items off the beaten path….

…wherein commander other rambles for a bit about the new version of Wordpress, blogging in general, and other stuff that have made an impression on him recently.

For those of you who don’t know, commander other is a professional photographer with a peculiar bent in that he doesn’t feel that a “professional” needs to cram his photographs down the gaping maw of the world’s presumed interest. I serve my clients, I have fun with it, and they’re mostly happy with me, except when I take on more work than I can actually swallow effectively. But, unbeknownst to many of my bloggy friends, commander other is also a bit of a quality assurance geek. Long, long ago, I moved up from a systems configurator position and took over a quality management position for a small value-added reseller of Dell Computers in Albuquerque, NM and within the space of six months managed to walk them through ISO-9001 certification without any credentials or direct quality management experience. Prior to that, I had been beta-testing for a couple of software companies, and over the years since then, have been an active beta and alpha-tester, sometimes paid, even, for about three dozen companies ranging from the gaming industry to business software. I recently stepped back into quality management for a company that makes software that serves the health care industry, so I now spend most of my waking hours (and many of my sleeping hours) hunting bugs and coordinating communications between our client and our development on production issues. After fifteen years working for myself as a photographer, this has been a very interesting trip back into the corporate world, and nearly-ironically, I’m loving it.

All that to say, I’m very handing at pointing out problems with things. Hence my (not so much recently) bent for photographic snarkery: the age-old “What’s wrong with this picture”, with a subjective twist. Coincidental to our recent move and taking on the new job, Wordpress has released a new version (2.5) and a new update to that version (2.5.1) in which some of the most heinous downgrades to Usability issues were undertaken in the name of progress. I won’t bore you by rehashing old tirades and conversations on that issue; they’re all google-able and Wordpress-searchable. However, as our fabulous designer and I were also updating my websites, I learned a few things about plugins that may or may not interest my fellow self-hosted Wordpress users.

1. Whether you have upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 or 2.5.1 or not, the first thing you need to do is remove your Wordpress Stats plugin. Yes, remove it. Get rid of it. Then, go make yourself a FREE account with Google and sign up for Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s efficient, and it doesn’t have any appreciable impact on your page-load like Wordpress Stats does. Yes, that’s right. If you noticed that the otherwhirled has magically started loading pages a little faster recently, it’s not because I haven’t been posting so much, it’s because I removed Wordpress Stats and a few other plugins. Not only does Google Analytics give you more information, but you can also look at it just as topologically as Wordpress Stats does (if you don’t care about the details), and even topologically, it’s still a more accurate report.
2. Here’s another plugin you don’t really need: Ultimate Tagwarrior and it’s later, more refined pseudo incarnation of Simple Tags. They’re good, really they are. They’re helpful, even. If you need to make site-wide changes to your tags. Once you’ve made those changes (if you needed to), at the very least, disable them. Having either of these running as an active plugin behind your site also increases the slowness, and 2.5/2.5.1 does actually have a fairly efficient tagging system now. Use that instead. If you need to convert tags, reattribute tags to posts or something like that, active the plugin, do it, then turn it off. While I am greatly appreciative to the Simple Tags developers, my sites are all faster for not running them all the time.
3. On that general subject, go look at your plugins and see what’s sitting there uselessly, hardly ever touched and contributing nothing to each page-load until you do “touch” it. If it ain’t doing anything on a per-page-load basis, deactivate it.
4. You don’t need a plugin to manage your robots.txt, so if you’re using something like KBRobots.txt plugin, deactivate it after you make your changes. All that one does is provide an editing window for your KBRobots.txt file anyway. A smart blogger like you knows how to use a text editor and an FTP program, right? Drop that one.
5. You don’t really need a “Maintenance Mode” plugin, either. I hope, though, if you use one, you have it deactivated when you’re not making changes to your blog template or structure.
6. I don’t think that non-tech bloggers really need other little gimmick plugins like the Wordpress Admin Bar (which I admit is handy, but there’s this weird thing called browser bookmarks that work just as well), or the Wordpress Dashboard Editor, because (again), if you setup your important admin pages in your bookmarks, what do you even need to stop by the dashboard for? Wordpress will tell you if it needs updating, and the developer blogs that get gratuitously shoved into the dashboard by default are generally pretty boring to read, like this post is.

So there you have it. Nifty tips from the jerk-wad, Wordpress-loving blogger with not enough time on his hands. I had to write this hugely detailed summary status last night, though, so the writing bug was in me. Which reminds me I need to come up with something for the next Carnival of Liberals. I’m tired of missing those.