Skuds’ Sister’s Brother

I have just heard that I will have my anorak confiscated if I don’t list all the technology which makes this whole thing possible, so here goes:

Wordpress
The obvious starting point is Wordpress v2.3.1 which does all sorts of clever things with MySQL databases so I don’t have to.

Plug-ins for Wordpress

• The Akismet plug-in which comes with Wordpress (upgraded to v2)
• Get Recent Comments displays recent post comments in the sidebar, with options to choose how many comments to display.
• Flickrrss displays photos from a Flickr RSS feed in the sidebar. It can take a feed frmo either a person or a group.
• Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam is yet another anti-spam measure I am trying. It is a sort of captcha program, but you can customise the list of words to use
• TDW Combobox Links is what lets me have drop-down lists for links instead of a three-foot long list of them in the sidebar.
• WP Super Cache is a caching program which is supposed to be even better than WP Cache
• Configurable Tag Cloud replaces the built-in tag cloud with something a bit better and a lot more flexible.
• WP-Footnotes adds a footnote capability¹
• EasyTube makes it easier to include embedded video clips from YouTube in a post.

And some plugins I have de-activated for various reasons.

• Bad Behavior is supposed to block attempts to inject spam comments, bu used to cause a lot of database problems for me.
• Spam Karma is a brilliant anti-spam plugin which looks complicated with loads of options, but will run straight out of the box.
• Comment Quicktags is what puts the toolbar on the comment form for doing html tags.
• Cryptographp adds a captcha test on comments. Worked like a treat at preventing spam comments. And then I upgraded to the newer version which is more complicated and I couldn’t be arsed to RTFM.
• Edit n Place lets admins edit posts from within the post rather than from the admin pages.
• Paged Comment Editing is one that helps the administrator manage comments.
  (De-activated as this function seems to be built in to WP 2.1)
• Subscribe to comments is what allows users get notified of follow-ups to their comments by e-mail. (De-activated as it didn’t agree with WP 2.1 when I upgraded to that. A new version is available which I will look into some time)
• WP-Cache adds a caching facility to Wordpress to speed up page loads for users.
  (Superceded by Super Cache)
• WYSI-Wordpress changes the Write Post to give you more options, like changing text colour. It includes Image Manager 1.4.1. Seems to work better under WP 2.1 than it did before, even though its not on the list of compatible plug-ins.
• Real WYSIWYG does the same sort of thing. When I get round to it I will see if I want to re-activate one of these.
• Wordpress Database Backup does on-demand backups of the database. Seems to work a treat. It was de-activated when I was trying to isolate problems and haven’t got round to re-activating it. Much simpler than going into the control panel.
• RAZ-captcha puts a captcha field on the registration screen. Downloaded by mistake as I thought it did comments. I don’t have a problem with spam registrations but if I ever do I will activate this in a flash.
• Cutline theme. Not a plugin, but another way to extend the basic Wordpress. Nice theme available in 3- or 3-column varieties, widget-friendly, and easily converted to do random header images.

AN Hosting
All this is hosted by AN Hosting of Chicago. Loads of file storage and effectively unlimited bandwidth for a low price. Support is very responsive - although they still can’t find out why I get such heavy spam sometimes.

eMachines
I do everything on a cheapo eMachines E4062 PC I bought from Comet. It has a DVD re-writer but I put the DVD ROM/CD Writer drive from my old PC in as well. I also put in the RAM from my old PC to take it up to 1Gb and the hard drive from my old PC as a backup for data, otherwise its plain off-the-shelf stuff. The screen is a 17-inch TFT.

Telewest Blueyonder NTL Virgin Media
This is how I connect to the Internet itself. I have a basic cable modem connection from Blueyonder, which they keep upgrading in speed, so it is now 4mbit/sec. This goes into a Belkin wireless router which I connect to by cat-5 cable, but the the other PCs in the house connect to it by a wireless connection. It has been pretty reliable except for a few weeks in early April 2006 when I kept losing the connection. That all went away after an engineer changed the modem from a WebStar one to a Motorola SURFboard modem.

