kuniform

Linking off to Jonathan Coulton’s blog post reply about the NY Times Magazine article discussing musicians, culture, fame, and how the internet changes the relationship between artist and audience. Coulton is featured as one of a new wave of musicians embodying who represent this trend. His post about making it up as he goes along and taking advantage of the situations he finds himself in is really inspiring.

I’m also linking off to it because he mentions my boy Dave Slusher. Yay! I’m still recovering from the bachelor party of one Brendan Gramer. I hope he’s still breathing.

As I noted earlier, I’ve been using Mint (so tasty and refreshing) along with Dreamhost’s built in stats counter software, I’ve had a bit of Google envy. Upon telling some web developer friends I’m using Mint, they would say things like, “You dummy! Why would you pay $30 for that? Google has it for free.” Thus far my answers have been to say things like, “But Shaun Inman is a person. It’s only $30. Google has $100 billion.” Then I go off on a diatribe about how, though I respect the heck outta Jeffrey Veen, Mint seems better, interfaces, marketing, building to flip sucks, blah blah blah.
Apparently, I need to get out more, and find more interesting friends. Today, though, my right brain was singing its intuitive praises as I read this objective and detailed comparison of Mint and Google Analytics by David Shea. Seems like he’s also redesigning his website. Heck, even his old design kicks the living crap out of mine. Will you be my friend, David? Awwwwwww.

As part of the redesign of kuniform.org, I am updating the navigation and flow of the blog and the site, adding lots of little touches to support community features. This has led me on a journey through the Wordpress plugin directory for resources and I’d like to share the initial list of plugins and my impressions of them with you.

• SilentBits’ SEO Plugins for Wordpress has a great list of search engine optimization plugins that add sweet semantic touches such as a customized title tag for the document and meta description meta keywords for each post, using data from that post. I’m not sure this one will work out for my whole site without customization, but if your site is entirely managed via WordPress, this nifty site map plugin may work for you. It covers both pages and posts you’ve created in WordPress.


• I am ditching the notion of archive links. Nobody has a reason to follow them, and nobody does. Instead, I will be adding related and popular links. For the related posts, I am using WASABI’s WordPress Related Entries 2.0, called “invaluable” by PingMag, dontcha know?


• To link to the most popular entries on the site, I am going to try out Alex King’s Popularity Contest.


• For responding accurately to Google search results, which is one of the primary means the site is found, I’ll try out theundersigned.com’s Landing Sites 1.3


• I already am using Akismet for spam filtering, Social Bookmarks for letting people link to my pithy articles, and Bill Rawlinson’s FeedList for integrating my del.icio.us bookmarks into the site.

That PingMag article has lots of other interesting plugins, listed too. After I launch the redesign I’ll share my war stories on which plugins worked for me and how I got them integrated. Once I know I’ll be using them, I’ll end up donating to each of the authors above for their efforts in creating and supporting these applications.

I finally broke down and installed Shaun Inman’s Mint logging software. For the $30 fee, it is already money well spent. I use Dreamhost as my host and WordPress as my blog software. Setting up my system for using Mint was a snap.

On the Mint support blogs it’s suggested to simply use your WordPress database settings to get Mint running. This made me a bit nervous, so I setup a separate subdomain and database for Mint. All in all, with installing some standard Mint plugins and a neat WordPress plugin for Mint installation took me 45 minutes. Having done it once, doing it again on another site would probably take me 10 minutes.

Dreamhost provides stats software, so what does Mint get me? It ignores robots from search engines, my own visits (once cookied), and provides a readable, usable interface. So far, it’s well worth it. Maybe once I see the traffic unadulterated by extra hits from me and the ‘bots, my ego won’t agree with it!