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A host of advice, tutorials and widgets can be found on the internet for WordPress. There seems to be so much that it’s difficult to decide where to look and who to trust. So the road to a decent looking blog and a useful set of tools is already looking like it will take longer than expected.

So far I have altered the permalink settings, added a whole load of XML-RPC Ping Services and taken a look at a number of widgets that look promising… and at some point I need to change the default theme to something more suitable.

So here’s where I’m up to:-

Permalink Settings

I finally settled on the following custom format:

/%category%/%postname%/

…which should help indexing on search engines.

XML-RPC Ping Services

I thought I should make an effort to add a few more ping services to the default list of one. So now the list of ping services has grown to include the following:

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

Promising Widgets

1. Akismet
   This seems to be a no-brainer and is extremely easy to setup.
   I already run a village website with a phpbb forum area. That forum has clearly shown me that spam control is of the utmost importance.
   So after a quick hop over to WordPress.com to register for my API key I’m up and running with spam control - and in my book anything that helps the fight against spam has got to be good.
2. Ultimate Tag Warrior
   This widget looks very promising and will no doubt be installed shortly. It should allow me to tag posts very easily. Again, it’s another way of improving indexing and possibly a good way to view related posts - more “playing” required!
3. Sociable
   This should allow me to add a bunch of links at the bottom of my posts for del.icio.us, digg, Furl etc.

Widgets still to find

1. Google Sitemaps
   I’m sure there is something out there that will make my job of maintaining a Google sitemap much easier.
2. Advertising module
   What I’m looking for is a simple module to help me include and manage adverts on the site.

I’ll let you know later in the week how I’m getting on in the land of WordPress customisation.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 22nd, 2007 at 9:52 pm and is filed under WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.