Colophon

The website is hosted at Rackspace and runs WordPress on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The theme is based on Pinboard, which I modified to behave less pathologically. You can download or fork that child theme on Github if you like.

Some posts use footnotes, which come from the really slick Markdown on Save Improved plugin. Code snippets are formatted using Easy Google Syntax Highlighter. I got rid of syntax highlighting of code snippets because all the plugins that do that kind of work were including boatloads of javascript that nobody ever used.

Comments are handled by Disqus, comment spam is handled by Akismet, broken links are handled by Broken Link Checker.

Photos come from an unnecessarily elaborate setup that gets Lazyest Gallery and Dropbox talking together. The fancy photo pop-out effect comes from Lightbox Plus.

The “Related Posts” feature comes from the venerable YARPP plugin. The Slideshare oEmbed support comes from SlideShare Embeds.

I’m sensitive about my keeping control of my information, so I collect the data from all my social networks here.

Some posts come from Twitter, which are automatically posted by a heavily modified version of Twitter Digest I call Twitter Sucker. Some posts come from Tumblr and Goodreads, which are automatically posted by FeedWordPress. We suck up the RSS feeds and turn them into posts. For Tumblr, the RSS feeds leave a lot to be desired, so I point FeedWordPress at my own version of the tumblr-rss tool to clean then up. Google+ posts were reposted here by Google+ Crossposting, but I’ve mostly stopped using that.

All of these automatic feeds link to the original images by default. I periodically run Cache Images to automatically download those images and host them on this site instead. That’s good for performance, ensures I have my own copy of all the images I post, and is the neighborly thing to do, since I’m not borrowing anyone else’s bandwidth. I wish I could run it in a cron job.

The site is licensed under a Creative Commons license, and we tell everyone about that using the Creative Commons Configurator plugin.

Everything is backed up using WordPress Backup to Dropbox, which is amazing.

If you’re using the Google Analytics Dashboard, as I was, you’ll want to periodically clean out the hundreds of thousands of transients you’ve accumulated in your wp_options table. I put it in my theme because I’m too lazy to build a separate plugin or patch GAD.