Design Finalized!

November 20, 2005 9 By Jakob

It’s been a few years since I last looked into any kind of design for Thusgaard.com. Over the past year I’ve been trying to get the most out of multiple content management solutions and the problem always ends up being the same: The time that I’d need to invest in figuring out how they work is just usually out of proportion with the importance of having a private website that runs OK. After all I don’t depend financially on the well-being of anything ending with .thusgaard.com.

With WordPress.org the scenario changed a bit. WordPress has a huge user base, is freeware, has loads of independent developers that write load of little tweaks, hacks, plugins, and themes for the software package. This meant that I could go ahead and “design” a new site with very little knowledge of PHP and little knowledge about using stylesheets. Even without this the new site has a few special features, that I’d like to talk a bit about:

WordPress.org: The key to the whole thing, the blogging solution that makes it easy for private people to have a dynamic website which is easy to update.

Neat!: The design that I used to adapt WordPress to my needs.

Flickr.com: Photo service which you can use for free to upload pictures, which you can post and integrate with your blog – either directly from Flickr.com or with plugins for WordPress.

FAlbum: GREAT plugin by Elijah Cornell for integration between Flickr.com and WordPress. Today I just needed to find out how to post a random picture instead of the most recent one, and that was solved with an upgrade.

del.icio.us integrator: This plugin by Eric Anderson helps you post all your del.icio.us links in the sidebar and on a seperate page. Very helpful to show what you’ve been surfing!

StatTraq: Solid statistics plugin by Randy Peterman that shows all you’d ever want to know about your visitors.

Subscribe2: Skippy’s plugin which lets you create an e-mail news alert that goes out to subscribers to news from your blog!

WP Flickr Post BarWP Flickr Post Bar: If the posting feature on Flickr.com doesn’t quite do it for you, this plugin by Joe Tan gives you the ability to post Flickr.com photos straight from your WordPress Write Post page.

43 Places.com : At 43places.com you can post your list of places to go or places you’ve been or where you want to go. In addition you can make a seperate page with a map of your 43 places as it is seen on 43places.com. Finally it’s possible to make individual posts from 43places.com to your blog.

WordPress Database Backup: Skippy finally delivered yet another plugin. When you’ve set it all up and it’s all running, what should not happen? That it all disappears without a recent backup being available. This plugin allows you to do a full backup of your database in order to make sure that you can upload it all again if things go wrong.

I now consider the work for done. I have very few things that I’d still like to get in place. One of them is to figure out how to make sure that Thusgaard.com is updated with the posts from all members of the page. It has to do with posting to different blogs at once or cross-posting or something like that. Not sure. But for now, my work here is done…!