Many technologies are used to make Off on a Tangent, and deserve part of the credit. I am a proponent of open source software, and most of what I use to make this site is open source.

Core

• WordPress—the core of this site is built on WordPress, an open source (GNU-GPL) blogging and content management system.
• This site makes use, to varying degrees, of the following WordPress plugins (some of which with modification). As derivative works of WordPress, these plugins are also licensed under the GNU-GPL.
  • 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. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin. By Matt Mullenweg
  • Align RSS Images—Makes image alignment work in RSS feeds. By Janis Elsts
  • AStickyPostOrderER—AStickyPostOrderER lets you customize the order in which posts are displayed per category, per tag, or over-all, in WordPress 2.3+ blog. Useful when using WordPress as a Content Management System. Now with pagination of post lists. By AndreSC
  • Better Blogroll—Pulls a configurable number of links and their categories from the WordPress Link Manager and gives you more control of your blogroll. By Jon Dyer
  • Broken Link Checker—Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found. By Janis Elsts
  • Configurable Tag Cloud—A tag cloud plugin for WordPress to give you more flexibility with the styling of your tag cloud. By Keith Solomon
  • CryptX—No more SPAM by spiders scanning you site for email adresses. With CryptX you can hide all your email adresses, with and without a mailto-link, by converting them using javascript or UNICODE. Although you can choose to add a mailto-link to all unlinked email adresses with only one klick at the settings. That’s great, isn’t it? By Ralf Weber
  • Gallery Shortcode Style to Head—Moves the gallery shortcode styles to the head so it doesn’t break XHTML validation By Scott Bradford
  • Google XML Sitemaps—This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog. By Arne Brachhold
  • Mail From—Change the default address that WordPress sends it’s email from. By Andrew Hamilton
  • Maintenance Mode—Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end. Navigate to Settings → Maintenance Mode to get started. By Michael Wöhrer
  • MiniMeta Widget—WordPress (Mini)Meta Widget with different logon types (form,link) and additional admin links. All links can enabeld/disabeld. By Daniel Hüsken
  • Quotes Collection—Quotes Collection plugin with Ajax powered Random Quote sidebar widget helps you collect and display your favourite quotes on your WordPress blog. By Srini G
  • SABRE—Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine By Didier Lorphelin
  • Simple Tags—Extended Tagging for WordPress 2.8 and 2.9 ! Suggested Tags, Mass edit tags, Autocompletion, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Related Tags, etc! By Amaury BALMER
  • Wordbooker—Provides integration between your blog and your Facebook account. Navigate to Settings → Wordbooker for configuration. By Steve Atty
  • WP-PluginsUsed—Display WordPress plugins that you currently have (both active and inactive) onto a post/page. By Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan
  • WP-SpamFree—An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin that virtually eliminates comment spam. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog! Includes spam-free contact form feature as well. By WP-SpamFree
  • WP Hive—Run multiple blogs using a single installation of WordPress. By ikailo
  • WP Render Blogroll Links—Outputs your Blogroll links to a Page or Post. Add [wp-blogroll] to a Page or Post and all your Wordpress links/Blogrolls will be rendered. This extremely simple plug-in enables you to create your own Links page without having to write a custom template.The output can easily be styled with CSS. Each category with its links is encapsulated in a DIV with a classname called “linkcat”. All the links are attributed with the class “brlink”. By Tanin Ehrami
• This site also makes use of the following JavaScript libraries, which are included within the WordPress distribution:
  • jQuery—For animations, effects, and various other things I am using the excellent open source (GNU-GPL/MIT License) jQuery JavaScript library.
  • Thickbox—Image and gallery pop-up effects provided by the open-source (GNU-GPL/MIT License) Thickbox JavaScript library.

Underpinnings

• Network Solutions—Hosting and domain registration services by Network Solutions (full disclosure: Network Solutions is my employer).
• Apache HTTP Server—The web server software that underpins both my development and production environments is the open source (Apache License) Apache HTTP Server.
• PHP Hypertext Preprocessor—The scripting language that powers WordPress and WordPress plugins, and much of my custom code, is the open source (PHP License) PHP Hypertext Preprocessor.
• Sun MySQL—The database technology that powers WordPress is the open source (GNU-GPL) Sun Microsystems MySQL.

Development

• Inkscape—All initial graphic design work and prototyping is done in the open source (GNU-GPL) Inkscape vector graphics editor.
• The GIMP—Final splitting, export, and re-touching of graphics for the site is done in the open source (GNU-GPL) GIMP graphics editor.
• Eclipse—I do the majority of my coding in Eclipse, an open source (Eclipse Public License), cross-platform software development environment.
• Mozilla Firefox—While developing this site, I do virtually all of my initial testing in the open source (MPL/GNU-GPL/GNU-LGPL) Firefox browser. Only as I’m nearing the end of my development efforts do I begin in-depth testing in other browsers.
  • Web Developer Toolbar—This open source (GNU-GPL) Firefox add-on is a must-have for all web developers and I use it constantly.
  • Firebug—This open source (BSD License) Firefox add-on is also extremely useful, especially when troubleshooting errant Javascript, HTML, or CSS code.
• FileZilla—The excellent FileZilla open source (GNU-GPL) FTP program serves a simple but important duty: it lets me upload files to the site, compare files, and otherwise manage the stuff on our server.
• YUI Compressor—I use the excellent open-source (BSD License) YUI Compressor to compress my JavaScript and CSS files to make the site a little bit faster for you, my loyal reader.