Want to know what the future has in store for richardflynn.net? Then come and look at the βeta version of the site I’ve been developing. Come and poke around, trying things out, and please, send feedback! I don’t yet know when the new site will be launched definitively, but it’ll be over the course of the next few months. (Written 15th April 2008)

About this Site

This website is powered by WordPress, a superb open-source web-publishing application which runs on PHP and a MySQL database. There are a huge number of plugins available for WordPress: the ones I use are listed further down this page.

The site is coded to conform to published Web standards. The content is written in XHTML and is styled using CSS. Because it conforms to Web standards, the site should be viewable on a large number of browsers, operating systems, and devices. If you have problems viewing any part of this site, it could be because your browser is out of date and doesn’t itself conform to Web standards. If you are using a current version of a browser, however, and are still experiencing problems, please get in touch.

The site is hosted by Pair Networks in Pennsylvania. After contact with a number of different Web hosts, I have found Pair to be very professionally run. They don’t place a huge number of restrictions on their users, and allow you to set up your hosting to work the way you want. Although they are not a bargain host—and they certainly never advertise themselves as such—their prices are competitive, especially considering the level of service they provide. They have always responded to my email support requests within hours, sometimes minutes. Having been so happy with their web-hosting, I recently transferred the registration of the domain richardflynn.net and others to Pair’s subsidiary, PairNIC.

The photos on this site are hosted by Flickr, a website recently bought by Yahoo. In my experience, Flickr is the most user-friendly photo-hosting site on the Web, and as a result a massive community has developed on the site which in turn only drives the site’s development forward. I catalogue the photos on my computer using Apple’s application Aperture, where I store titles, captions, keywords, and location information. I complete the transfer of photos from Aperture to Flickr using Connected Flow’s FlickrExport plugin for Aperture, which takes care of all the photos’ metadata (titles, captions, keywords, etc.). The photos and all metadata are in turn displayed on this site using the WordPress plugin FAlbum.

Here is a list of all the plugins currently at work making this site what it is:

Plugin Author Description
Akismet Matt Mullenweg Akismet fights comment spam on this and millions of other websites. Comments which look like spam are immediately flagged as much, and I’m not bothered with the necessity to moderate a lot of stupid spam comments on this site. To date, I’ve never had a false positive (although I’ve had a few false negatives).
Author Highlight Jonathan Leighton Differentiates comments I have written on the site from those written by others.
Dunstan’s Time Since Michael Heilemann & Dunstan Orchard Displays as a difference the time since an article was written when the reader looks at it. (So, it provides the numbers for something along the lines of ‘This article was written 2 days, 5 hours ago’.)
External Links Denis de Bernardy Marks links to sites other than this one as such by automatically putting the little icon next to the link (the icon doesn’t work in some older, less standards-compliant browsers).
FAlbum Elijah Cornell A plugin for displaying Flickr photosets and photos in a gallery format on your Wordpress site. This is a brilliant plugin (if slightly under-documented), and drives the Photos section of the site.
FireStats Omry Yadan Provides website statistics: where visitors are coming from, what browsers they’re using, what time they’re coming, and other such data.
Get Custom Field Values Scott Reilly I use this to display the “In this article” table-of-contents you’ll see in the sidebar on some longer articles.
Google XML Sitemaps Arne Brachhold This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Configuration Page
Now Reading Rob Miller Allows you to display the books you’re reading, have read recently and plan to read, with cover art fetched automatically from Amazon.
Official Comments Brett Taylor Differentiates comments I have written on the site from those written by others.
Organize Series Plugin Darren Ethier This plugin adds a number of features to wordpress that enable you to easily write and organize a series of posts and display the series dynamically in your blog. This plugin also makes use of (optionally) the Category Icons plugin by Ivan Georgiev. As far as I can tell this plugin is compatible with 1.5+ (including 2.1).
Page Category Plus Andy Staines Produces a list of tags in the write/edit post pages - click to use
Subscribe To Comments Mark Jaquith Allows readers to receive email notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry on which they themselves have commented.
Viper’s Plugins Used Viper007Bond Displays this list of currently active plugins, and allows me to write my own description of plugins!
WP Movie Ratings Paul Goscicki Wordpress movie rating plugin, which lets you easily rate movies
WP-Footnotes Simon Elvery Allows a user to easily add footnotes to a post.
Welcome Visitor! Kaf Oseo Provides the ‘welcome’ text at the top-left of the homepage. Using this plugin means that I can update that text using the WordPress administration interface rather than having to edit the template files on the server.
WordPress Database Backup Austin Matzko On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Navigate to Manage → Backup to get started.
WordPress Export Eric Pierce Export WordPress data to multiple formats
WordPress.com Stats Andy Skelton Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.
iTunesSpy crea-doo.at iTunesSpy is a script to add the songs you are currently listening to in iTunes to your WordPress blog. You must also have a program running on your local machine to send the songs to your blog, for Windows use ituneswatcher 2, which could be found here.
inlineRSS Cal Demaine Allows inline RSS feeds from any source in any format (hopefully). Click here to edit the sources and here to edit the xslt file. Usage in templates: inlineRSS('feedname'); Usage in posts / pages !inlineRSS:feedname. This flavour uses multiple processing engines.