Adventures in WordPress

I am pleased and quite amazed at how wonderful a framework this WordPress is.  I was amazed just using the WordPress.com site to get a taste of it, but now that I am hosting my own website, I use the WordPress framework to run it.  And it is SOOOO configurable with all the plug-ins available.  The thing is, there are SOOOOO many plug-ins available.  I’ve been working with different ones to try to get a functional yet interactive experience, from Facebook and Google+ interaction to being able to get to my Picasa albums.  There are lots of things to choose from, but for those of you also considering using WordPress, here are the plug-ins I’ve been using thus far to help get this great experience going:

• Picasa interactivity:
  • PIcasa Express x2 — it’s a plugin that when writing a post, allows you to connect to your Picasa Web photo gallery, select an album or pictures, then add them into your post.  It then uses another plug-in to help display the photos with a slick interface (I’m currently using HighSlide) all while the photos get saved and loaded from Picasa, not your site.
  • PIcasa Albums — I’m not using it currently now, but it can quickly and easily create an album page for your site that is linked to the pics in your Picasa site, again while not having to copy the pictures locally.
• Social Sharing:
  • Sexy Bookmarks — sounds all sexxxxy right?  It certainly is, but sexy in terms of slick interactivity with your WordPress site.  I’ve spent most of the day today trying out different options, with of course each one doing something that the other didn’t, and me wishing that there was one that did both.  Well, I got my wish:  Sexy Bookmarks is awesome and lets you customize and add which social services to connect to, as well as shows metrics associated with the post.  A must, if you want social integration.
• Tag Cloud:
  • Better Tag Cloud — another type of feature that there are tons of options out there.  This is the one that I found to be the least obtrusive and the most powerful, and actually doesn’t break the search when you click on a tag within the cloud.  Some of the others I tried wouldn’t return any results if I clicked on a tag, like hotness.  And when Hobie wants his hotness, he wants his hotness now.

So to anybody out there who is just getting started on the WordPress train, good luck and enjoy.  I’m blown away by how user-friendly and configurable it is, without losing any functionality and power.

That was a way geeky post.  Sorry if your brain just melted.