Finally, after being down for 4-5 months, my blog is back. Thanks goes to Øyvind for setting up Wordpress and importing my MovableType posts. You Rock mayt.

This new blog has become quite a showcase of what can be done with all these new ‘Web 2.0’ services popping up. I’m pleased with the results – It forms a cohesive and very usable site. So much so, I will drop the ‘blog.’ and make it my main site – the other main page place holder that stayed far too long.

I’m using Wordpress 1.5.2 with a beta of the K2 theme, modified a little and added a bunch of plugins and services:

• WP-ContactForm – The contact form
• FAlbum – The Flickr integration on the photos page. Very slick.
• Brian’s Latest Comments – The recent comments displayed in the side bar
• Akismet – Comment Spam Protection
• Extended Live Archives – Nifty AJAX archive page browsing
• Ultimate Tag Warrior – Tagging of posts. Also integrates with Extended Live Archives for the tag cloud seen on the Archives page
• del.icio.us bookmarks – Displayed on the links page and also using their playTagger to make mp3s on the music page instantly playable via a light weight javascript and flash player.
• Flickr – FAlbum grabs my photos from flickr for the photos page. Also have their Zeitgeist in the sidebar
• last.fm – This Tracks and catalogues what I listen to and posts a weekly ‘top’ list in my sidebar

K2 gives a bunch of integration with some of the above plugins and, AJAX goodies: Live search and Live Comments.

Some remaining things I’d like to change or add are:

• Colour weighted tags on each post with Ultimate Tag Warrior. Couldn’t figure this out even after extensive manual reading.
• RSS feeds to be displayed next to peoples names my Friends/Blogroll.
• How to get rid of the auto applied image borders. Probably have to look though the CSS files some more.
• Making tags searchable.
• A metatagcloud™ (the domain is available!) Will try tagcloud.com some time
• Weighted tag list and del.icio.us like auto fill in the post backend

As you can see if you browse around, I’ve gone whole hog with the taging and tag cloud thing. Time will tell if it is truely useful, but it has been handy a few times already, and it does give an attractive visual overview of my interests. Still have to go over more past blogs and add tags though

After using Wordpress for this blog, tequp and the new retrorockers site (my mums dance crew) I’m very impressed. Makes a lot more sense in how it all works than Mambo/Joomla and MovableType. I even donated

So…What other nifty stuff can I add?