The Inside And The Outside Of Freedom Ideas Blog

Posted on September 5, 2007
Filed Under Blogging advice

I finally decided on a design(-er) of this blog so here are some things that make this blog run efficiently from the inside and what makes it look good on the outside:

The Inside

The blog of course uses Wordpress as its main “engine”. It’s not my first experience with Wordpress since I already use it with my tennis blog.

Then there are all sorts of useful plugins:

1. Akismet spam plugin which comes with the Wordpress install files and just needs to be activated. It’s doing a great job.

2. The All in One SEO Pack takes care of titles and descriptions of the pages and makes sure that there is no duplicate content on the blog

3. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator does exactly that: it creates a true sitemap of the site which gives you an additional link to every post you make and thus prevents it from dropping into Supplemental Index (which supposedly doesn’t exist anymore )

Here is the link to the sitemap of this blog if you want to check it out.

4. Feedburner FeedSmith redirects the original Wordpress feeds to Feedburner feeds. This gives you a much better overview of your readers and you can track all sorts of stats with it.

5. Google Sitemaps plugin generates an XML version of your sitemap which you then submit to Google in your Webmaster tools. This helps Google find and index all your pages much faster.

6. Simple Tags allows me to quickly create Technorati tags at the end of the article. I keep forgetting to do that.

7. Antisociable is a hacked plugin by Andy Beard which puts the social bookmarking icons at the bottom of my posts but with a nofollow attribute. Smart move!

8. Wordpress stats plugin gives me a quick look at the number of visitors that visited my blog, where visitors came from, what they are clicking and so on.

The Outside

I came across this clean Wordpress design called Vertigo Blue Theme by Brian Gardner and liked it on the first sight.

I emailed Brian if he could modify it a little bit and make it unique.

Brian was very quick to respond and modified the theme in one day for a very affordable price.

So that’s it.

I hope you like the design and let me know if there are some useful Wordpress plugins that I may be missing.

Share and Enjoy: