I appreciate the slick publishing platform that WordPress provides for my writing. Perhaps even better is its plugin system, which lets me make it do just about anything I like.
Since you wont find me churning out PHP code of my own anytime soon (I’ve actually been meaning to take another stab at to wrapping my brain around Python now that version 3 is out), I rely on the WordPress community to do so for me. Fortunately, with nearly 10,000 plugins available, they seem up to the task!
When I set up my WordPress installation earlier this year, I promised myself that I wouldn’t go overboard the way I usually end up customizing and extending most of the other tech tools/toys in my life. Even while showing restraint, I’ve managed to accumulate just over 20 plugins at this point… whoops! 1 That said, every plugin I’m using has helped make this blog what it is today… from one that mirrors comments that people post on Google Buzz, to one that gives me a per-post space to brainstorm as I compose.
Thus, I’ve created an ‘About Plugins’ page that properly recognizes each one.
- The plugins actually seem to be impacting the blog’s performance; I need to take a closer look into just where the inefficiencies lie.[↩]
I hear that Think Python is a good book.
Thanks for the heads-up, Prakash! I’ll have a look; I quite like the look of it so far (it’s free :-).
The other attempt I made was with Learning Python. I got about 1/3 of the way through that book before I hit a wall: the book wasn’t really encouraging me to apply the things I was learning as I learned them. I tried Dive Into Python, but found myself confused rather quickly.
The very first sentence of the Dive Into Python site states:
I guess it would be more useful as a second, or third, Python book, if one has no prior programming experience.
Yep, there’s that. I think I gave it a try on the advice of the commenter here.