Website Creation/Code Monkeying
Content Management:
- WordPress. Requires you to have your own web host, but provides free, highly flexible “blogging” software that can be customized to serve up a comic (or
threefour). Don’t feel like getting hosting? Try WordPress.com instead.
WordPress plugins:
- Akismet. The existance of Akismet is hands-down the reason I was able to give up the phpbb bulletin board we were running and switch to comments in WordPress. (More on that here if you’re interested.) So far it’s captured all the spam that’s hit my site except maybe 10 that I had to nuke separately, and only mislabeled five posts as spam out of 1400. Not bad.
- Live Comment Preview. Provides that neat comment preview you see while typing in your comments.
- Userpic & Avatar. Great for avatars that aren’t favatars and all that garbage, but not 100% polished. For one thing, I can’t get the userpic section to work at all. Still, worth messing with.
- Navigate by category.
I seriously modded someone else’s plugins for the multi-category navigation at the top of single-post pages and some day I’ll post it — but not today.
Web Hosting & Web Hosting Tools:
- Hostmonster. Lots of features, lots of support, reasonable prices, so far no downtime. I upgraded from Midphase to Hostmonster in January ’07 when Hostmonster was offering about twice the everything that Midphase was for a lower price.
- CPanel Proxy. Does your web host use CPanel to control your site? Does your employer’s firewall block connections to the port where your CPanel access is installed? If you have one subdomain available through your host, you can install CPanel Proxy and use it to get to your CPanel access through port 80 instead. Will even auto-install while you’re outside the firewall in many cases.
Code Snippits:
- Rotator. Serves up random images each time you load the page. Requires php and some clue how to use it, but merges perfectly with WordPress.
Other weird crap that comes in handy:
- Lorem Ipsum – need "garbage" text to fill a space? Lorem Ipsum has been the standard in gobbledygook since the 1500s.
- What Is My UserAgent? – need to know what browser you’re running (or at least what the webservers think you’re running)? Check your useragent string and IP address all in one handy link.
- Using PHP to modify CSS to match the browser – if you need to identify a specific browser and treat it totally differently from the others, this is one relatively easy way to do so.
- 100 Delightful & Pleasing Color Swatches