When I’m creating a Wordpress them or editting one, I usually clip out snippets of coding and paste them into notepad incase I’ll need them later. You never know what you’re going to mess up or why, so it’s good to have the original coding to be able to slap back in whenever you need to. Sometimes, I want to keep that coding and saving notepad files in random places around my desktop has worked, but it’s not extremely efficient because when I save them I save them as the date I made them, and if I don’t know what the date was when I saved the clip I need.. well, you get the picture. So what I’ve started doing is saving notes in my wordpress theme. It’s easy to do without a plugin (though it’d be nice to have one).

• Open notepad and save the empty file as notepad.php
• Open your theme’s folder in FTP
• Upload the notepad.php file to the same folder as your other theme files
• Go to your Theme Editor and click on notepad.php
• Paste in your code with some guides that will explain to you what the code snippets are about

So it’s extremely easy and truly has been a life saver at times.

:: I have added plugins to this list to resubmit for Thursday Thirteen 06/04/2009.

I thought it would be helpful to list the wordpress plugins I use on my own sites and tell you why. I use these plugins because they make maintaining a blog easier and therefore multiple blogs as well. Wordpress has thousands of plugins, which is why it’s my CMS of choice. There are many options out there, but Wordpress is the only one that can do anything and everything, all on the same script. If I want to open a store, create a magazine, anything I want to do is possible with Wordpress and its plugins. It makes it hard to imagine why anyone would choose anything else.

Akismet – This comes with your Wordpress blog and you should enable it right away to keep spam comments to a minimum.

Bubs Button Board –  Everyone likes to get a free link, so add this to your site. Get them to come to post their own links, then get them to stay with your great design and content. 

Contact Form 7 -  Great contact form script with multiple forms. Very easy to use.

Clean Archives – Shows a list of your archives in a page in a clean, easy to read format.

Do Follow – I use this plugin on my personal site  because I don’t really care about page rank or anything and I think it’s fair that my commenters get link credit.

FlareSmith – A plugin to match my Feedburner account with my blog.

FlickrRSS – Allows me to display my most recent Flickr photos right on my blog. They’re listed at the bottom of my sidebar.

Get Recent Comments – Allows me to show appreciation to my commenters by listing their link in my sidebar with “do follow”.

I Am Reading – Displays the book you’re currently reading, the page you’re on, and the link to  buy it from your Amazon Associate account. Good little way to make some extra money.

Link Hopper – Allows you to mask outside links as links to pages on your own site. This looks good to the search engines giving your site a higher rank.

Really Simple CAPTCHA – Adds Captcha to forms on your site. Used with the contact form or on your posts.

TwitMe – Twitme posts on your Twitter when you post a new post, and also lets you post to twitter from your Wordpress admin. I have separate twitter accounts for my portfolio, my personal site, and my hosting site so this helps me manage them all without having to go crazy trying to remember which one I’m signed in to.

WP-PageNavi – Makes navigation my pages easier. Takes out the “Previous Entries” and lists them as page numbers.

I’m always looking for new, good plugins to enhance my site. If you know of any really great plugins that would be useful, please list them here.

I’ve decided to go a different direction with this site, so I’m working on cleaning it up to make room so things will work with the new design I’ve put up. The stupid thumbnails I had before and the excertps were getting in the way. So please come back in a few days to see the new, improved Radkitten website.

EDIT1:// Incase this looks weird while I work, I wanted to let you know I’m moving all the posts around to it into new categories. Just really, ignore all this. Leave a comment on this entry and I’ll let you know when the site’s finished. Seriously, comment then leave.

EDIT2:// You know what? Why am I even doing this? Who cares if 2-3 people stop in while I’m working? I’m taking off the  Theme Test Drive and I’ll just be working on the new template as is. I hope you all like it. It was really nice to have a plugin that was capable of allowing me to view and edit while everyone else saw something else.