This website makes liberal use of a number of free software plugins and programmes, designed by dedicated, generous, and extremely talented people, and it would be remiss not to duly acknowledge their hard work.

First, the wordpress platform itself is just awesome, it makes building a blog (or any website) incredibly easy. It’s free to install on your own website, incredibly easy to set up, and full of really exciting possibilities (for a geek like me anyway).

Second, the theme is all my own design, but I wouldn’t know the first thing about building the php files on which it’s based. That’s all done by the Atahualpa plugin, a theme that allows you to design your own look for your site. It’s extremely user friendly and customisable. I came up with my own trick for getting rounded corners combined with a fluid width, so if anyone has any queries about how to do that, I’d be happy to help (basically you use the html inserts to add divs on top and bottom of the layout with an img sized in percentages–not a background image, because they don’t stretch. After looking for ages and not finding anything that really combined fluid width and rounded corners, I was quite pleased with this workaround!).

Among the other plugins that I use on my site, wp-smugmug is obviously a labour of love by its designer, and enables the integration of my smugmug galleries into the blog, it’s genius. Then there’s shizam’s slideshow for smugmug, which looks great, though some browsers may struggle with it. I’d love it if there was a simple javascript based slideshow that could call images up from a smugmug rss feed, but I’ve not been able to find one. The people at smugmug are, in general, brilliant, there’s a real gang of dedicated designers, building new ideas and enabling awesome customisation. I’m very glad to have left pbase for there.

Many thanks also to the designers of: geo-mashup, which enables the geo tagging of our posts; 1 blog cacher, which speeds things up despite the fact that my lame hosting service has php_safemode enabled; shadowbox JS, which covers the lightbox-like behaviour for images and slideshows; ShareThis, SimpleTags, all in one SEO pack and Wordbook, all key additions to the site.

So, I can only hope I’ve managed to put all these expertly crafted pieces together without messing too much of it up!