A Few New Features
Thanks to the generosity of the WordPress team and some open source plugin developers, this site has some nice, new, shiny features, some visible and some not.
First, thanks to Mark Jaquith at Tempus Fugit you can now subscribe to comments via email using his Subscribe to Comments plugin. If anyone posts a comment after yours, you’ll know.
Next, thanks to Skippy at Skippy.net, you can subscribe to our blog posts via email using his subscribe2 plugin (see also the link in the sidebar) and display your gravatar in our blog comments using his Gravatars plugin (get a gravatar and then leave a comment to see what I mean). And as a backend service for me, I’m using his WP-Cron plugin to send a database backup of this blog to my Gmail account every day.
Next, thanks to Ricardo Galli and his WP-Cache plugin this blog serves a cached version of each page rather than dynamically generating each page from the database with every request. The result is a much faster page load time for you and extra bandwidth savings for me.
Also in the mix is the Related Posts plugin from Alexander Malov and Mike Lu. At the bottom of every post is a short list of (possibly) related posts for your endless reading enjoyment.
Finally, thanks to Ryan Duff at RyanDuff.net and his WPContact-Form plugin, you can now contact us! (See also the link in the sidebar.) The great thing about it is that we don’t have to expose our email to spammers or obfuscate a mailto link (inaccessibly, I might add) with JavaScript. You get what you want and so do we.
WordPress is amazing. Last year I customized an installation of version 1.2 to serve as a simple CMS for my church. Now with version 2.x and all of the new plugins popping up, it’s almost unnecessary to hack WordPress anymore. For the price of a few minutes of searching Google and a few hours of installation and tweaking you can have a professional content publishing system that meets the demands of most small businesses. It’s a very exciting time to be a content producer (and/or to be a web designer).
(Or one who uses parentheses.)
