American in Spain

Lately around the internet, I’ve been noticing more and more sites, serious respectable magazines and important blogs, switching their comment mechanism to use Disqus. My only experience with Disqus in the past was using it as a disgusting javascript hack to allow comments on a Tumblr blog. It seemed like a strangely useless service, but it has matured a lot in the three years since my initial evaluation. Let’s evaluate the pros and cons of using Disqus on a WordPress blog like this one.
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Recently I’ve been recommending some wordpress plugins to people, and I find myself repeating the same reasons and explanations, so I thought I would write them down here so I can just point people to one place. Ironically, I can totally live without all of the plugins that I took the time to write: Flickr Flash Badge Widget, Revver WordPress Plugin, Widgetize Anything, and YT-Audio: Audio Hosting From YouTube.

I’ve ordered them from least important to most impressive and important, just like top ten lists are supposed to be.
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A “gravatar” is a “globally recognized avatar“. I can’t remember why I signed up at gravatar.com about six months ago. Last October, the company that runs WordPress, the software that runs this blog, bought gravatar.com, so it’s not surprising that there is a WordPress plugin to support gravatars. When I noticed that the new version of my comment preview plugin supports gravatars, I thought I’d give them a try here on my blog. I might not keep them, but it’s a fun novelty for now. As implied, your gravatar should show up on other websites too, especially as Metcalfe’s Law takes effect and more sites adopt them.

So go sign up and set your avatar for my blog comments!

I’m a huge fan of the Audio Player plugin for WordPress that lets you embed a flash player for a single MP3 file in a blog post. The problem is that you have to host the MP3 file yourself, and if your hosting service isn’t very generous with either storage space or bandwidth, it’s not a very good solution.
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I’ve been debating for a while how to, and whether or not to, switch to host all of my photos on Flickr.
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This blog, in its present form, turned one year old this past weekend. It was a solemn single-candle ceremony.
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Several people have found my blog lately searching for a countdown widget for WordPress. I briefly considered writing one with a nice back-end interface for entering the date, etc., but in the end, I think it’s going to take less time and be more flexible if I just explain how I have mine done.
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Yesterday, I received an email from a Hollywood actor.
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Don’t look now, but you’re being followed! By Google…
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This has been done before, but not in such a simple and elegant way, in my opinion. This implementation has four important features that separate it from the rest: no images, no messy nested divs in your html code, no CSS, and realistic fading shadows!
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