1. About me

Depending on the interests of the reader, there is either not much or a lot to say about me. I'm male, mathematically I've been polluting this planet for about 40 years, but that's just a number. Sometimes, I feel younger, sometimes older - it really depends. I live in Austria, a small country in central Europe, often confused with Australia, to which many Austrians reply with: Sorry, no kangaroos here :)

In my young years, I studied electrical engineering at a college but I never took a job in the corresponding industry. During school, in my early teen years, I already realized my future interests would concentrate on the digital world, but nevertheless I finished the college for the sake of a solid education.

Later, I studied physics and computer science, and especially the latter has been my main point of interest for the past 20 years. It's also the industry I work in, being responsible for parts of the IT infrastructure of a medium sized enterprise.

I like weird things like hang- or para gliding and generally enjoy viewing the world from above as it looks so much more peaceful when observed from the bird's-eye view. I also love to travel and have been visiting many interesting places of the world. During the winter season, I love skiing - you have to love it when you live where I do; skiing is one of out national sports and its popularity over here can be compared with the popularity of hockey, basketball or baseball in the United States.

I enjoy music in many incarnations, from classical to heavy metal, I like good movies or just behaving old-school and reading a good book or going to the theater. I generally dislike the way the entertainment industry works and I'm not a big fan of mainstream entertainment.

Every now and then, I play MMORGs, but I don't have enough time to make them a real hobby. I've been a fan of Lord of the Rings online for quite a few years now and can still enjoy it. Yes, I do like fantasy literature, including Tolkien, Pratchett and Moorcock.

About the site

This is nothing special. Just another blog, one of millions self-hosted WordPress installations. I created it years ago as the home page for one of the Open Source projects I've been working on. Since I'm no longer involved in this project, the blog has been changing into a more generic tech blog where I write about everything I want, but mostly about web technologies, especially WordPress. So yes, this is just a hobby site and I do not run it for the numbers. It's completely free of ads and I prefer to keep it that way.

The core is WordPress 3.1 - currently the most recent release - and a number of plugins (if you are interested, the list of plugins I'm currently using is below).

So, why WordPress?

Well, because it works. It is really that simple. Now, there are people who claim that WP is insecure, others claiming that it is slow and puts too much load on the server and finally there are people advocating for "xyz" being a way better blogging software and constantly ranting on how much WP sucks.

Fine, let them whine :) In fact, I've tested a lot of blog system, including but not limited to WordPress, Serendipity, Movable Type, Textpattern and even large CMS systems like Drupal, EZPublish or Joomla. While the latter are certainly far more powerful than WordPress, they are also heavier, harder to administrate and simply not needed for a page that basically wants to be a more or less simple blog with a few static pages added. Always use a tool that does the job and don't use nuclear weapons to hunt down a rabbit. Big CMSs are fine, but simply not needed here.

When comparing the well known blog platforms, one will sooner or later realize that there is no number one, no system that does everything in the best possible way. There is also no fastest or slowest, no most user friendly or most awful system. They all have strengths and weaknesses, however, WordPress has a few things that are important for me:

• It is easy to use, easy to install, easy to configure.
• It has a very broad user base, which means that it is also a very attractive target for spammers and other bad guys. This makes it less likely that some hidden and unknown security hole stays in a undercover state for an extended period of time.
• It has got a decent basic feature set and can be extended by an impressive number of plugins.

Given these facts, I believe that WordPress, even with its few weaknesses, is still a good choice for running a blog. If I wanted more than just a blog, I would use a real CMS, because I do not think that WordPress can fulfill the requirements for a good CMS. But that's not its fault nor is it a problem - WP wasn't designed as a full featured CMS, although it can fulfill the needs for a simple one well enough.

Speaking of plugins and extending the basic feature set

I tried to keep the list of installed plugins relatively short. Not only does this help with security, it also keeps the blog's performance good and reduces the number of possible problems. You can never know what lurks inside a plugin and I've seen plugins that were particularly badly written and which I wouldn't install without first performing a full code audit, but that's another story.

So, here is the list of plugins I've installed

• Disqus - I started to use their blog commenting system and I really like it. It offers great features and can spice up your blog comments and -community.
• Related posts - this plugin allows you to manually attach links to related posts or articles when composing a post. It does not automatically find related articles based on tags or fulltext search. Because of this, it has a very small performance impact.
• Multipage toolkit - Improves the navigation for posts or articles with multiple pages. Note: this plugin has a minor bugs which can break "pretty" permalinks when used with WordPress 3.1 or later. There is an easy fix for this problem.
• WP File Cache - A simple caching solution. Speeds up page loading times by caching objects and database queries. Safe to use for both anonymous and logged in visitors, this can give a medium performance boost and reduction in database queries. Unlike WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache or WP Hypercache, this does not serve fully static pages, but it does a good job in reducing the server load.
• PW_Archives - simple and highly customizable archives widget. Can also be used to display a page of full archives using a shortcode. Very efficient with little, if any, impact on performance.
• Wassup - simply the best statistics plugin for WordPress. Gives you a lot of information about who visits your site, where they come from and what they do while browsing your site. It can also identify the most common hacking attempts (though it is not really a replacement for a real IDS) and can help with detecting spammers. Put it simple, if you are, by any means, a statistics nut, this plugin is a must have. Period.
• Fast secure contact form. Simple plugin. Allows you to add a contact form to your blog. The plugin offers many options for the functionality and look of the form, including checking the submissions for spam and a captcha option.
• WP-PageNavi - Enhance the page navigation at the bottom of index- and archive pages. Instead of simple links to the previous and next page, a real pagination will appear.
• WP-Polls - add polls to posts or pages. Includes admin backend features to manage polls, a sidebar widget to display the most recent polls, a poll archive and more. Can be styled to match your theme and is very easy to use.

The theme.

In the beginning, I was using a custom theme which I created based on the old WordPress 2.x (Kubrick) theme. Later, I started to develop my own theme based on the simple and lightweight Blocks2 theme. Over the time, I added many features and code to support a few plugins and integrated a couple of JavaScript packages that otherwise would need additional plugins. The current theme is almost completely custom - very few things are left of the original theme I started with.

The theme is valid HTML5 and optimized for good performance. Without any additional server-sided optimizations and with a couple of additional plugins, the theme scores a Google page speed index between 87 and 90 (depends a bit on the current content on the front page). It's relatively lightweight and low on graphics, but a bit heavy on the JavaScript side.

The theme has integrated functionality to create social media buttons (Share/send/tweet) and many things can be configured on a per-article or per-page base by using meta variables. For example, it's possible to disable the side bar by simply adding a meta variable to a page or post. Same goes for the header, navigation bar and footer, so this theme can be used to create custom pages with a completely different look.

The following JavaScript functionality is integrated:

• Colorbox.js - a lightbox-like script to display images, movies and inline HTML in a nice, animated popup window. Extremely small and lightweight, just about 9k of minified JavaScript code and a few lines of CSS.
• Syntax Highlighter - I often need to post code snippets in various languages and this is a good way to make them appear nicely formatted and colorized.

I've integrated both scripts in the theme so no additional plugins are needed to use their functionality. Instead, I wrote some custom JavaScript to use colorbox for images, movies and some inline HTML segments.

That's it. Feel free to ask questions if you want.