I entered the world of blogging back in 2006, and my first site used self hosted WordPress.

Since then, I have started many other blogs, for myself but mostly for others.  In each case, WordPress was my preferred platform.

What I like about WordPress is its versatility.  It not only has thousands of free themes that you can use or even customise to suit the look and feel of your site, but there are also many thousand plug-ins which can add enormous functionality or just plain gimmickry.

I tend to classify plug-ins under several categories.

First of all, there are the essentials.  A site will work, and work well without these, but you can save yourself a lot of trouble and potential disaster if you use them.

Next are the very important ones.  These are the ones that enhance the site in some way to make the reading experience easier or provide functionality that is otherwise lacking.

Next are the mildly important ones.  Again, they provide some kind of added bonus to the site but are easy to live without.

Then there are the trivial ones that are there as pure decoration.

There are also two subgroups – those that are ‘free-standing’ in that they just add code to the site which performs a particular function, and the ‘non-free-standing’ ones which rely on a third party website to function properly.  These latter ones require some caution.

Plug-ins should be treated with some caution, as they can impact heavily on the site.  The essentials are essential, so I will leave them out of this argument, but even amongst the Very Important ones, there are some that may impact on a site’s performance.  The dangerous ones are the Very Important Non-Free-Standing plug-ins.  As an example, if a blog uses Google Analytics to track traffic (and who doesn’t like to know how their blog is faring?) then this requires coding that has to connect to the Google Analytics site.  If, for example, the Google site is slow or down, then this is going to cause problems with your blog.    Fortunately these events are extremely rare, but it is worth consideration.

Equally, some plug-ins set up additional fields in the site’s database.  Not only does this impact on the server response time, but can lead to fairly weighty databases.  One plug-in I had some unfortunate experiences with in the past is Firestats, which tracks statistics on a site.  It creates extra tables, and in a couple of instances I found these tables filled with tens of megabytes of additional information – the plug-in was recording details of every single hit on the site and storing those details!  I did not consider this information to be of such vital importance that I could tolerate not only the impact on the database server, but also the huge wastage of disk space, so I have removed it from all sites.

Next time around, I will delve into some of my favourite plug-ins; why I use them and how to get them.

Stay tuned.

So the Irish Blog Awards are nearly upon us again.

Head Rambles has been eliminated from three categories and remains in just one in this round – Best Humour Blog -  which let to some significant tantrums from Grandad.  Quite honestly, I was delighted as it removes the agony of having to decide which category to go for (as a blog can only enter under one).

Both Grandad and I will be attending.  Seeing as we are two aspects of the one person, it would be somewhat difficult for one to go and the other to stay at home, and it only remains to be seen which rules on the night.

I am a quiet person by nature.  I am the type who will sidle into a room and find a quiet corner where I can sup a pint and watch others having the fun.  Grandad’s inclination is to dive straight for the best looking woman on the place and try for a grope.  These are mutually exclusive actions so it should be interesting.

After the last awards ceremony, a couple of Grandad’s readers said they saw him/me there but were too shy to introduce themselves.  If only they knew that I would probably been the shyest of the group.  What’s worse, I love meeting not only my readers, but writers of other blogs, and I feel I missed out now.

I’m looking forward to the night, I must say.  I think the chances of Grandad winning are slim to none, but for me that’s not the point.  I’m looking forward to the craic, and meeting old friends.  Hopefully, I’ll make a few new ones too.

I’ll have to keep Grandad in check though…….

From time to time, vague thoughts cross my mind.

The latest vagueness is to ponder whether this site could do with a change of name.

It started out as a sort of joke, to counter the madness on Head Rambles, and ‘The Other Fellow’ was part of that whimsy.  However, I wonder if it could do with a change?  Could it do with it’s own identity?

I have been mulling over various names, and have set out some little rules for my mulling –

• It would be nice to have a name starting with A?
• It would be nice to have a name that reflected the contents of the site?
• It would be nice to have a catchy name that people (mainly myself) could remember?
• Something that would grab searches would be nice too?
• It must be a name that can be registered as a domain.  That’s a hard one.

Maybe it’s just too much bother?

Maybe it could revitalise the place?

What do you think?