When I was reading comments on my site, I noticed that some people had profile pictures. I, however, was not one of them. A horrible shame. Isn’t this my blog, after all? So after a little research, I figured out that there are these things called gravatars, which stands for globally recognized avatars, and means that if you comment on a bunch of different blogs, they’ll all show your avatar image. This page has more than you probably want to know about them. The cliffs notes version: signup for an account here, making sure that the email address you give them matches the email address associated with the account you login with on your wordpress blog. After you send gravatar.com your image, whammo! It will start showing up in all of your comments, on everyone’s blog.  Nice.

I also installed twitter tools, so now everyone can see my latest tweets on the blog. And yes, it was rather painful to get installed – why does twitter force me to become a developer and create an application? There should be a better API for this. Also, my server didn’t have PHP curl installed (which is how twitter tools talks to twitter, tweet tweet), so I also had to figure out how to get that going. But that was the least annoying: apt-get install php5-curl, add a [curl] line to my php.ini, and reload apache.

Google Analytics is my new favorite thing. A snap to install, and now I get all sorts of interesting stats. For example, I’ve had visitors from Portugal, Indonesia, and Australia, and only 5% of my visitors are using internet explorer (most use chrome and FF).  </geekout>

Subscribe to Comments and Akismet (twitter integration should’ve been that easy): check and done.

The best part, of course, is I finally moved off of the default wordpress theme. Well, almost best part. My new favicon surpasses everything else I’ve done, ever.