Applied Vitals

I’ve received several inquiries about this adventure racing website and what web platform I’m using to run it. I’m happy to share all the details to help others get started.

Website platform: WordPress
I’m using the WordPress blog publishing platform, installed on my own hosting account. The WordPress platform is a free Open Source application used on millions of sites.  The WordPress user and developer community continue to push this amazing application forward, making it useful well beyond blog posting.

Note that a blog account with WordPress.com is an entirely different route then hosting privately and will not offer all the customization flexibility that I describe below.

Theme: Mimbo
WordPress is designed to easily accommodate different designs, or look-and-feel,  through a simple point and click admin interface.  These designs or themes could be custom created by you or a professional web designer . . . or you could simply download a theme for free from WordPress.org like I did.  For examples of great paid and free WordPress themes, take a look at Smashing Magazine’s many reviews.

The Mimbo theme, by Darren Hoyt, is a magazine style theme. I chose it for several reason, including how it displays the latest posts on the homepage. The balance and visual impact of this theme depend upon the inclusion of images within each post.  The theme displays the image–resizing and cropping them with JavaScript–on the home page in a nice clean layout.  Alternatively, the default WordPress home page will display posts either in their entirety or per the excerpt that has been defined, but not reformatting the content and layout for a unique homepage display.

Plugins:
WordPress plugins are what extend the blog platform beyond simply posting editorial articles in chronological order.  Depending on what you need or want to do and what type of content is going to be delivered, some combination of plugins will help to accomplish a pretty customized web publishing tool for you.  Below are the plugins that I’m currently using on this blog:

• AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget – easy access for users to mention, post, email or bookmark on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Delicious and many more
• Advanced Category Excluder – specify which categories get displayed
• Akismet - spam filter
• All in One SEO Pack – improve search engine optimization
• Better Tag Cloud – finer control of the tag cloud display
• Category Order – manually set the order of category listings
• Edit Category Slug – bulk editing of category names
• FeedWordPress – ability to pull in external RSS feeds and dynamically create blog posts – using for Garmin Connect
• FD Feedburner Plugin – replaces native WordPress RSS feed with Feddburner feed
• Get Custom Field Values – retrieve and display custom field values/meta data for posts or pages.
• Google Analyticator – applies Google Analytics script to pages for tracking and more
• Google XML Sitemaps – dynamically creates a sitemap, including pages/posts as they’re created, Google Webmaster Tools account required to queue Google into reading this sitemap
• Lightbox Plus – open images in a popup modal window
• Organize Series – creates navigation between multiple posts that have been indicated as part of a series (part 1, part 2, ect)
• SlidePress - offers a slick WordPress admin for use with a SlideShowPro flash slideshow (front-end example on this adventure race training blog post)
• Twitter Tools – pulls Twitter feeds into the side column, enables tweeting new blog posts, allows daily or weekly tweet digests to be created from Twitter feed
• UMapper - connects to personal UMapper account to create, embed and manage dynamic maps
• User Photo – allows users to upload a profile photo to be associated with blog posts and comments (see photos with comments on this post)
• wp-forecast – posts weather forecasts in the side column
• WPtouch iPhone Theme – serves an entirely different theme to small screen devices (iPhone, Droid, smart phone) for easier viewing and interation
• XML Google Maps – allows the import of KML, GPX and other geo file formats to be displayed in posts, as well as simple interface to embed Google Maps

Adventure Websites using WordPress:

Adventure World Magazine
The Adventure Blog (on WordPress.com)
Women’s Adventure Magazine
The Adventure Life
WEND blog
The Snaz
The Accidental Extremist
Checkpoint Zero
to list just a few…

Is your adventure related website running on WordPress?  What theme and plugins are you using to make your magic?