Site facts

Here are some basics about the karaokepoetry.com back­end. I thought I’d put this in, not only as a thank you to the var­i­ous peo­ple who spend their time cre­at­ing amaz­ing themes and plug-ins, but also as a guide for those inter­est­ed in what goes into a word­press install like this.

The theme I’ve used is “The Eru­dite” by Matt Wiebe of Soma Design in Win­nipeg. It’s a fan­tas­tic sim­ple typog­ra­phy-based theme, allow­ing me to focus on the words and word design. I’ve had to hack it here and there to allow for the strange ways that I like to lay out words, but the code is robust and has­n’t bro­ken yet. Great job, Matt, and thanks. I rec­om­mend a vis­it to Mat­t’s site somadesign.ca to check out what he’s doing.

I’m using a few plug-ins to do var­i­ous things at both the back­end and the fron­tend of the site. I find the fol­low­ing very use­ful, but am always open to new and/or bet­ter plug-ins.

Of course, the con­tact page is very nec­es­sary and impor­tant, espe­cial­ly if I want peo­ple to con­tact me. I use Con­tact Form 7 by Takayu­ki Miyoshi to enable this capa­bil­i­ty. It’s sim­ple and flex­i­ble and I use it on a num­ber of sites.

One of the require­ments for “The Eru­dite” was to also do an instal­la­tion of the wp-Hyphen­ate and wp-typogri­fy plug-ins. These were neat lit­tle plug-ins that allowed typo­graph­ic ele­ments to be used. How­ev­er, they’ve both merged to become wp-Typog­ra­phy by Jef­frey D. King who also cre­at­ed wp-Hyphen­ate, so I guess I’m going to have to upgrade. Thanks goes out to Hamish Macpher­son for cre­at­ing wp-Typogri­fy in the first place. 

I use the WP Title 2 plug-in by Hris­to Chakarov to add a cus­tom head­ing that’s dif­fer­ent from the title for use in page links. Nifty and worth using.

To give me some pro­tec­tion against the inevitable cut-and-paste raiders, I’m using WP-Con­tent Pro­tec­tor by Anurag. I’ve hacked the code a bit as it was insert­ing a link back to the cre­ator which threw the typog­ra­phy and lay­out off bal­ance. I think the inclu­sion of this link should make up for remov­ing that.

Orig­i­nal­ly The Eru­dite theme had some issues with ana­lyt­ics code escap­ing (!), so to get around this I began using Ulti­mate Google Ana­lyt­ics by Wil­fred van der Dei­jl, a very sim­ple but effec­tive plug-in. The ana­lyt­ics code prob­lem was lat­er fixed in The Eru­dite, but I’ve con­tin­ued using Ulti­mate Google Ana­lyt­ics, main­ly because it’s good and it works.

And then, last of all, none of this would be pos­si­ble with­out Word­Press. What more can I say, oth­er than if you want an easy to use and high­ly flex­i­ble blog­ging plat­form, you can’t do any bet­ter. It’s easy to install and work out how to use, even if you know noth­ing about code. Of course, it all takes time but it’s worth it. And it’s free.

And that’s about it.

Boz Cap­pie