BizzyBee’s BizzyThoughts

Wordpress and some minor site changes

Wordpress is the tool I use for this blog. You might wonder why I don’t use one of the open source Notes blogging systems, or perhaps why I don’t create my own primitive blogging system?

There are a couple of reasons for this:

• Notes web hosting is expensive and hard to find: my current hosting partner is One.com and I pay a couple of euros a month. In return I get PHP, MySQL, unlimited e-mail accounts, a good service,… If I want to have a comparable configuration in Lotus Notes, it will cost me a lot more.
• Wordpress is expandable: there are tons of plugins, themes, widgets,… that make life easier and add new possibilities to my site in a couple of minutes.
• I like new environments to work in. I try to keep an open mind and not to stick to Lotus Notes for everything in my life, because it can restrict my choices.

This doesn’t mean I don’t respect people willing to do the effort to create their own system in Lotus Notes, like Jake from Codestore. It makes it also possible to demonstrate some techniques online with test databases and this is a welcome feature people like. I can only talk and explain things here.

Another downside is: I have a feeling of less control over “the system”, because PHP and Wordpress are not my main domain of technology. But I have to say all is well documented and there’s a load of information on the web available.

I experimented a little with Wordpress plugins, and this resulted in some small site changes. Meanwhile I’ll explain what plugins I use.

• WP-Postratings: adds the neat AJAX star rating system to my site. Of course, I invite you all to give scores to my articles.
• Tiger Style Administration: the default administration is easy, but Tiger Style shows more on one screen
• Wordpress Database Backup: creates backups of the blog.
• WP-Mint: Mint is a cool web statistics system and interface, and this plugin makes it easier to integrate with Wordpress.
• Subscribe To Comments: if you add a comment you can now subscribe to it, so that you get an e-mail when somebody responds to it.
• Akismet: takes care of comment spam.
• OneClick Installer: adding Wordpress plugins is just a matter of uploading a zipfile (instead of via ftp).

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