VirusHead Blog changes and updates:

• WP-EMail – You can email any post now. There’s a link at the bottom of each post that will open a pop-up window, and there’s a tally on the sidebar of the most emailed posts. At the moment, there is only one. I sent myself the Green Day post to test the system. It’s like butter.
• Simple Tagging: I decided to go with the Simple Tagging Plugin rather than continue to use Ultimate Tag Warrior – Simple Tagging is easier for me to use, and it has a lot of features that I really like. The Technorati tags link directly to the tag page at the – guess what – Technorati site, and the others link internally to a page of all the posts with the chosen tag. The extra features I like (and I’m not using all of them) are the ability to list a specified number of related posts, the little menu of suggested tags, and the auto-complete type-ahead dropdown menu to add tags. I never used the heavy Yahoo tag suggestions in UTW. I prefer to do my own indexing regardless of the popularity of key phrases.
• Bad Behavior – I’ve installed this plugin as a first line of defense against spambots. Akismet is already installed to pick up most of the rest. Some people were having trouble every once in a while with seeing the verification image used by Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam. I love Peter’s plug-in, especially since you can add your own words as verifiers; I made up words for fun every once in a while. Still, it’s not worth it if anyone has trouble. I’ll see how well the Bad Behavior/Akismet combination works out. At the moment, Bad Behavior has blocked 3659 access attempts in the last 7 days. The total can be, and is, displayed in the footer.
• Recent Comments List – updated to version 1.9.

You can see all the plugins that I’m using at any given time (care of WP-Plugin List) here.

To Do:

• Create a separate page with Simple Tagging tag cloud. I don’t really want it on the sidebar. I’ve read the documentation, but the page template they refer to simply doesn’t appear and I’m a little stymied. I’ll do a little more research on that. Done 5/27 – but I still need to play with the format.
• Consolidate some of the tags – there are far too many and there is a lot of topic overlap. I still have some hundred or posts that don’t have tags at all.
• Now that this design is well and truly complete, I’m getting tired of it. It would be a real pain to change it now. I’m not using the WP widgets yet – everything has been hand-inserted except for the features that originally came with the SeaBeast theme. I would like it very much if I could figure out how to put the two sidebars on the left while keeping them SEO-friendly. I just prefer to read text that is on the right-hand side of the page.
• Experiment a little bit with web-friendly fonts. Is there a better one than I’m using?
• Figure out how to make the font a little smaller in the footer display of Bad Behavior. Never mind. I just adjusted the code in the plugin.