This post has been edited to improve clarity
A sly lurker sent me an email yesterday asking about various customisations installed on this blog, especially one that sie hadn’t seen elsewhere.

I have installed several plug-ins added to the basic WordPress files, as well as tweaking the K2 theme template that I use (a template which already allows substantial customisation (e.g. the rotating banners and page-variable sidebar modules) without needing plug-ins).

The plug-ins (all shareware) I’ve installed are:

• The latest addition, Share This by Alex King, which is the one which prompted the question. Enables quicklinks to social networking sites like del.ici.ous, Digg, Stumbleupon etc with just one button at the bottom of the post instead of a zillion little icons (a look I don’t like at all). Also enables emailing a post to a friend.
• Gravatars2 by Kip Bond. Enables the gravatar icons to display next to commentor’s names, as well as local caching of gravatars.
• Comment Quicktags+ by Dan Cameron. Enables the insertion of HTML tags into a comment at the click of a button.
• Subscribe to Comments by Mark Jaquith. Enables subscription to discussions on individual posts, sending an email to subscribed readers every time a new comment is added.[Edited to clarify description]

To install them you need to have FTP access to your web-host in order to upload the plug-in files into the “wp-content” folder of your WordPress installation.

If that last sentence above was all incomprehensible jargon to you, then you need to find a more geekly person to help you out. If you’re mildly geekly but never done such a thing before, all the plug-ins have full instructions on their read-me files and on the download-sites, but you have to be willing to get into the style-sheets and insert a line of code or two (the fancier plug-ins do that themselves when you activate them, but some of the more basic ones do not).

The WordPress official site linked to above has FAQs about installing plug-ins, etc.

Non-plug-in customisations: I tweaked the Cascading Style Sheet so that the text in the input-field is a larger font than the default, so that it makes proof-reading comments easier. I also changed the colour of the links, some fonts, various icons and the way that blockquotes display, because I didn’t want it to look like every other K2 site out there. (I’ve also used K2 successfully to set up a couple of websites for customers for their businesses, because the customisation flexibility is just so useful)

So there you go. Any more questions?

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