A Man, His Horse and His Dog
From the “The Devil and Miss Prym”
by Paulo Coelho
Once upon a time, a man, his horse and his dog were traveling along a road. As they passed by a huge tree, it was struck by lightning and they all died. But the man failed to notice that he was no longer of this world and so he continued walking along with his two animal companions.
Technology: cms plug-ins themes web hosting company website wordpress
by Touch Of Zen
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The Birth of TouchOfZen.net
The idea of creating a web site to keep my collection of notes and experiences from work and life has been in my mind for quite a few years. There were many times I took the first step, I started creating something but never got to the end. This time was different though. I guess it was the name of the site that I chose that inspired me or something else, but nevertheless, the idea has now taken shape and form.
As for the geeky details, these are the parts under the hood that power up TouchOfZen.net.
Hosting Company
One of the main objectives in choosing a host company was an affordable feature-rich plan. A necessary requirement was also to have ssh access for ease of administration and maintenance. After comparing many hosting companies, the winner was GreenGeeks.com.
GreenGe
eks offers a plan called “Eco Site Web Hosting”. It features unlimited Web space, bandwidth, domains, email accounts and MySQL databases and a free domain name for life. GreenGeeks also provides cPanel, the most popular and easiest to use control panel to administer various aspects of the website and numerous other tools and software for building and maintaining a robust website.
But the most eye-catching feature of GreenGeeks is that it’s a certified green, Eco-friendly web hosting company. GreenGeeks buys wind energy credits to offset the energy consumption and to put more energy back into the grid which was produced by wind power technology. Furthermore it implements an overall green strategy in its day-to-day operations.
Content Management System – Blogging
The first version of the website was built using Joomla, one of the most powerful open source Content Management Systems (CMS), used for building from simple websites to complex corporate applications. The blog part of the website was built using b2evolution, a blog script featuring multiple blogs, categories, skins, search function, multiple languages, search engines friendly URLs, etc.
However, at some point my attention was caught by WordPress, a popular blogging software with focus on ease of use, elegance, performance and a huge selection of themes and plug-ins. After a time consuming but fun :-) migration, this is the final result.
WordPress Themes
My objective was to find a clear minimalistic theme that would actually reflect the name of the site. I’ve tried several themes and at the end I chose this one:
* Emptiness, Version 1.13.3, by Cliffano Subagio
A minimalistic theme that supports header and background images and a white background. Simple and clean with very lightweight HTML and CSS.
During my trial, the following themes would serve as good alternatives as well:
* Apricot 1.2, by Oliver Baty
* Basic2Col 3.1.2, by Kristin K. Wangen
* Codium Extend 1.0.9, by Henri Labarre
* cp-minimal 1.1.1, by Christian Proell
* Hybrid 0.9, by Justin Tadlock
* Oulipo 1.0.9.2, by A. Mignolo
* Pilcrow 1.0, by Automattic
* Platform 1.2.1, by PageLines
* SimpleDark 1.2.11, by Justice
* simpleX 1.3.3, by Chandra Maharzan
* Snow Summit 1.0.5, by weddingthemes.marriagescene
* Twenty Ten 1.2, by the WordPress team
WordPress Plugins
Based on my needs, I tried to keep plug-ins to the minimum and install only the necessary ones. The following plug-ins are used in general, even though some might be deactivated at certain times:
Advertising
Advertising Manager 3.4.19, by Scott Switzer
Breadcrumb Navigation
Breadcrumb NavXT Version 3.8.1, by John Havlik
Commnent and Trackback Spam Protection
Akismet 2.5.3, by Automattic
WordPress Hashcash 4.6 by Elliott Bac
Contact Form
ONW Simple Contact 2.0.1, by John P. Bloch
Facebook Share Button
FaceBook Share 1.9.2, by Appointy.com
Facebook Like Button
Facebook OpenGraph I Like Button 1.2, by Radu Boncea
PDF & Print Button
PDF & Print Button Joliprint 1.1.5, by Joliprint
Posts and Pages Indexing
Brog Indexor 1.3, by Brogol
Quotes plug-in
Shantz WordPress QOTD 1.2.2, by Shantanu Goel
Web Analytics
WP SlimStat 2.3, by Camu
That’s about it. Should you have any questions, comments or suggestions or would like to post an article or even start blogging, please contact me.
