New Plugins

I’ve finally taken the time to update a few plugins. It’s easier to do those than to upgrade, so I figured I do these first. My hope is by the end of the weekend to also have a page listing out the active plugins that I use at this site. For today, I’ve loaded the following:

• Star Rating – this allows me to put star ratings on my book and movie posts. I’ll still do my quirky movie ratings, but I’ll use the stars to show my Netflix rating. Since Netflix doesn’t allow 1/2 star ratings, sometimes I take a 3 1/2 here and make it a 3 at Netflix, and other times a 4. So this way you’ll see my half star rating and I know which way that half leans.
• Add Graphical Signature – it’ll only show up on my posts until it allows multi-author functionality. It’s just a fun bit of fluff for my posts to be more obviously MINE. Even I sometimes begin reading Denis’ posts and think, “What? I didn’t write that!” before realizing HE wrote it. This way it’s more obvious that it’s my post.
• Further Reading – this plugin provides three recommended posts after the one you read, in case there are other things in the same category that you’d be interested in. I may lower it to two posts instead of three – but I’ll leave it like this for now and see how varied the recommendations are.
• Impress – In the upper right toolbar you can see the stats for this site – number of posts, wordcount, comment count, categories. It’s a simple little plugin and just fun for me to see how far the blog has come.
• Plugins In Use – now up in the page list you’ll see “Plugins In Use” which shows you every single plugin that I use on this website. It was a nasty plugin to set up, with little instruction for someone who is strictly entry-level on PHP coding, but I finally got it to work.