www.markpude.com

Alright, so I’ve let it sit a couple of days and think I’m pretty happy with the new setup I’ve got going here. As I mentioned before I was looking for a bunch of plug-ins to make my life easier in that I don’t have to update several websites at the same time (this one, facebook, etc). I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of things like that available.

As I promised before, I will list the plug-ins that I ended up with including a brief description of each.

1 - Contact Form 7 – Very simple contact form generator.  This one I probabaly could have done on my own, but I’m lazy.

2 - Easy AdSense – Added Google AdSense. I don’t anyone comes to this site let alone clicks on the ads, but oh well.

3 - Fotobook – This is a pretty slick plug-in that grabs all of my facebook pictures and stores them on the site. It also has cron capability to periodically check for new pictures. See 7 to see how this is implemented. Check it out via the Photos tab above.

4 - Lifestream – This was the last one I added. It grabs RSS feeds from a whole host of services including Facebook status, and things I watch on Hulu. Check it out from the Lifestream tab at the top of the page.

5 - MapMyRide Widget – This pulls off of my MapMyRun.com RSS feed to display the most recent workout I’ve logged. I had to do significant customization to this one. I wasn’t a big fan of how much information it posted, so I changed it.

6 - ShareThis – This adds the “Share This” link at the bottom of each post/page. I don’t expect this feature to ever be used, but it makes the website look more legitimate since you see that sort of thing all over the intarweb these days.

7 - Utopia Cron – I think this guy is a very slick piece of work. Its a pseudo cron job manager. Basically whenever someone loads the website, it checks the time to see if any cron jobs need to be run. This is what I use to periodically update the Fotobook stream.

8 - Wordbook – This one interfaces with Facebook to tell people there when something new is posted here. Its really the only evidence on Facebook that this site even exists.

9 - WordPress PDA & iPhone Plugin – This little guy formats the site differently when it is accessed via a mobile device. Again, not something anyone other than myself will likely ever use.

Finally, I added a Zune tab above that just includes my Zune card or whatever its called so you can see what music I’ve been listening to.

This is a long post. I will end it abruptly.

So, in an effort to force myself to use the website a bit more, I went through and did a little work on it today.  Basically my problem is that I don’t want to update 40 different things with the same information…  By 40, I basically mean 2… I really don’t feel like updating my Facebook and website stuff when I really want things to be identical.

I went fishing around through WordPress’s extensive plugin library looking for things that will simultaneously update my facebook and website at the same time.  I was pleasantly surprised to find quite a few options.  I’m still in the process of playing with them to figure out which ones I like and which ones I don’t.  Maybe when I’m finished I’ll post which plugins I ended up with.