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Blog Refinements

I have just spent the weekend upgrading my network infrastructure and finalizing some changes in the blog. Having learned a lot from reading other blogs and expecting this to be helpful for people visiting this site this is the list of the main changes.

• Upgrading to Wordpress 2.3: This have been a surprisingly smooth upgrade. I only had minor problems with UTF-8 conversion (I had to disable the line define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8') from the configuration file). It seems that with this new Wordpress version, categories are going to be deprecated in favor of Tag Clouds. I have yet to convert my post database to tags
• Feed Icons: I am using now what is supposed to be the standard for RSS icons
• Email subscription: Thanks to FeedBurner now you can subscribe to this blog via email. If you are not using a Feed Reader, please use this method instead of bookmarking
• W3C Validation: Now, the XHTML and CSS of this blog are fully validated by the W3C tests. I use a simple text editor to modify the HTML and CSS, so there were lots of errors. After a lot of minor changes (like eliminating warnings in C++), the blog passes all the tests becoming a more standard blog and, supposedly, more friendly to bots navigating through my rumblings
• Amazon book links: I do not like putting ad in my blog (and you probably won’t ever see any), but now book links pass though my Amazon account (I receive a small percentage if you buy using that link). It is a non-intrusive modification so I expect you don’t care about it
• Wordpress plugins updated: I have updated and added new Wordpress plugins. This is the list of plugins I am using:
  • Askimet to combat the spam. 95% of the comments I receive are spam
  • All in One SEO Pack. Meta information, that invisible information that only bots can read, is important. This plugin gives you control over the generated metadata
  • Counterize for tracking internal visitor stats
  • FeedBurner FeedSmith to get feed usage stats. FeedBurner have been bought by Google and now all the pro services are free
  • Subscribe To Comments. This is a very interesting plugin that is increasing the number of comments in the blog. It allows email subscription to posts where you contribute
  • Ultimate Google Analytics to collect info for the Google Service Analytics
  • WP-PostViews for getting visit stats for each post
  • WP-UserOnline. An online users counter

Comments are welcome, thanks for reading.