The company acquired a Virgin branding, and the service stayed the same for a while, but started to go downhill a bit in 2007 at almost exactly the same time as the broadband support number moved to a premium rate number.

Fujifilm FinePix E550
The digital camera with which I take all the photos which break up the dull text sometimes. I used to have the A201 but moved to the E550 for its higher resolution, optical zoom and better handling of low light levels.

PhotoFiltre
Its a bit like Photoshop, but obviously with fewer features as it is freeware. PhotoFiltre is French, as the name suggests, but is available in English. I find it great for retouching photos, adjusting levels and contrast and the like, cropping, resizing and doing basic effects.

Photoshop Elements 5.0
A birthday present from the Mrs. I still have to explore the possibilities of this. So far only used to clear up red-eye.

FileZilla
I used to use WS-FTP for updating my websites, but I was using the really old free version of it, and when I started installing Wordpress I found it a bit limited and decided to try FileZilla, which turned out to be fantastic. As well as transferring files, you can manage directories easily, set permissions and do all sorts of other stuff. Its another piece of free, open-source software.

Notepad
I’m a bit old-fashioned. Apart from this blog, I have some other websites of varying complexity, but I still use Notepad for creating all the pages. It keeps me familiar with HTML, which comes in useful for editing the templates on Wordpress.

Flickr
I use Flickr to keep copies of my photos and share them. Its also handy for hosting larger pictures and is a sort of backup for me. Tagging facilities and sets makeit easier to find photos tha on the PC sometimes.

StatCounter
I use this to keep track of visitors to this site. StatCounter provides limited facilities for free, or you can pay for extra facilities. The free version holds a lot of historical visitor stats but only holds detail for the latest 100 visitors, like their IP address, where they come from, what link or search they followed to get here and so on. I choose not to, but you can make your StatCounter data available to everyone.

Firefox
The WYSI-Wordpress plugin was behaving strangely in IE6 and the blog often displayed without formatting until I refreshed it. Firefox cured all these problems for me and gave me loads of new features to play with, most of which I have not even discovered yet.

Montastic
This is a website which will monitor your own site and let you know if it is unavailable. You can do the same thing yourself by never sleeping or going out and staying at the computer all day, but its easier to use Montastic, and it is totally free.

Open Office
I am still finding my way around this, but so far it seems to be able to do everything I used to do with MS Office. The only difference is that its a lot smaller and its open source.

ZoneAlarm & AVG 7.5
Freeware firewall and anti-virus. So far they seem to be doing their jobs properly.

SyncBack
Yet another piece of freeware. This one can synchronise files in two locations. At the moment I use it to manage the files on my iRiver but I will set it up to manage data backup soon.

iRiver iHP-200
Several years old, but still doing everything I want. It won’t play videos or games, but I only want it for music. The only real problem is that I now have more music than will fit on the 20Gb hard drive. It made my daily commute on the train bearable when used in conjuction with some Koss ‘Spark Plug’ earphones which isolate external noise for me and prevent my music from disturbing other travellers. I used a little program called iHPTool to manage the database and playlists but for some reason that won’t work on the new PC so I started using iFish now. For a while I tried GXTranscoder to make smaller WMA copies of large MP3 files for on the move.

Audacity
Another bit of open source software. This is great for editing audio files. When I recorded old cassette tapes into mp3 files on the iRiver I used Audacity to chop the files into individual tracks and clean up some of the noise. It is also handy for cutting down mp3s into shorter samples or loops for ringtones.

HP Photosmart C5180
All-in-one copier/printer/scanner. Bought primarily for its scanning , but it produces very good results on photo paper, for which it has a separate tray. Built-in ethernet so it just plugs into the hub and the rest of the family can use it without having to turn my PC on.

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