Chasing the Walrus - A Blog Development

[walrus]

The first thing to decide when starting a blog is what is it's purpose. Chasing the Walrus is going to be an entertainment / comedy / satire type of blog which will touch on a multitude of topics...hence the chasing part of the title. If any of you remember The Walrus Blog, it will be very much like that other than I probably wont be posting much porn. But it will be adult in nature and I will use some celebrity sponsors for monetization.

The first thing to do is to download the latest release of Word Press and all of the plug-ins I intend to use. Today's post will be listing and explaining why I use certain plug-ins.

I'll list the plug-ins I use on every blog first and then the ones I've selected for this specific application.

Plug-ins

If I'm looking for new plug-ins for something I want to do on a blog, the WordPress Plugin Database is always my first stop.

Spam Prevention - Askimet. I use the standard Askimet plug-in that is bundled with Word Press. It seems to do an excellent job of keeping spam comments from appearing in my blogs but I will admit that it does flag legitimate track-backs as spam.

Google Sitemap Generator - While I won't comment on the long term advantages or lack there of to using Google sitemaps or not, I will say that I do believe that if your starting a new blog using it does seem to get your site indexed a bit quicker.

Ultimate Tag Warrior - This is my "must" have plug-in. It does a great job of tagging your posts without creating a traffic leak to technorati or delicious but thats just for starts. You can create a tag cloud either as a page or as part of your sidebar. I will interlink common themed posts and it will add your tags into the post meta as keywords.

I'll post more on tags and tagging a little later as that will take some writing to explain.

Feedburner plug-in - Redirects your RSS feed to your feedburner feed. The advantage to this is that the feedburner feed is readable as HTML. So that if your feed does get mixed into the SERP's (and that does happen now and then) it is readable. You can also watch as the popularity of your blog grows as they do offer feed stats.

Social Bookmarks - adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic linkss at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites. This link wasn't working for me tonight but I do have a recent copy of the plug-in.

Subscribe Me - Displays the tiles with subscribe buttons to the major readers.

Feeds, feed readers and how to market your feeds is a post all it's own which I will get into at a latter date.

WP-Contact - a drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post.

Now for some plug-ins I've selected specifically for this blog:

vPIP - This is a great plug-in for embedding video's into your posts and while I won't be doing a video with every post...or even a picture...I can envision wanting to embed one now and then.

Site Map Generator - This is one of a number of plug-ins that I previously haven't used but I want to take a look at.

atiChaos Aggregator - Another new plug-in. While I will not be aggregating any feeds into my posts on this blog, one of the things that caught my attention with this plug-in was it's ability to aggregate feeds both in the sidebar and on pages. Something I've done more manually on a number of other blogs.

Page Category Organizer - If you've tried to organize your pages in wordpress you know what a pain in the ass it is. This plugin claims to let you add your pages into categories, thus making it possible to organize your pages in a logical order. I haven't tried this yet but I do like to create a lot of pages and if this works pretty well will be integrating it into XXX Blog Maniac.

Next week I'll post in here on how I optimize my template and configure WP