• Ok, McCain’s speech isn’t the shot out of the park that Palin delivered last night, but its a good solid double off the wall… #

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Gruntled had these posted at GG and I thought it’d fun to answer…

1. If you had to add a thirteenth month to the year what would you name it?
   That depends on when it fell… If it was in the summer… something like… wait. What was the question? Scoopleeloo!

2. In your opinion, what should the Eighth Deadly Sin be?
   Ignorance

3. If you were magically transformed into Snow White’s Eighth Dwarf, what would your name be?
   Lanky Dwarf

4. If you could add an Eleventh Commandment to the Christian bible, what would it be?
   Thou shalt not pay an income tax.

5. If you were to become the sixth Spice Girl, you would call yourself _______ Spice.
   Paprika. Or Thyme. Or Basil. I’ve always thought that Basil as a name was cool. Like Basil in the Great Mouse detective….

whats your five?

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Everyone knows that one family member who’s hard to shop for. Maybe its your great aunt Marge (you know, the one who always squeezes your cheeks together when she sees you) on your mother’s side or your uncle Al and Aunt Judy who live in Kalamazoo. Either way, its always a chore to figure out what to get them. For us, it used to be my grandmother. After all, there’s only so many purses a woman in her 70’s needs right? It got to the point where my mother would just order her a nice bouquet of flowers for Christmas and be done.

It was almost the perfect gift (Grandpa was a gardener and could always use vases around the house) and with the flowers delivered directly to them before Christmas, we were almost always guaranteed that they would have their gift in time. We’d send something like the Holiday Tradition bouquet. The colors, the vase all screamed Christmas and would go good in anyones home. I can’t wait until I’m at a point where all I have to do is send my parent’s Flowers for Christmas.

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Thirteen Wordpress Plugins worth Using
In no particular order…

1. Akismet - Akismet comes default with wordpress installs these days. Its one of two plugins that do. Akismet is perhaps the single best tool against fighting blogspam that we have available today. Why my install of akismet has already blocked over 6,000 spam posts and blocks at least 100 a day. If you’re not using it, you really, really should be.
2. Commentluv 0.993 - CommentLuv is perhaps one of the coolest plugins I’ve installed to date. What it does is scrape the url you submit when you make a comment and it gleans the last post from your feed and adds it to your comment as a “Last post from” type addition. So you get some really good back links over time if you keep commenting on my site. I’ve received a lot of positive feedback over this one…
3. Comment Timeout 2.0.1 - This is another great comment plugin, this one though helps with spam like Akismet. Comment Timeout does what it says. You can set an amount of time (I think I have mine set to 30 or 60 days) that comments are open on a post before they are closed. Certain triggers like a large number of comments will cause the comments to be kept open on a single post, but for the most part this helps prevent spammers from going through your old posts and adding comments. Its helped cut down on the spam a lot as well.
4. Douche Bag - I haven’t used this one a lot but its fun to have. The guys at YoungGoGetter came up with a way to label comments you don’t like.. You simply add a tag to the comment and the image of your choice is shown (currently its a brown bag with the word douche on it).
5. WeatherIcon - This one isn’t so much a do something plugin, but I’ve had it on my blog for virtually ever. Its nice to know the weather here in teh ATL and I can, all I have to do is hit my blog. Besides, its pretty cool. Isn’t it??
6. WP-Polls A good way to encourage participation on your blog is to give people something to participate in. From time to time, I like to run a little poll to see what the general masses are thinking (I am in no way associated with any official polling company). Thats where this gem from Lester Chan comes in to play. You can specify the items in the poll and display them in a sidebar or a post. Its pretty nifty.
7. WP Grins - Clickable emoticons for comments. What more could you ask for??
8. WPG2 - I use gallery (menalto) for my image management and I needed a good way to integrate it in to the wordpress site. The team working on WPG2 has done an amazing job at making things work the way they need to. Could ask for a better gallery plugin.
9. wp-recent-links Some people use their wordpress install for little more than listing links every day of places they like and visit. I like to use my blog for blogging, but the wp-recent-links plugin works wonders for when I find that little nugget of gold on the web that I want to share with people I know (I was going to say like… but then I remembered Gruntled. I simply add my link and a description and bam. Its posted for the world to see. Plus there’s a cool link archive page.
10. Show Top Commentators - I’m not sure what a commentator is (I believe its a normal tator…) but I do know I like to show the top commenters on the site and this plugin does that. Its great for keeping track of monthly contests.
11. Wordbook - Recently, I created a facebook account (facebook is so much cooler than myspace) and this plugin allows me to post my blog posts on facebook with out any extra work on my part. Now thats nice.
12. Quoter -Allows commenters to quote other comments (dynamically or server side if they have Javascript disabled) and any other text in a page (Javascript only). Is nice when I want to specify what the heck I’m replying too.
13. In Series - I’ve used this only once since I added it (my posts about Disney) but its nice and for sites that are posting series of how-to’s its a god send. You can specify which posts are in the “series” and it adds a table of contents to the post making it easy for your readers to read all the articles in the series.