my wordpress mods

This page outlines the modifications I’ve made to the WordPress stock install to turn it into librarian.net. This page is now in reverse-chronological order.

Added Comment Timeout to make my old posts close themselves after a certain amount of time to eliminate or lessen lots of spammy links on old posts.

Added EventCalendar plugin to try to keep track of my upcoming talks in the sidebar but I didn’t like it so I replaced it with ical-events which works directly from ical.

Used feed2js to pull in some sidebar feeds.

Ditched the Cutline theme in favor of the White and Clean theme that I have modified somewhat.

I installed Casey Bisson’s bsuite stats tool and got it working splendidly.

Ditched sociable. Switched to the Cutline theme, sightly modified. Got rid of a bunch of plugins I don’t use. Ditched all mailforms. I may have forgotten to mention that I use Challenge which helps keep spam down in my comments.

Added the sociable plugin so that people can post links to individual posts directly to del.icio.us, digg or co.mments.

I added a Google sitemap by using the Google Sitemap plugin.

I switched to a WP-native mailto form to try to cut down on spam. I started out with ContactForm][ (spam troubles) and then switched to Secure Form Mailer (couldn’t get CAPCHA working), and tried WP-ContactForm (got spam). I’m still looking for something, currently trying PXS Mail Form which is working out well so far.

I upgraded to 2.0.2 which was simple. I also installed the WP Tiger Administration plugin (works with Safari and Firefox) to make WP look more like an application and less like a clunky website. Nice so far!

I upgraded! I’m now using WordPress 2.0.1 and it only broke a few of my plug-ins. The whole thing took about 20 minutes, and I used the excellent database backup plug-in which is now integrated into WordPress 2. I’m going nuts this time and changing the WordPress stylesheet so that the admin pages look the way I want them to, why not, right?

Added a live previwe option to my comments by using the LiveCommentPreview plug-in

Added two new themes to the theme switcher: Maple Leaf (modified) and Daisy Rae Gemini (modified.)

I added supreme spam blocking with the Spam Karma plug in

Added titles to all my pages using this page as a guide.

Upgraded to WordPress 1.5.1.3

I started getting trackback spam for the first time. So, I went to the codex page full of spamblocker solutions, and am now trying out the Mod_Rewrite Trackback Spam Blocker

I went back to my modified templates and made sure I was commenting out the php in the proper way.

I decided against using wp-contactform because it was almost too easy to use and I couldn’t customize it the way I wanted to.

This blog has tags, thanks to the WordPress tags beta plugin, seems to slow some stuff down, I’m still messing with it.

I used the WP-CC plugin to add a machine-readable Creative Commons license to all my pages and also in the footer, in a slightly modified version.

I installed the Theme Switcher Plugin so that people who don’t like my design aren’t stuck with it.

I deleted the Firefox referral link/image from the bottom of the WordPress administrative pages.

I am using the Dashboard Options plugin so that the administrative page I see when I log in isn’t glutted with WordPress news and bloggish stuff that I don’t care about. I deleted all the other stock plugins since I’m not using them.

I imported all my Movable Type entries and categories almost seamlessly. I am using a modified version of Theron Parlin’s benevolence template.