I love open source software and believe in giving credit where credit is due. If you like something about this blog, these are the sources of all the bells and whistles. Also, my comments about each.
General:
- WordPress: The software that runs it all.
- Dreamhost: The hosting company. Can’t beat it for price to features ratio. The other side of this is that it isn’t a professional caliber hosting company. Occasional outages and slowdowns are a fact of life.
- Ad-clerum wordpress theme. Great, clean theme. I hacked it up a bit. Minimized the header space and changed the images out. Did some resizing on the side images to allow the map.
Widgets and plugins:
- Akismet: Stops the spam in comments. This lets us leave the comments open.
- Header Image Rotator by Matthew Hough. This is a nice plugin that rotates the middle image you see in the header. Customizable by time. Currently, it loads a new image every minute
- wp-quotes plug-in and the accompanying widget by Dustin Barnes and Abhijit Nadgouda, respectively. Great little plug-in which allows custom quotes and stores them in the database backend.
- Wunderground.com Weather Sticker. I like this much better than the ubiquitous WeatherIcon plug-in. This plug-in also allows indexing by the standard “City,State” string which is really nice.
- Peter’s Date Countdown Widget Style Yo!. Fun and easy to use widget which stores the data in the database.
- Visited states map by epgsoft.com. I periodically generate a new map and re-upload it. No dynamic content on this one.
- XML Google Maps by Patrick Matusz. Allows us to download the .gpx file from our TomTom One (hacked to allow data recording) and post them immediately with no editing! Amazing stuff. Just upload the file, insert a link and you’re done. Only had to tweak the width to make sure it fit the theme.