Website Information

Hosting

This site is currently hosted by Dreamhost on their base shared hosting plan. They are very affordable and work well for lower-traffic blogs like this one. With one-click WordPress installs (among other software), a free included domain name, and an easy to use admin panel, it couldn’t be easier to switch to self-hosting. I’ve heard that some people have huge issues with downtime, but I haven’t had any problems as of yet, even when linked to by WOW Insider.

Shameless self-promotion, but if you use the code SHADESOFKAE to sign up at Dreamhost, you will get a $70 discount, and I will get a referral bonus as well.

WordPress

This blog uses the WordPress software, and I really love it. It’s so configurable and has a huge adoption audience, which means that there are tons of themes, plugins and tutorials out there on the interwebs.

Plugins

These are all plugins that I’ve been using for a while and would recommend:

Akismet – spam filter that you can’t live without
CommentLuv – enhanced comments, including linking to a commenter’s most recent post on their own blog
Fast Secure Contact Form – contact form that will filter through Akismet, and even provide stats about the browser/OS of the sender
FD Feedburner Plugin – redirects your WordPress feeds to your Feedburner url if you have one
Google Analytics for WordPress – Enables Google analytics on your site in the simplest way possible
Google XML Sitemaps – generates a site map for search engines
jQuery Archive List Widget – collapsible archive widget
Powered by Wowhead – an easy way to enable WOWhead item mouseovers
Subscribe to Comments Reloaded – enables anyone to signup for email notifications on comments, even if they haven’t left one themselves
TinyMCE Signature – adds my signature to every post
Twitter Tools – allows me to notify Twitter when I publish a new post
WordPress.com Stats – adds statistics to your blog – this is used by free WordPress.com sites, and is invaluable
WP-DBManager – the tool I use to backup my database. I do a weekly backup and email it to myself
wp-jquery-lightbox – shows images in a nice popup when you click on them
WP-PageNavi – enables page number navigation of posts and archives, instead of the default “older” and “newer”
WP Render Blogroll Links – outputs all the links I have in my full blogroll onto a page
Hyper Cache – caches pages for faster loading (note that to use Hyper Cache properly with WPtouch below, I chose to reject the user agents (mobile device types) that WPtouch supports – this means that mobile device pages don’t cache, but do allow you to switch back and forth between mobile and standard themes)
WPtouch – mobile theme that shows up when viewing the site on a mobile device

Theme

I designed my theme from scratch, which was a huge effort, but something I really enjoyed. I’ve done a lot of dabbling in web design before, as well as having experience with PHP, so it wasn’t a huge stretch for me.

If you’re interested in designing your own theme from scratch, or just learning how it all works, I would highly recommend visiting these links: