Ringing in the new year with a new look on wordpress. WordPress offers me better aesthetic possibilities and customization options than blogspot.  Blogspot was great to get started fast.  Fast believe it or not has more appeal to me than aesthetics. Aesthetics, graphics and design are super important to me, so once I  have something working and have the time I then  want to spend some time improving it’s look and feel, but really the technology, functionality and easy of creation are the first and foremost.

Thanks to Tanel Poder and Greg Rahn  for the template idea and for tweaks in the wordpress theme. The theme was tweaked by Greg and then repurposed by Tanel who help me get a copy and then get started.

For plugins, I used

• Blogger Importer – import blogspot posts and comments
• SBS Blogroll – for  blogspot type blogroll (I tweaked the code to be able to change the title of people’s blogs)
• amr shortcode any widget – to put blogroll on it’s own page
• SyntaxHighlighter Evolved – for marking up SQL code (as well as other code)
• W3 Total Cache – improve load times
• Akismet – anti spam
• Google Analytics for WordPress

Kyle Hailey
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