One of the great things about WordPress is the community and the number of great plugins that can do amazing things with little effort.

But all that code, as any good developer will tell you, is a liability. How do you pick a plugin that not only meets your requirements now, but will both continue to do so? WordPress advances. APIs change. Plugins need love too.

Many moons ago I settled upon Flickr Gallery, a plugin that allows you to import Flickr images just by adding a short-code to posts. I thought there was value in keeping all my public photos in one place and, at that time, WordPress had poor media management facilities. The plugin seemed popular and well supported.

It’s important to have a Top 10 list. I know this as every other site has one. I don’t want to miss out. So here are the top ten most read posts here this year, with the year they were originally published in parenthesis:

1. QA Mindf**k
2. Do Apple take 40% in the EU? (2011)
3. Learning Swift
4. iOS Developer Program: from individual to company (2011)
5. How do I do “X” in Swift?
6. AQGridView to UICollectionView (2013)
7. iPhone Dev: Saving State (2010)
8. NSFetchedResultsController and iCloud
9. Why you need a crash reporter (2011)
10. Sophia Smith (2006)

If there’s a lesson here in increasing readership it’s simple: get retweeted by people with lots of followers.

For some reason, when I saw the poster for the new movie “Fury,” I misread it as “Furry” and saw a beard on Brad Pitt that wasn’t really there. I’ve tried to correct these errors.

I’ve been pretty quiet here for a couple of of weeks and that’s because… well, a picture speaks a thousand words.

Junior took his sweet time popping out — we were in the hospital over a day before he made his grand appearance — but for Juniorette we weren’t sure we’d make it there in time! In the end we checked into the delivery suite just after ten in the evening and the birth was recorded just before eleven.

What a difference two years makes. Just a little over twenty-four months ago we were awaiting the arrival of our son. To commemorate the occasion we went to the park and took a few pictures. The bump, after all, would be short lived.

Since then we’ve spent a lot of time in the playground where these pictures were taken.

Last week we did the same thing, now that we’re expecting our daughter in a few weeks. Other than the obvious difference — we had a two year old in tow this time — we had a very different time of year and a change of location — Cannizaro House.

It’s a cliche to ask where the year has gone but it’s no less true this year than any other. Life has got in the way of blogging more than usual — moving house, a toddler, work — with only 23 posts this year and only one of those making my “most read” list.

Talking of which, these are the most read blogs this year:

1. iOS Developer Program: from individual to company
2. iPhone Dev: Saving State
3. Do Apple take 40% in the EU?
4. AQGridView to UICollectionView
5. Old Fashioned

Probably my favourite blog of the year was “What to do?” but I posted it a little too late to get the readership that I would have liked.

The only thing that would have made it bigger would have been if the Doctor Who fiftieth anniversary show was on the same day. But I had to wait another day for that.

This post is a rant. I can offer no solutions, no help. Some sympathy perhaps but that’s not terribly useful.

The story: we’re moving house. So we need to deal with lawyers and mortgage companies. For sound reasons, they both need to prove that we’re not laundering money.

Frankly, until I had to do a number of anti-money laundering courses at work I would have had no idea how to launder money. I’d be stuck like the characters in Office Space looking up the definition in a dictionary. Or, more to the point, looking it up online.

I found this while (mis)typing the caption to yesterdays photo competition. Is it any wonder that those meerkats have to keep telling the world about their website to avoid confusion with a comparison shopping site? Even the Mac’s spell checker gets it wrong.

I don’t normally do this kind of thing but I’ve been blogging a little less than usual this year so I thought it might be worth jotting down a few notes about what I have been up to. With pictures, obviously, as I’m never far from my camera or iPhone.

The theme, in case you missed, it is my son who grew from a tiny, sleeping-eating… thing to a walking, playing and noisy toddler.