Ask the Oracle and Other New Blog Features (Blog)

[Savage]

Use this thread to discuss the following entry from Steve Pavlina's blog:

Ask the Oracle and Other New Blog Features

[Angela]

How fun this random generator is! Maybe for fun you should add a couple of special blogposts:

Reply hazy -- try again later.

It is decidedly so.

Are you kidding?

Outlook good.

[Savage]

Some of the existing articles could provide funny answers:

The Joy of Sadness - get used to disappointment
Hopeless Situations - game over, buddy
Quitting to Win - time to cut your losses and get out
Consult With Erin - maybe you need a reading
A Better Life - things are looking up
Moving Day - there's a move in your near future
Making Peace With Death - you may want to get your affairs in order
Life After Death - no worries, you'll be OK on the other side
For Love of Evil - the dark side beckons
Perfection - your life is already perfect
Ask Steve - he knows the answer
Ask Steve: Sex - go ahead; I might say yes
Ask Your Guides - they might be able to help when no one else can
Raise Your Standards - ask life for a penny, and that's all you'll get
Humor Skills - you're going to need a better sense of humor
Saying No - sorry, the answer is no
Sharpen the Saw - you need a vacation
Brains Brains Brains - stop living like a zombie
Do It Now - quit playing with the Oracle, and get to work!

[Angela]

Ha! I asked how I could improve my relationship with Danger Man, and I got "Polarized Problem-Solving." So now I'm trying to figure out if I'll get better results from being Jesus or Hitler!

Marriage = The Final Solution

[Savage]

I just added the random post feature to Erin's blog. Since she's more intuitive than I am, her blog is probably a better oracle than mine.

[BChris]

Steve the random link in your blog is awesome since you have a lot of articles. This is great because now I can read interesting articles that I didnt read in the past without looking for them in the archives.

The thing is that it actually makes me want to hit the link to read other ones!

Ohh and one of the best wordpress plugins lately is PhotoDropper(flickr) the plugin automatically generates the credits for the authors of the photos you select.

[Trezker]

The RSS haven't been able to load for me lately. Did you mess up something?
Has anyone else got problems with RSS?
Erin's RSS still works.

[Savage]

Originally Posted by Trezker

The RSS haven't been able to load for me lately. Did you mess up something?
Has anyone else got problems with RSS?
Erin's RSS still works.

Hmmm... It still works for me. Are you using the feed at Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog ?

I ran it through feedvalidator.org, and it checked out as valid.

[The David]

Yes! Thank you! I've been wanting a 'random' page for a long time so I could set
it as my homepage.

[jamestl2]

You didn't tell us about what other plugins you installed

[Savage]

Originally Posted by jamestl2

You didn't tell us about what other plugins you installed

Most are on the admin side, so they don't affect the visitor experience.

Btw, these new features are available on Erin's Blog too.

[jamestl2]

Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina

Most are on the admin side, so they don't affect the visitor experience.

Well, I was just thinking here that members with other blogs could benefit from the knowledge of why you chose to install certain plugins on the admin side too, and how they're helping you .

[Savage]

Originally Posted by jamestl2

Well, I was just thinking here that members with other blogs could benefit from the knowledge of why you chose to install certain plugins on the admin side too, and how they're helping you .

Oh, sure... didn't realize you were asking from that context.

WP-Cache - this is the most critical one for me. It caches all blog posts, so PHP/MySQL usage is greatly reduced. This speeds up page loading and dramatically reduces server load, meaning that you can handle much more traffic on the same hardware. When I turn off caching, the server load spikes to at least 4x its normal level and sometimes to 20x, and the site slows down to a crawl. Without this plugin I'd need much faster hardware (more $$$) to handle the load.

Askimet - Essential for nuking trackback/pingback spam. It has caught more than 60,000 spam attempts on my blog already and continues to catch about 150 more per day. And I don't even have blog comments enabled -- this is all just from trackbacks. Today I installed an Askimet plugin for the forums too, so hopefully most of the spam attempts here will be automatically nuked as well.

WordPress.com Stats - Just installed this one a few days ago. It shows some pretty cool stats, including your top blog posts. I can see that "How to Become an Early Riser" is still #1 by a landslide. I can also see that same article has been getting thousands of hits from StumbleUpon during the past few days. And finally I can see that the "raw food diet" search term is sending me a lot of traffic right now. Most of this data is redundant with my regular web server stats, but it's another way of looking at it.

RSS Signature - Add an HTML signature (copyright notice, links, etc) to the bottom of posts in your RSS feed. Previously I used OZH Better Feed. I just added it to Erin's blog too.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade - I love this plugin! It automatically upgrades a live blog to the latest version of WordPress, including backing up old files and the database, unzipping, deactivating and reactivating plugins, etc. I used it to upgrade Erin's blog, although I haven't tried it on mine yet. This will save a lot of time when each new version of WordPress comes out.

SRG Clean Archives - I used this to create the archives page. Works great.

Google Sitemap Generator - Automatically creates sitemaps and submits them to Google and other search engines. Probably unnecessary for my blog (Google spiders come here every day anyway), but should be a nice addition for most bloggers.

PodPress - I haven't had time to play around with this one yet, but it promises to make it easier to post podcasts and adds some new podcasting features.

Oneclick - Fast installation of new WordPress plugins. Just enter the URL of a new plugins' ZIP file, and it handles the rest. I haven't had a chance to test this yet, but it looks useful.

All of these are available at the WordPress plugins page, or you could do a Google search to find them as well.

Here's a great list of WordPress plugins too.

[Trezker]

I've been using the rss through Firefox. When I click the rss icon on he right side of the URL bar it loads this page http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/feed/atom/

And that doesn't show anything. Some kind of error is broken somewhere.

Your link did work however and I have a working feed again.