Quite some time ago I used Wordpress for my Rebuilding Thailand blog. It was strictly a blog site that chronicled my year as a volunteer after the 2004 tsunami, and the adventures that went along with it.

When it came time to building a professional level site (this one) I ended up looking at ModX. For what it was worth it was a very rich content management system, but I found that it took a lot of time to learn the system, and in some circumstances even learning a new code structure. And the blogging software was rather clunky.

And now I find myself jumping ship back to the familiar platform of Wordpress. But this time in a much more robust application than before, and I couldn’t be more happy. Along with the thousands of available plugins to make it super powerful, the interface is just simple enough to do no more than what you really need to do.

For other Wordpress users here is a short list of some of the useful plugins I am currently using:

• Skype Online Status: Display’s when I am online on Skype and allows Skype users to directly start chatting with me.
• Google XML Sitemaps: Essential tool for SEO geeks like me. Automatically rebuilds your Google Sitemap with every new blog post.
• Clean Notifications: By Mike Davidson who’s blog I read. Makes the email notifications very pretty.

These are just a few, but they make the experience of blogging and adding new pages so nice.
I hope that you enjoy navigating and viewing the site as much as I enjoy writing and updating in it.