After much playing with various WordPress plug-ins, I’ve settled on a final 12, all of which are active and in use. Out of interest, here are details on them…

Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it and can review the spam it catches.

Contact Form 7
A flexible contact form generator

Easy Gravatars
Add Gravatars to your comments.

FeedBurner FeedSmith
This plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog.

Hot Linked Image Cacher
Goes through your posts and gives you the option to cache some or all hotlinked images locally. This was useful after I moved from Blogger to WordPress, as many images were hotlinking to Blogger and/or Picasa.

I Love Social Bookmarking
I Love Social Bookmarking is a simple WordPress plugin that allows your readers to submit your content to social media services via a clutter-free drop-down list of attractive icons. I’ve modified this myself, with a new icon.

Last Viewed Posts  
Show a list of posts (and pages) the visitor had recently viewed. It’s cookie based. Every visitor has his own listing. This is not a global output for all users!

Lightbox JS 
Used to overlay images on the current page. Can be used seperately, but also used by WP Picasa LightBox.

wp-cache
Very fast cache module to help speed up your WordPress blog.

WP Picasa LightBox 
This plugin allows you to easily add your Picasa photos to your posts.

WP YouTube
WP YouTube allows you to easily add YouTube videos to your posts.

I’m an IT geek. That’s pretty much known.

And what got me into IT, other than the Commodore 64 that I had at home, were the BBC Micro’s (and Master’s) that I used at school and, later, college. Indeed I barely touched a PC during this time. And it was my experience during this time that got me a job in IT straight away, no degree required (quite rare at that time in the commercial sector).

The “Beeb” was a superb computer. Well designed and very quick (you quite easily write a commercial program in BASIC. Even a game). They shared a similiar processor to the Commodore 64 (6510 vs 6502) so I could even use my machine code knowledge and write assembler on the BBC as well. Stick a decent monitor and a twin dual-side disk drive on a BBC Master and it was an absolute beast.

Good times.

The chap who designed the BBC Micro went onto design the ARM processor. This spun off to a seperate company (ARM Limited, based in Cambridge) which a good friend of mine works for. The ARM processor is now used in numerous devices, including many mobile phones.

Truly a genius and a bit of a god-like figure to someone such as me.

Which is why it came as a surprise, completely accidentely, to discover that he’s the father of a good friend of mine. Steve Furber is the man. Catherine is his daughter, and a fellow member of Beeston Musical Theatre Group.

He picks up an MBE from the Queen in a couple of weeks time.

Well deserved too.