Colophon

This site is built on the backbone of WordPress. It’s actually a child site of broadpool.com, which started life running WordPress-µ, the original multisite version of WordPress, but has since been upgraded to WordPress 3.x, which has native multisite capabilities. The server is hosted by Rackspace Cloud Servers, and I highly recommend them if you’re looking for a relatively inexpensive, highly-scalable cloud server solution.

Plugins

There are a number of WordPress plugins that I use. These sometimes change all the time, so I’ll just list what I think are the most important ones. If you want them on your site, just go to the “Add New” Plugins page and search on the name.

  • IntenseDebate — this is WordPress’s preferred solution for commenting. I have used both Disqus and IntenseDebate before, and they’re both reasonably rational and useful, and both far better than WordPress’s built-in commenting features.
  • WP Minify — this plugin “minifies” (compresses) Javascript and CSS files. More importantly, it automatically concatenates them. Most web developers, for some reason, do not realize that the number of HTTP requests made by the client is the single biggest cause of performance problems. If you have 10 Javascript files (and I’ve seen sites with that many or more), then the browser has to make 10 separate requests back to the server(s) to load them. Each request comes with a lot of network latency, so simply concatenating those files together gives great benefit. The same thing is true of CSS files and images.
  • WPMU Domain Mapping — this is the magic that makes it possible to use an independent domain (like glen-campbell.com) instead of a subdomain (like glen-campbell.com) for multisite hosting. It works perfectly, and I almost never have to touch it.
  • MediaRSS — another plugin that just works and never needs touching. It automatically creates MediaRSS feeds that include special tags for images in the feed. Without it, my feeds would be far less interesting.
  • After The Deadline — this is a full-featured spelling and grammar checker that’s built into the WordPress visual editor. It can be (and is) configured to automatically check posts and pages before they’re published. It’s saved me from looking like an idiot more times than I can count.

Other Trivia

I use DNS Made Easy to handle all my DNS. After the SOPA flap, I transferred all my domain names to NameCheap.com.