Inspired by a kwip by Mayank I thought I’d share with you my google reader list.

Click to Download.

My RSS list is very diverse but nicely categorised – all you need to do is import it to your RSS feed!

If you feel like sharing your RSS feed list feel free to link to it in the comments – I’m always on the lookout for new blogs!

Rhys suggested I write some design tutorials – so thats just what I’m going to do. I’m going to teach you how to design your blog, graphics, CSS, HTML and all! This is effectively a rewrite of my previous tutorial on how to customise WordPress, only in much greater detail.

You can view the final theme here.

I’m going to assume you have basic skills when it comes to web design or at least some concept of design! No tiny fonts and clashing colours here please! You’ll also need to have wordpress installed. Please also keep this page open, its the most useful thing when making themes!

Some other useful pages are Using Themes, Theme Development and Templates.
click to read more »

ahh, the wordpress plugins post, another way of saying ‘I dont know what to blog about’ or in my case, ‘I have something to blog its just not ready yet’ It’ll be exciting though! (at least thats the plan!)

Sorry about the downtime yesterday – especially to all my hostees! May, Kai, Guy and Taylor. The server was being DOS’d apparently so they had to move us to a new IP. I guess thats the risk with shared hosting, if one person pisses off a hacker we’re all screwed! Now do you see why I don’t rely on my own server! I spent all of yesterday moving my files to my box.net account!

Without further ado, These are in no particular order.

1. Advanced Admin Menus
I worship this plugin! It converts all the sub links in your wordpress admin, under dashboard, write, manage etc into drop downlinks so you don’t have to click, presentations, wait for the page to load and then click theme editor. You just hover and select theme editor! Simple but SO effective.

2. Spotmilk
Beautiful with the above plugin – it makes the wordpress admin pretty, theres a blue theme and a black theme. (to get the black you uncomment a line of code – its easy enough to do)

3. Category Tagging
Creates a tag cloud with all your categories.

4. Comment Relish
Sends an email to a user on their first comment.

5. Digital Finger Print
Lets you find the people who steal your rss feed and display it on their site. You make up a random string of words and set up a custom google search to find them, if your reading my feed you’ll see some random words at the top of it, thats my digital finger print, Its actually a pretty good idea!

6. Enforce www. Preference
Does what its name implies, if someone goes to eruanna.net the url is changed to www.eruanna.net, I wanted some consistancy.

7. FeedSmith
Directs people to your feedburner feed not your wordpress /~rss one. So you can concentrate all your readers in one!

8. FlickrRSS
Everyone knows about this plugin, it shows your recent flickr photos on your website.

9. Full Text Feed
In wordpress 2.1 it automatically places a read more link after the first few lines in your feed, this gets rid of that nasty habit.

10. Sig2Feed
Allows you to add your signature to the bottom of your feed, or anything you want for that matter, images, links and text.

11. Sideblog
I’ve had a few people email me about this one so here it is. It shows a list of ‘mini updates’ in the sidebar instead of getting random @soandso comments from twitter! Its all managed from the wordpress admin.

12. Simple Tags
Adds technorati tags to the ends of your posts, if you remember to add them though!

13. Related Entries
Shows a list of entried related to the one your viewing.

14. WordPress Mobile Edition
I used to use this and I only just rediscovered it, it makes your site viewable on PDA’s and Smart Phones, it works, I’ve tested it!

15. WP-Grins
Lets you have clickable smilies in both the wordpress admin panel and the comments form. Especially useful if you’ve used my tutorial on Changing the Default WordPress Smilies.

16. WP Database Backup
Great for the paranoid like me! Emails a back up of your SQL database to you.

17. WP-Cache
Caches your site – particularly useful if your being dugg – apparently its helped but I’ve never been dugg so I wouldn’t know!