Technical Specifications

The Main Software

This blog is operating on Wordpress, a open-source project that facilitated blogging in the run of the last years. Thus a lot of people have jumped on the bandwagon of blogging with Wordpress.

The Theme

I designed this theme all by myself. In case you are also into 2 column themes and don’t know where to start, I can recommend this tutorial: Simple 2 Column CSS Layout.

Here a list of colors and fonts used in the current design of philsblogging.com:

Header Images

Pictures used in the random header. Click on the title to see the original file and usage rights.

1. Aisle On A Plane - Ron Layters
   
2. Flipping Thru A Book -  sAeroZar
3. Curvy Ponds - Ms4jah
4. Found Face With Black Eye - Ms4jah
5. Surfer On The Beach - Ms4jah
6. San Francisco Skyline - eecue - Please ask for permission. I did and I got it. 
7. Vienna Sky Reflection - Dr Wiwo
8. Vienna Secession - Trois-Tetes
9. Spinning Theme Park Ride - Ms4jah
10. Capture The Busy City - Thomas Hawk
11. I’m On My Way - Karen Strolia
12. Life Is An Intersection - Ali Husain
13. Catch The Tram - Eschipul

Want to have your header to act like this, check out this tutorial: Simple Random Header Images for Your Blog by Pearsonified.

Plugins In Use

People tend to wonder how Phil’s Blogging runs so smoothly. As I said, I use Wordpress with several plugins. Here an overview I couldn’t find a plugin ;-) Irony rules the Wordpress community…

• Akismet - spam fighting. Powerful because its database is centralized on Wordpress.com
• All in One SEO Pack - Optimizing philsblogging.com in regards of search engines.
• Audio player - let’s you play audio files uploaded onto your server or external files.
• Ozh’ Better Feed - Adds buttons displaying comments, del.icio.us submission links & many more additional options to your feed making it a better place on Earth
• Cleaner Wordpress Gallery - with my Lightview Plus Plugin my built-in WP gallery looks way better!
• Configurable Tag Cloud - the Wordpress approach of displaying of tags hasn’t been satisfactory for me at all, therefore CTC for ever.
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator - creates a list of all pages and posts sorted by category.
• Democracy - whenever I want my users to vote on something.
• Executable PHP widget - your dynamic sidebar wouldn’t play so nicely without this widget.
• Google XML Sitemaps - search engines crawl blogs and can therefore extract information more efficiently without penalizing your for double content like listing entries on the index.php and archive.php
• Lightview Plus - overlay image displaying in a fancy, smooth way.
• Random Redirect - Bored? - get a random post of philsblogging.com?
• Related Posts
• Smart Youtube - Easily insert YouTube videos in posts, comments and RSS feeds. By Vladimir Prelovac.
• Subscribe To Comments - email notification for commenters.
• Theme Test Drive - that I recommend for test driving your themes (only seen by administrators)
• Twitter updater - posts a twitt whenever I post an entry on my blog.
• WordPress.com Stats - oh stats are so rewarding for a blogger.
• WordPress Admin Bar - every setting, every button in your admin menu is only a click away.
• WordPress Database Backup - oh stats are so securing for a blogger.
• WP-ContactForm - a spam-proof contact form that lets users email you directly from your blog.

Additional Gallery Software - Zenphoto

Zenphoto is running as my gallery as it is now. Waiting for the Wordpress built-in gallery to increase the number of functions and to add customizable displaying commands, Zenphoto is the best alternative.

The gallery was embedded into the Wordpress software on the user side (the administration panel of zenphoto is still extra). Read this tutorial to learn how to integrate Zenphoto into your Wordpress theme.

If you want to display your Zenphoto pictures in your Wordpress posts, use this plugin: ZenphotoPress (displays several pictures you manually choose) or Zenphoto Wordpress Plugin (displays an preview album).

Code Is Poetry, People

After the first phase of testing philsblogging.com, fiddling with design items and code snippets, I’ve made sure that the code is valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS level 2.1. Code is Poetry. Some plugins don’t really support valid XHTML code, I am trying to replace the messy ones. Plus, Wordpress posting sometimes messes up some code as well, so let’s blame it on the WYSIWYG editor, okay?