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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!