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Scott Nolan’s Blog

This is the personal web log of Scott D. Nolan. I write about tech, politics, religion, cycling, aquariums, and scuba diving. This is my second web log, replacing (and importing) all the posts and comments from an earlier privately hosted Blogger maintained blog.

The opinions here are mine alone and do not reflect those of his employer, partner, non-profit organizations, or cats. None of them take me seriously, and neither should you.

I use free wordpress.org software on affordable dreamhost.com web hosting. In fact, this wordpress site was installed with dreamhost’s one click installer. I later set up a wordpress.com account to get a key so he could enable the Akismet anti-spam filter, because spam is a waste of time. Sadly, though Akismet does a great job eliminating most spam (hundreds per day); quite a bit still gets through (6-12 spams per day). I added the is_human() module to challenge commenters to a simple question and multiple choice answer and that seems to block the few spams that get past Akismet.

The built in WordPress Database Backup plugin is also enabled.

WordPress (one click install from DreamHost panel)

    WordPress Plugins:

    Akismet (included with WordPress 2.2 and newer, though you may need to upgrade Akismet)

    WordPress Database Backup (included with WordPress 2.0.3 and newer)

    Gravatars (for pictures of commentors)

    wp-cache (make things faster)

    Google Analytics for WordPress (statistics for the site)

    WP-FLV (Flash Video Player)

Gallery (one click install from DreamHost panel)
MySQL (one click install from DreamHost panel)
PHP Version (automaticly available on DreamHost websites)
Apache (automaticly available on DreamHost websites)