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 an 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 Automattic
  • 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 the ability to override itself. 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 blog 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
  • Featured Blog Widget—Adds a widget that pulls the avatar of a user and the most recent posts in headline format from a “featured blog” By Deanna Schneider
  • Gallery Shortcode Style to Head—Moves the gallery shortcode styles to the head so it doesn’t break XHTML validation; allows disabling or modifying the default gallery styles. By Scott Bradford
  • 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
  • Simple Tags—Extended Tagging for WordPress 3.0 ! 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
  • WordPress MU Domain Mapping—Map any blog on a WordPress website to another domain. By Donncha O Caoimh
  • 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 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
  • WP Super Cache—Very fast caching plugin for WordPress. By Donncha O Caoimh
• 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.