part is where things get interesting. Cpanel comes with an awesome extra called Fantastico. Fantastico allows the end user to pretty much set up any system or website with a click of a button. Essentially, I bought hosting for Mightyfunk and went to cpanel\fantastico\wordpress\ and clicked install. It was as easy as that. I had a basic, fully functional website/blog set up in under 30 seconds flat.As for Fantastico, I love it. As an old-school blogger and website designer, I used to have to manually hook applications (such as Movabletype) into a manually created database (typically using MySQL.) It was always such a painful command-line water torture process as databases weren’t my full-time occupation. Now it’s just a simple ‘click’ of a button.
Now if you’re using a different system and you can’t find any install scripts. Good freakin’ luck reading - I don’t want to help you. I hate manually installing that crap. It’s amazing what a few years will do.
Initial design:
- Google Wordpress Themes. Download one that you like. Put it in your Wordpress Themes directory and activate it through the Dashboard.
- Optional. Tweak the theme using the provided stylesheet. It’s not rocket science, although this is probably the most complicated part for people. If you’re not familiar with the basics of a CSS style sheet, you may have a little learning curve ahead of you although it’s not really that difficult - just a bit time consuming. do a web search for CSS or style sheets and you’ll come across loads of information.
- Optional. Tweak the graphics. I won’t go into detail here as it involves knowing graphics applications. I did a fair amount of tweaking - basically creating a website that looks like nothing else. Is it a pinnacle of my designs? Hell no. I just wanted a basic blog up and running. I spend enough time designing other crap and sadly enough, this was the least of my concerns here. I’m not out to design websites for a living any more so this is no showcase by any means. Website design pays shit and I can’t be bothered otherwise.
Installing plugins into Wordpress:
Do you find yourself missing something on your website or see another person’s site’s features that you like? Then it’s time to explore extensions. You can Google Wordpress Plugins or simply go to the Wordpress Plugins repository. It’s as simple as downloading an extension and putting them in your website’s plugins directory.
Here is a comprehensive list of the current plugins used in this Wordpress install after a couple weeks of tinkering and research. This list may change - by no means do I claim to be a Wordpress expert but I feel this list is very solid presently:
- Akismet - Built into WP 2.5. This plugin checks to see if comments are spam and prevents them.
- Cleaner Gallery - Fixes WP’s default gallery and provides valid XHTML code instead.
- FeedBurner FeedSmith - Redirects posts to Google’s Feedburner pinging service. This essentially tells other websites and users that a new post has been written by an author. It helps people find your website.
- Google Analytics for WordPress - This tracks where people are visiting from and what they are looking at on your website. It’s basically a traffic log from the folks over at Google.
- Google XML Sitemaps - This automatically creates a sitemap for your blog and updates Google to assist it in web searches. It’s 1000x better than having to code one by hand. In my opinion, this should come standard with a Wordpress installation as Google is the leading search engine.
- HeadSpace2 - Allows all your webpage titles to have their own per page heading. This assists search engines to better find your topics and writings through search engines. This should be included with a default Wordpress install.
- Highlight Author Comments - Allows you to easily visually distinguish an authors comments post from the rest of the crowd. This can be coded manually but this plugin makes life a lot easier.
- Image Caption Easy - Allows captions under your images based upon your description. This should be built into a default Wordpress install.
- Lightview Plus - A form of a ‘lightbox.’ Lightboxes are the cool effects you see on websites when you click an image, and a bigger picture pops up while greying out a background. I tried several different lightboxes, and this one came out on top for ease of use. There’s a couple things missing here which I hope a developer will code such as EXIF tags (camera/photo descriptions) into the popups.
- Post Teaser - The theme I created lacked a good ‘read more’ option at the bottom of every post so I use this instead. It may not be necessary under certain themes.
- Sociable - Ever see a ‘Digg this’, ‘Fark this’, or Technorati icon? These are feed rankings. If a person finds an article useful, they can click the icons and submit them to the place of their choice letting others know they found an article interesting or useful. This should be optionally built into a Wordpress install.
- Subscribe To Comments - This is a simple checkbox and form which allows readers to be alerted via email whenever someone replies to a topic or a comment. This should be a default Wordpress option.
- WP-PostRatings - A rating system which allows readers to simply check if they like an article or post.
- WP Captcha Free - Another form of spam security measures. It avoids Captcha altogether - those funky hard to read codes which people have to type in to make a post. Personally, I hate captcha as I have a hard time reading some of them myself. It would be nice if a form of this security measure was built into a default WP install as well.
- WP Paged Comments - Ever come across a post full of comments that keeps going on a single page? Well, it can be brutal on load times over a heavy traffic website. This plugin forces Wordpress to create additional pages if a certain number of comments are reached. An option such as this should be built into Wordpress.
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