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Top 10 Wordpress Plugins from WordCamp 2008

Wordpress fans from far and wide congregated this weekend in San Francisco for WordCamp 2008. There is some great coverage in a live blogging style over at The Web Life. One of the interesting tidbits that I found over there was a list of the top 10 Wordpress plugins.

Here’s a quote:

For every feature that we could add to Wordpress, there is a plugin for it. Wouldn’t it be interesting to look at the usage of these and guage where should we go with it.

They also state that there are 4.96 average plugins per blog. The most a user has installed is 1290; 526 of those are active.

The post goes on to list the top 10 plugins…sans links. But I have taken the time to make your journey to them a little easier by providing them in my list below. Also, no information was provided as to the basis for how this list was calculated.

Top 10 plugins
1. Akismet
2. All in One SEO Pack
3. Google XML Sitemaps
4. NextGEN Gallery
5. Wordpress.com Stats
6. WP-DB-Backup
7. WP-Cache
8. WP Automatic Upgrade
9. WP-Polls
10. CformsII

My Memory Upgrade - Just Because it was too Cheap not to

I’m running a Dell 8400 3.2GHz system with 1Gb of RAM and didn’t have a real need for more memory until recently. I’ve been contemplating getting VMWare up and running to play with Vista and Linux in an isolated environment. I was working on a friends system and while doing so decided to temporarily borrow some of his ram and drop it into my system. It was nice to have the extra memory and I decided to look around at RAM prices which I hadn’t followed to see were prices were.

I was pretty amazed when after doing a little searching around on dealnews, techbargains, and fatwallet I was able to find a 2GB Kit (2 x 1GB dual channel kit) of DDR2 memory for only $70 with free shipping at one of my favorite online merchants newegg.com so I decided they were too cheap not to buy them. I could then easily get about $30 for the 1GB dual channel kit I already had in the system making the upgrade net at only $40, but I decided to be nice and put the memory in my son’s computer.

As I went to the page to provide you with the link I come to find out that they dropped the price another $5 to only $65…amazing…Here’s the Link

How to Disable Widgets in Wordpress 2.2

If you are planning on upgrading to Wordpress 2.2 one thing you want to know is that it now includes widget support in the core. This is a great addition for the most part as widgets have proved themselves to be a great addition to Wordpress. The only problem is that if you prefer the Sidebar Modules Plugin like I do (Implementation is so much nicer!) or if you are using a theme that has SBM embedded such as K2, you will run into problems as they are not compatible with Wordpress 2.2

I installed 2.2 on my local server and verified that my version of K2 was broken after upgrading. Luckily I found a solution. Darrell Schulte is a progressive Wordpress blogger who is currently running version 2.3 alpha and uses K2. It appears that as he was using beta versions of 2.2 when he came across this issue and developed the Disable Wordpress Widgets Plugin.

I downloaded and installed it and can verify that it worked with the release version of 2.2 and allowed my K2 theme to work gracefully again. I thought I’d help get the word out for all the other Sidebar Module users out there.

Search to Buy the Best Hair Dryer for my Wife

My wife’s current hairdryer had just died. It was a pretty good one that had cost her ~$100 (I had no idea they could cost that much). But she really liked it. We went to Costco and she bought some $20 model they had over there and had been using it but knew that she didn’t like it as much. Being the tech gadget freak that I am, I decided to employ my research and purchasing skills as if I were buying some new computer accessory, to find her the best hairdryer I could as a birthday gift.

So I searched around for some reviews and comparisons of top hairdryers out there. The best I found was “How to pick the best professional hair dryer” at Missiko.com and “Buying The Right Hair Dryer” from CBS News. After reading each of these it became clear that a two rose to the top which were the Farouk CHI Turbo & Rocket Ionic hair dryer as well as the T3 Evolution Tourmaline hair dryer. I learned about what makes these higher end hair dryers so much better based on use of negatively charged ions, tourmaline, and ceramics. So my next step was to find some user reviews for each of these which I found over at a commerce site called Folica.com. They had a good number of user reviews for the Chi Turbo, Chi Rocket as well as the T3 Evolution. After thinking about it some more I decided to get my wife the Chi Rocket. Needless to say my wife was very happy not only with the hair dryer I bought her, but with the research I did to make sure I got her the best one.

Guys, let me tell you, going through a process like this to get your lady a tech gadget can go a long way in getting her to appreciate the nuances of getting better gear. It can also open the door to her understanding why we go through so much trouble selecting our gear. Hopefully she will understand this as I decide which High Def DVD player I will be purchasing soon.

Cleaker is the Best Wordpress Theme You’ve Never Heard Of

…and I selfishly would like to keep it that way for fear of widespread adoption, but author Adam Walker Cleaveland deserves praise and recognition for his fine work. Prior to my search and conversion to Cleaker I was using 3ColumnK2 which is a mod of the ever so popular K2 theme which I still use for other sites. I decided to switch for a few reasons.

• I was having IE6 compatability issues where the sidebar was wonky and didn’t appear properly
• didn’t like being at the mercy of the modder to update based on newer K2 releases
• I started having some issues with the Sidebar Modules embedded in the latest K2 and once again didn’t want to be at the mercy of K2 for SBM upgrades
• I was bored

My search for Cleaker took a while. My requirements for a new theme were:

• 3 Column with content on the left followed by 2 sidebars on the right
• Flexibility to change the overall theme width as well as the columns
• Support for Widgets (hence Sidebar Modules)
• Navigation buttons in header based on Pages
• Ability to have a custom header image
• Looked good

This was a pretty time consuming process but in the end it was worth it. Cleaker met all of my requirements and then some. The first step was to prepare by porting over all of my existing theme customizations necessary to Cleaker. I’m pretty good about keeping a text file that identifies every customization I make to my theme along with details and the actual code. These items include content from third party services like Google Analytics, code necessary for plugins, scripts for widgets etc. I highly recommend you do this as it can be a nightmare trying to remember where all these pieces are without them being documented. So edited the templates necessary as well as created all the sidebar modules necessary.

After finishing that process I began to concentrate on remaining issues. Currently I’m having layout problems I haven’t gotten around to with my Slickr plugin which I use for my photos page as well as with my Lifestream plugin for my Lifestream page. I’ve been too lazy to fix them as I struggle nightly whether to work on content or design and content usually wins. Not a huge deal and not the fault of the theme.

Next up was customizing the theme a bit for my liking. As I began to dig through the style.css file I was very happy to see that it was lined with helpful commenting. The main thing I wanted to do was modify the column the overall width of the theme as well as the columns. For anyone else interested it is easily done by editing the style values below:

#wrapper - changed width to 1000px
#header - changed width to 1000px
#content - changed width to 550px
#sidbarRight - changed width to 170px
#sidebarLeft - changed width to 150px
#footer - changed width to 971px
ul#Nav - changed to 1000px

There was still one more step necessary for these column changes to work and that was to modify the “contentbg2.gif” & “header.gif” images. Since I was increasing the content column and extending the overall width of the theme, I needed to move the seperator and add to the right side of contentbg2.gif.

Cleaker contentbg2.gif modified

I also had to increase the width of my header.gif image from 900 to 1000 pixels

I made some other changes too such as incorporating the blockquote style which I liked more from K2 and changed the font weight to bold for the headlines. I will probably play with the color scheme and make some other changes as well in the future.

I am very happy with this theme and urge others that are looking for a great looking, and easily editable theme, to give it a try.

My modified version of Cleaker 2.1 Widgetized is available here