WauloK’s BangRocks Blog

I finally got around to upgrading WordPress to the latest version. I thought I might add a few plugins while I was at it.

I’ve chucked on the antispam plugin "Bad Behaviour". That should help cut down on spam in my comments, hopefully.

Another one I added was "del.icio.us links". Now when I bookmark something you can see it on the right-hand side of this blog page.

You can now see the local weather via the "WeatherIcon" plugin. I had some trouble with this one. It wouldn’t show the data it downloaded. I posted on the forum and talked to one of the devs, but that didn’t help. In the end I decided to try another airport up north instead of the closest one down south and the plugin worked. I guess the data it downloaded from the weather website was faulty. It’s close enough to show our weather anyway.

The "time of day" plugin shows in human terms the approximate time I’ve posted to the blog. Nothing major but nice to have.

One of the most useful plugins I added was the "Twilight Autosave" plugin. This one automatically saves the text you type in your blog to a cookie on your computer. If the interweb goes down or your browser crashes or something, your text has been autosaved in the cookie so you can come back later and finish your blog post. This is fantastic simply for the reason which you’ve already seen: I’ve had crashes, etc which have wiped out my blog. Usually this seems to only happen once I’ve typed a shitload of text and it really pissed me off. Let’s hope I don’t have to worry about that any more. It got so I’d be typing my blog into notepad and saving it periodically then doing a C&P to my blog.

I finally joined up to LastFM aka Audioscrobbler. If you’ve never used this, you sign up for an account and get a plugin for your music player. In my case, Windows Media Player. Whenever you have played over half of a song, it uploads the ID3 tag details to your LastFM account and records it there with pretty graphs, etc. You can also join groups and find other people with similar music tastes. It provides an RDF feed of your songs which you can display on a website. I added the "WP-Scrobbler" plugin and you can see it on the right in my sidebar with a list of the last five songs I’ve played with WMP.

I had a funky plugin to use Ajax to display the calendar on the right called "LiveCalendar". Unfortunately, once I got it working it stopped all the other Javascript plugins (WP-Scrobbler and Del.icio.us) from working so I had to disable it. It’s handy but not essential.

I also tried a plugin to display the current value of this website on BlogShares, but that kept giving errors about ‘headers already sent’ so I had to disable it too. No matter. You can see the BlogShares icon on the right there. I have to put that on my site so I can claim my blog on BS.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 16th, 2005 at 9:41 am and is filed under 1st Life, Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.