Wordpress
The OS Quest uses the Wordpress blogging/content management system.
Wordpress Theme
The theme used is Sandbox by Andy Skelton, Scott Wallick, and other collaborators. While there were many sources of information about Sandbox the following proved especially useful: the Sandbox forums, the Sandbox Designs Competition (many designs to review), and the InternetDuctTape website.
I started out using a Sandbox layout called Shades of Gray by Leslie Franke. You can download the design from the Sandbox Designs Competition site. Leslie provides more details on his website. I’ve modified the design so you can see his original vision at the Sandbox Designs Competition Live Preview (pick Shades of Gray from the Sandbox Designs drop down).
The Shades of Gray design had several features I was looking for. It already had a separate format for asides, a sidebar on the right and a second sidebar along the bottom. So I wouldn’t have to figure out how to do those things. Plus it was a nice clean design.
Wordpress Plugins
The OS Quest uses the following Wordpress Plugins:
Articles by Alex King is used to populate my Articles page.
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator by Dagon Design is used to create my Sitemap page.
FeedBurner Feedsmith by Feedburner is used to redirect my RSS feed to Feedburner. (originally created by Steve Smith)
Full Text Feed by Ronald Heft, Jr. is used to publish a full feed even when the Wordpress <!–more–> tag is used.
GoogleAnalytics by Denis de Bernady is used to easily embed the Google Analytics code in Wordpress. This plugin also turns off Google Analytics tracking when I access the site (and am logged on) so that my usage doesn’t affect the statistics.
Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold is used to create a sitemap and notify search engines whenever the site is updated.
Head Space 2 by John Godley is a plugin to manage meta data. I just started using it and so far I’m just looking at it as a way to manage the new Wordpress 2.3 tags.
Link Harvest by Alex King. I use this to create my Links page. The plugin harvests links used in my posts to create the list. So the links page contains what I’m writing about rather than a manual link list.
Popularity Contest by Alex King is used to track post activity and calculate a “popularity” value. A post gets points for different types of activity. You’ll see each posts popularity value at the bottom of each post page.
Redirection by John Godley is used to manage redirection when the URL to a post or page changes. I started using this when I changed my Wordpress install to be in the site root rather than a sub-directory. Also useful when posts or pages get moved around.
Related Posts by Alexander Malov, Mike Lu & Jon Bourne is used to display the related posts at the bottom of each post.
Search Unleashed by John Godley provides a full text search across posts, pages, comments, URLs and titles. Search results are contextually highlighted and search results from other engines (such as Google) are supported.
Share This by Alex King is used to allow posts and pages to be easily bookmarked. The Share This icon and link is displayed at the end of each post or page. (I’ve modified the share this icon, it’s typically green)
Spam Karma 2 by dr Dav is used to stop comment and trackback spam. While Akismet didn’t do too bad, SK2’s record is nearly 100%.
Wordpress Database Backup by Austin Matzko is used to backup the MySQL database used by Wordpress.
Icons
Some of the icons are from the Mini collection at famfamfam.com.
Last Updated: Oct 19, 2007
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