Anyone watching this blog* has undoubtedly noticed there’s a lot of changes happening. I’m trying to get things into a more featureful, interesting state. It’d be a lot easier if I had any visual design talent (at all), but since I don’t, I’m relying on templates others have created. Perhaps someday, when I’m rich and powerful, I’ll hire a graphics designer to create the picture I have in my head.
In the meantime, I’m trying to do my best to enhance the experience with some fun plugins. I’ve installed a few and will be adding more over the coming week (it’s giving me something to do with all the nervous energy that’s accumulating pre-graduation).
Anyhow, on to the new features.
For those of you who either haven’t heard of it, or, like me until about two days ago, heard of it but had no idea whatsoever what it was (besides being really trendy), Twitter is perhaps best described as a miniblog. Each post is restricted to 140 characters. From the site, “[Twitter is a] global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: ‘What are you doing?’” Updates can be placed on the website, over IM, or over the phone. I’m not the type that feels the need to post everytime I do something so mundane as eating a sandwich–unless, of course, it’s a really fantastic sandwich–but I often find myself doing something I’d like to make a short note of, either because I want to share it with all of ya’ll or because I want to expand upon it in a longer post later when I have more time. In my opinion, this is a perfect use for Twitter, especially when integrated with a larger blog.
Also, every day at midnight a post with the day’s tweets is generated. For those who remember my promise to post once a week at least, don’t worry–these automated posts do not count towards my quota, especially when they contain such sage comments as “I drank The Purples.”
There are many social bookmarking sites on the web. The One Wiki article explains it more thoroughly, but basically these services allow a user to create a list of bookmarks visible to their friends and or the Web at large. Also popular are social news sites: news sites in which the content is submitted by the users. Digg is perhaps the best known of these. The Share This plugin allows anyone to easily submit the post/page they’re viewing to these services.
I post lots of links here. The Link Harvest plug-in records all of these and puts them on one page for easy access. I’m still having some issues with it. Namely, it doesn’t seem to like Wikipedia very much. Aside from that, it seems to work well.
I’ve got some other goodies planned for installation, but I’m not sure when I’ll get around to it.
* Does anyone watch this blog? Sometimes I wonder. If you’re watching, comment and let me know. 
(And for those bots and jerks that keep trying to post Viagra adds to my comment sections, you’re more than welcome to stay quiet. I know you’re there.)
[tags]wordpress, wordpress plugins, wordpress themes, Share This, Twitter Tools, Link Harvest, Alex King[/tags]
I thought I would comment to let you know I’ve been checking out the blog since yesterday. I was in the Wordpress IRC channel last night.
Anyway, I like how well you have gotten K2 to work. Added this blog to my RSS reader (NewsFire). Thanks for talking about the different plugins you use, for I have downloaded a few (Share This and Old Post Alert from Alex) to use on my blog.
Mark,
Thanks for the comment, and for taking the time to help me get things up and running. Glad to hear you like the K2 usage. Aside from laying out widgets, I haven’t really done that much to customize it yet. I hope to get a bit more creative with it later. I’m using one of the nightlies ’cause the standard release doesn’t do three column layout, and I kept running into bugs with 0.9.5. Seems totally stable now.
I use Newsfire myself. Awesome application. Got it as part of the MacHeist bundle sale. ShareThis is indeed quite svelte, but I’m not as happy with Link Harvest, as it doesn’t seem to parse titles from linked pages very well at all, and completely chokes on Wikimedia sites (which is where I do most of my linking). I don’t suppose you know of any alternatives?
Do you use OpenID for anything? If so, you might consider voting on the extension proposal I linked to in my next entry.