Marktopia

For those of you out there that use Wordpress, do you use many plugins? I have a few on my site, but have been looking at a few more potentially.  If you have a lot of plugins (more than 5) do you notice a performance hit? Do you find them valuable? Do you run into problems when upgrading Wordpress? Related to that, are there any plugins that you have to have installed? The AJAXed Wordpress plugin is that way for me, although some of the features of it will be part of 2.7. Feel free to comment about your plugin experiences.

Even though I am on vacation, I have postdated this entry as not to miss the Pick of the Week.  Luckily for you the reader, this is possible using said Pick of the Week.  Wordpress has been my blogging software of choice for about 3 years now (with a slight interruption during the Drupal kick I had).  Wordpress has both hosted and self maintained versions of their software that allows you to manage a blog through a web based interface.  I won’t go into all of the details as their web site does a better job of that.  What I want to comment on is the new version that came out this week.

Version 2.5 doesn’t change much for the end user, but it does make administration of your site much easier.  The admin panel is well organized now and little things with the Write section really make a difference.  You can also manage the design of your site easily, even editing the CSS if you have the permissions set correctly on the server.  If you are running a blog and looking for a new content management system, I would highly recommend Wordpress.

Pick of the Week is my way of highlighting cool/new services and software on the web or the Mac. A few Windows applications might sneak in from time to time, but it will be rare. You can find an archive of services and software at http://www.marktopia.net/tag/potw/.

I have upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.  Not too much new stuff for the viewers of this site, but lots of neat stuff on the admin panel.  My hopes are now that the work on the admin panel is done, Wordpress will turn to the reader’s experience next.  To celebrate the new version, I also came up with a new design for the site.  There is still a little CSS tinkering to be done, but in general it is ready to go.  Take it for a spin and let me know what you think.

I am going to be doing some testing with Wordpress 2.3 locally and maybe on here as well, so it will be some slow posting for awhile.  Hopefully after the testing though, it should be smooth sailing for awhile.

I have the new design and am implementing Ultimate Tag Warrior instead of the built-in categories for WordPress. One of the reasons to do this is because I am interested in using the blogging client ecto. It can save posts locally (useful for someone who happens to switch blogging platforms more frequently than he should), edit posts without a browser and ties in nicely with Vienna, by RSS reader of choice. Ecto can be configured to also manage the tags for posts but it takes a little configuration. Once I get that setup, I will be in blogging heaven, and will hopefully be posting more often as well.

Also, I have my new design in place if you want to check that out.