WordPress After 8 Months

Early this year, I switched from Movable Type to WordPress for my blog. I’ve been very happy with that decision. So I thought I’d give an update on how I feel after using WordPress for eight months.

First, I should say that the speed issue hasn’t bothered me like I thought it would. I haven’t added caching, but may still do so at some point. Let me know if things feel slow.

Second, I’ve changed the which plugins I use, so let me give you the current list.

1. NEW — Twitter Friendly Links let’s me use my own domain for short URLs instead of Bit.ly or TinyURL.com
2. NEW — RF Twitter Post will update Twitter when I write a new post. I’m testing this one and hoping the next version adds support for Twitter Friendly Links
3. NEW — SexyBookmarks makes it easy for readers to share things they find interesting
4. Aksimet filters comments from spammers of which there are many
5. All in One Adsense and YPN handles the ads on my site though I have them turned off now
6. FD Feedburner Plugin lets me use FeedBurner for my RSS feeds
7. Google Analyticator adds the Google Analytics tracking code
8. KB Robots.txt allows me to add my sitemap to my robots.txt file
9. Markdown allows me to write using Markdown syntax
10. Recently Popular highlights what posts people find interesting
11. Simple Google Sitemap automatically creates a sitemap for me
12. Twitter lets you know exactly what I’m up to at all times
13. WP-DB-Backup makes it easy to back up the content on my site
14. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin suggests additional posts that relate to the one you’re reading

Since January, I’ve stopped using Automatic Timezone because putting WordPress 2.8 and PHP 5 together makes the daylight savings time magic work.

Third, I was able to find several WordPress themes that I liked and get them installed fairly easily. And switching between them is simple.

Overall, I’m still very happy.

2009-12-05: I spent some time optimizing WordPress which you can read about here.