Random is Good, Random is Life

Now that I have pretty well settled into life in London, I’ve decided to actually do something with my blog. My travels through Europe were experiences that I’ll never forget. However, as you may have read updating my blog on a regular basis whilst on Contiki was difficult bordering on impossible. The very hectic, but incredibly enjoyable schedule, expenses of using web cafe’s and not having a laptop made it hard to think about all the weird and wonderful experiences, let alone write about them! I still have my handwritten diary so I’ll be blogging entries as time allows.

The first thing I wanted to do was change the theme to something a little more different than the default WordPress Kubrik theme. After browsing JohnChow dot com via a Digg article I noticed his theme, Misty Look 101. Mistylook is quite a nice clean theme and also supports sidebar widgets which adds drag & drop functionality of your blog such as positioning of your sidebar:- categories, archives etc. Installed and modified it a little, blue background and orange text, I quite like it, let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

WordPress Plugins

Adsense Deluxe
This is an awesome plugin which allows you to put code snippets into your WordPress loop, and even in your posts to display adsense ads. The plugin is easily usable with in WordPress itself, allowing different tags etc to be used.

Digg This Button
Displays the very familiar Digg This button on your post when it has been Dugg. Upon testing the plugin, I found that it works quite quickly, I unashamedly dugg a a post myself and the button appeared within a few minutes. Not bad. A few diggers were even nice enough to vote on it…

Social Bookmarks
Simply displays the most popular social bookmarking sites in little buttons at the bottom of each post, the usual suspects are present such as Delicious, Digg, furl, Yahoo!, StumbleUpon and Google Bookmarks.

Google Sitemaps
Awesome plugin to generate your sitemap for Google, updates the sitemap.xml file which Google will download from your site, check out Google Webmaster tools for more information.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is yet another service from our beloved search engine Kings that monitors every movement of your website viewers such as their location (provides a very cool world map indicating the Country and City of your visitors), length of visit, depth of visit, browser versions, screen resolution and much more to help you understand your visitors and optimise your site. This plugin adds Google Analytics code without manually editing your website code.

New Host
Signed up with Powweb, but I gotta say, so far I’m not too impressed. I originally ended up with them as I needed a fair amount of space to host my travel pics via Gallery 2.0. Powweb have the ‘One Plan’ thing, it is $7.77USD with 20,000Gb space, 400MB bandwidth, fairly decent spam protection via Spam Assassin and a good suite of addons & default installs of the most popular web software. However the slowness and sometimes damn out-right outages (some lasting HOURS) are becoming quite boring. I have limited time to research a better host, so I’ll give them a chance to improve their service, if they fail to, I will be hunting for a new host real soon.

Update:16/11/2006 - PowWeb seem to have picked up their game, I have not noticed any outages and the site performance seems fine, so at least for the time being I don’t have to hunt for a new host!

From time to time I’ll be fiddling with the look and functionality of the site; love it or hate it, feel free to comment.