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The name of this site comes from my middle name, which begins with M, blah blah blah. It’s really not very interesting so I’ll just stop here. I registered the domain in December of 2006 and this site is hosted at A Small Orange, which is a great host in case anyone’s looking. The blog is powered by Wordpress, with assistance from a shitload of plugins.
I use the following programs and apps in coding and doing web design. The ones with asterisks (*) next to them are the ones that I would recommend to anyone as long as they can afford it. The other ones are solid programs, in my opinion, but may not be the best depending on what your needs are.
The wonderful thing about paying for hosting is that I can share it, too! Yay! For close friends, if you need some space to put up a personal site, I may be able to set you up with something. No file hosting or commercial stuff, please. If I don’t know you, you can shoot me an e-mail, but you better have some amazing design skills. For those with your own domain names already, I’m able to host multiple domains in this space, but I still can’t give you cPanel access.
I put up a section in the gallery for previous layouts. Find them here.
I use Wordpress more as a content management system than as blogging software. But of course, that means I need a hell of a lot of plugins. Here are just a selection of the ones I use, divided up into categories based on what they help to accomplish.
Increased Search Capabilities
The search function in Wordpress is pretty weak. However, I didn’t want a plugin that requires a lot of work on the user’s part to set a bunch of parameters by implementing an “advanced search” or something. Instead, I installed the following: Search Hilite highlights search terms from both external and internal searches in the search results. Addicted to Live Seach is probably more for the sake of bells and whistles than actual usefulness, but at any rate, it just means that when to type terms in the search box it dynamically displays a list of the results as headlines as you type. Finally, I really needed something that would search the content beyond just the posts because of the amount of stuff I have on pages, so, I downloaded Search Everything.
The Bookshelf (version WP)
This is my baby. I came up with it, coded it, turned it into a wordpress plugin, and will continue development on it. Currently, I’m not offering up the Wordpress version, mainly because of the work necessary to make it so that it can be implemented easily for other users. Maybe someday.
Comment Span Prevention
I spent a lot of time battling comment spam with my last blog. This time around, I’ve built up my defenses with Akismet, just cause it was provided in-the-box with Wordpress (it matches up comments with a database in order to detect comment spam), and Challenge, which is a CAPTCHA ** that asks a basic math question before people can submit a comment.
** CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart
Additional Functionality
fGallery+ provides the infrastructure for the photo gallery. Democracy is in case I want or need to put up a poll of some sort. DS-Rating is good because I have an opinion on everything and it allows me to transpose those opinions onto a 5-star scale. It automatically attaches that rating to the post through the custom fields.
Tracking Blog Statistics
For basic blog and site statistics, I use Readers Post which spits out a count of how many people have read a certain post, WP-Online Counter which is the function that tells how many people are online at once, Word Count whicch counts up the number of words in posts or comments, and WP-SlimStat which gives general site, referral, origin, and a bunch of other generic data. I also use a Download Manager just to keep track of certain files and make sure my bandwidth isn’t being abused.
Subscription Services
Because I’m highly skeptical of anyone’s desire to actually frequent this blog, I should put in the effort to make sure someone can subscribe in case they’re actually interested. Therefore, Suscribe2 allows people to subscribe/unsubscribe for e-mail alerts when something new is posted, and Subscribe to Comments allows users to subscribe for e-mail alerts when the additional comments have been posted for a specific discussion they want to follow.
And much, much more
