Behind the Music, er, Blog

Time for more of that silly meta stuff I do on Sundays.

I changed a few things this week. Some of them aren’t really visible. I had a bit of a snafu with the Facebook linkage because, long story short, I realized the Facebook app I made for it was still in developer mode, and had to put it into production mode, and this was a little harder (rather, more confusing) than I expected. I broke it for a few days. Whoops. I also replaced the time to read/progress bar plugin, because the one I was using put the reading time in the summaries that appear on the index, which makes no sense at all (plus some of them didn’t work at all).

So, here’s a current list of what plugins I use to power this blog, in case you’re curious:

Akismet — The gold standard for anti-spam, of course.
Author and Post Statistic Widgets — Adds some stats, although come to think of it I’m not sure if anyone but me can see them.
Captcha by BestWebSoft — Another way of keeping spambots out.
Creative Commons Configurator — Used to show my CC license info on all pages.
Dashboard Wordcount — Something only for me. It shows the total wordcount of the blog on my dashboard.
Disable XML-RPC Pingback — Another one I’m not sure I still need. I should probably check. But it’s an abuse-prevention plugin.
Easy Google Fonts — I added this to support certain theme fonts.
ImageInject — A very awesome plugin I use to provide most feature images on this blog.
Jetpack by WordPress.com — Pretty much essential, although I don’t have everything turned on. It adds stats and a bunch of other features.
Simple Tasks & Todo’s — This is how I keep track of things I want to write about. Currently 61 topics in the queue, but to be fair, a lot of them could probably be condensed.
Social Media Auto Publish — This is what I use to publish to Facebook. I may have it go to Twitter in the future. Would have to pay money for that.
Swifty Bar — This is the new time to read/progress bar plugin. I like it a lot better. It adds social buttons, too, which I’m not totally sold on, but hey, they’re there.
UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore — I use this to back up the entire blog to my Google Drive account, which is pretty cool. The setup was an absolute bear, though.
User Switching — A necessary tool for when I have guest posts, so they don’t have to login and do things themselves.
Wordfence Security — As the name suggests, it’s a security plugin. Does things like IP ban people who try to break into accounts.
WP Favorite Posts — Lets people “favorite” posts. How this differs from the Like system, I’m not sure, but it’s there.
WP Statistics — Another stats plugin, which I sometimes use in addition to the Jetpack one.
WP User Avatar — The built-in avatar options kinda suck, so this expands them to be more useful.
Yoast SEO — One I should probably get rid of because I really don’t use it much. It’s also broken the site a few times, which I can’t say for any other plugin.

So, there you go! I’m on the latest version of WordPress and all of those plugins. They are very handy. Most of them, anyway.

I didn’t mention it before, but I finally fixed the issue with scheduled posts duplicating on Facebook. It seems that scheduling was fixed in the WP core, which meant I no longer needed the scheduling fix plugin, which was causing the duplicates. So, that doesn’t happen anymore. Hooray!