Refactoring the Blog

I’ve changed the blog’s look. I still need to change the menu and search form, but otherwise I’m happy with everything now. What do you think of the design?

I got rid of most of the plugins I used before, keeping only:

• Block New Version Requests - keeps WordPress from requesting information about new versions of the system and plugins every time.
• Yandex.Fotki - a plugin I developed myself that displays little thumbnails from Yandex.Fotki in the sidebar.
• Akismet - spam protection based on looking up spam messages in a shared database of spam and spammers.
• All in One SEO Pack - changes the format of titles, adds keywords and descriptions, and blocks indexing of “duplicate content.”
• FD Feedburner Plugin - replaces the standard RSS feed with a proxied RSS feed from FeedBurner.
• Google XML Sitemaps - generates a Google Sitemap (creates a sitemap in XML format).
• Subscribe To Comments - comment subscriptions, a very important feature for any blog!

I’ve added some new plugins:

• CodeColorer - syntax highlighting. I like that it uses , and overall it looks nicer and feels lighter to me. A tip right off the bat: edit style.php and disable anything you don’t need. A very good replacement for WP-Syntax!
• LiveJournal Crossposter - cross-posts to LiveJournal.
• Search keywords - automatically displays a block of links to other blog posts in older posts, using the search phrases that brought visitors from search engines to those posts on your blog as the link text.
• WP No External Links - gets rid of links to external sites: when serving a post, the plugin replaces each external link with an internal one that redirects.

And these are the disabled plugins, which I turn on as needed:

• Delete-Revision - deletes old versions of your posts and pages from the database.
• WP Tuner - a plugin for finding bottlenecks in your WordPress blog. Specifically, it shows how quickly each theme file is processed, which plugins eat up far too many resources, which queries are too slow, and so on. Full, detailed statistics that even show which core or plugin file makes which query, how long it takes, and how many resources it consumes.

I’ve also ditched the rich-text editor (WYSIWYG) in favor of the HTML editor (you can change the editor’s size in the user settings). I got tired of it transforming my source code… I went into the settings and turned it off. I also changed the admin interface’s color to blue in the same place. Lovely! :D

Perhaps the problem with < and < can be solved with the “WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically” option under Settings -> Writing… I don’t know; I haven’t tested it.

UPD: It turns out this option is completely useless in HTML mode: it converts « to <<…
Thanks to Mavr!

By the way, I’ve almost finished the Yandex.Fotki plugin. I’ll release it soon. I’ve implemented caching, and I want to add thumbnail loading via AJAX.

I’m looking for a WordPress plugin that understands YAML like MediaWiki does.

Incidentally, the blog now loads noticeably faster: 2–3 seconds, according to PingDom. The theme is lighter, there are fewer and lighter plugins (CodeColorer), and Yandex.Fotki is now cached too!

UPD: Added a screenshot of the old design