Shanghai Tan

Yes, yes I know, blogging about my blog is boring, but I’m doing it here for my own record, mind you…

I’ve been using WordPress on my website for almost two years now, never looked back. Prior to this, I used blogger.com, which was nice and easy, but didn’t provide the total control as hosting my own site. Beside posting regularly, I’ve been improving my wordpress installation lately, to a point that I feel quite satisfied now. So for my own record and those interested, here’s my current WordPress configuration.

I upgraded to WordPress 2.3.x last month, from 2.0.x. It wasn’t exactly straightforward but I didn’t run into big trouble, after throughoutly reading the upgrade doc. The theme that I’ve been using all the time is ChinaRed, made by BigHead. I like the very Chinese color combination, with a clean banner, simple 2-column style and foremost the beautiful wallpaper.

I’m using the following plugins:

• Askimet: to automatically tag potential spam comments, so far it has 100% hit for me
• pb-embedFlash: to embed flash content in posts, including YouTube
• WP-Highslide: to embed popup images display in posts, this makes it easier for viewer to see large images without leaving the actual page
• Quality Quotes: to automatically fetch famous quotes from thequotes.com, and randomly display each one on the main page
• Google XML Sitemaps: to automatically generate sitemap.xml everytime content of this blog is modified, and also notify major search engines about the changes (Google, MSN, Yahoo, ask.com)
• StatPress: to dynamically generate viewers statistics

There is no shortage of open-source blog tools in the market, but I still feel that WordPress is the best choice out there, in terms of having a very active developers community, tons of plugins available, user-friendliness, simplicity and stability.

I still remember 8 years ago when I registered my domain chekim.com. At that time I was temporarily living at Fort Lee (NJ), working as a consultant at Roseland (NJ). I wanted to put my resume on the website but it wasn’t pretty… Then I started putting some photos on it, taken with my Sony DSC-F505 digital camera. Later on I had my company e.consulting‘s website on it, built with NetObjects Fusion. At 2004, I installed the open-source Gallery 1.3 that I keep using until a month ago where I migrated to Gallery 2.2. I am now very happy with WordPress and Gallery. I never say enough of thanks to those brave developers working on their own leisure time. OPEN-SOURCE ROCKS!

Two years after I started blogging seriously, I found my love of writing just grow stronger, almost as much as my passion for photography. Meanwhile, I also become more sensitive about society, economy and world politics, and I read a lot about those subjects. I think this is good signs of mental maturity.

Actually I don’t know who is reading my blog, if anyone, except myself. Hopefully my newly installed plugin StatPress could shed some light on it. [To readers] If you’re reading up to this point, please make a comment to this post as a feedback. Thanks!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Scrapbook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.