Buzzsonic.com

I’ve been using the blogging software WordPress for around three years now and in all of that time there really is nothing to touch it. Why? Its free (Open Source), it has a massive user base and support network, plug-ins, mods, widgets and themes galore, oh and did I mention it doesn’t cost a penny?

Of course free doesn’t always mean great but in this case, you get what you don’t pay for. I have tried literally hundreds of mods over the years, different themes/skins and modifications. Basically I like to tinker and I think I’m getting closer to my ideal WordPress install (at least for my needs).

Buzzsonic.com (as of today) runs on WordPress v2.0.2, so its not the latest install (which is v2.1.2). Anyway, I thought I’d list my top ten (or eleven!) modifications which I’m finding the most useful right now. This could well change soon but these are what I consider the most useful WordPress mods.

1. Glossy Blue Theme- For a simple, quick overhaul of the default WordPress look this neat two column Web 2.0-ish looking theme is one of the easiest ways to get a cool looking make-over. A close second was Glued Ideas Subtle which you might go for if you prefer a three column look. Honorable mentions go to Misty Look and Semiologic (I’m using an older install of this theme here). Read the rest of this entry »

Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror looks at how the increased bandwidth of a popular blog can throttle a Website and offers some tips. In one way its a nice problem to have as it means you’re getting traffic but there are some straight forward tips here to cutting down on bandwidth usage. The biggest culprit for many is images, there are enough third party image hosting solutions (Flickr is the one which immediately springs to mind of course) around for that to not to be an issue anymore. Also as Jeff mentions, your RSS feed is a bandwidth leech. Again services like FeedBurner can snuff out this problem.

Of course we’ve never had Website meltdown here at Buzzsonic, though we got an indication of how bandwidth can spike within minutes of a popular story being linked to by a news site when Slashdot picked up on a story and bandwidth usage went up fifty fold within hours.

Related Reading

We Got Slashdotted and Survived (Buzzsonic.com)
Using Amazon S3 As An Image Hosting Service (Coding Horror)

OK, as you can see if you click on any of the category links or archives we’re having major problems (php errors) right now as well as going through a webhost move and several database issues so please have patience. I’m hoping everything will be sorted out by the weekend OK. And there will be more posting  asap. Thanks for the patience !