It’s been about a week since I flipped the switch and moved our site to the new server. Everything seems to be working (fingers crossed!), so I thought I’d post a little something about the redesign.

First off, I’d like to make it clear that I am lazy. Extremely lazy. There used to be a time when I thought nothing of spending days to hand-code a web site, but now I just don’t have the patience. So if someone else has a better idea, I’d rather use their code then pull my hair out trying to do the same thing by myself. Today’s open-source Internet is perfect for my lazy tendencies, but I still want to give credit where it’s due. So here’s a list of software, plugins, and resources that I used to redesign bdline.net.

The Basics

• WordPress – the last version of bdline.net was created with software that generated static HTML pages. The result looked like a blog, but in reality it was a mess. Now we’re running the site with WordPress, which is 100% better. Finally we have a true dynamic web site, not something that looks like it was hacked together with string and tin cans.
• A Small Orange – our web host. We don’t have giant server needs for bdline.net, but the switch to a A Small Orange gives us more options at half the cost of what we were paying before. That savings is going into the Borderline Booze & Bail Fund.
• Theme – For the new look of bdline.net, I ended up modifying an existing theme, Ambient Glo by Nathan Parikh. The main changes were modifying the header image, removing the 3rd column, and tweaking the fonts a bit.

WordPress Plugins

• FeedBurner FeedSmith – Redirects all traffic from the default WordPress RSS feeds automagically to our FeedBurner feed.
• Flickr Photo Album for WordPress – This is a two-for-one deal. The plugin accesses your Flickr account and lets you easily post your pics with WordPress. It also comes with a sidebar widget to display Flickr photos, which I think looks better than the standard Flickr badge.
• Get Recent Comments – WordPress has a sidebar widget to display recent comments, but this plugin does a better job.
• Swift SMTP – Our e-mail is handled by Google, so this plugin lets us use Google’s servers to send comment notifications.
• User Photo – See that photo of me in the headline? It’s there because of this plugin.
• Viper’s Video Quicktags – The WordPress post editor thinks it knows more than you do when writing a post, rewriting the code and making it nearly impossible to embed Flash videos. This plugin fixes that issue.
• WP Super Edit – Another plugin for the post editor. Adds some nice options for formatting that normally are not available.

Miscellaneous

• Podcast Pickle Player – there are a lot of Flash players out there that read podcast feeds, but the Pickle Player is the nicest one I’ve seen. Plus, we love the Pickle.