My long-time friend Bryan recently described me as “a person who will spend a lot of money on some new electronic gadget and then take it apart before he even uses it.” He’s right; I can’t help myself. I want to make everything “better.” This has extended into the use WordPress Plugins on my site. I’m always looking to add something new and my plugin count has increased to nearly 40. But the list has grown large and I’ve started to debate the usefulness of several of them. I then receive an e-mail from a native Dutch speaker by the name of Ilse, who reverse-translated the Global Language Translator plug-in translation. I found out all sorts of interesting facts about myself:

• My sex is not male, but little man (ouch!)
• I really like the television show Lights That Shine on Friday During the Night and that the classifications of NBC smell really bad (a.k.a. their ratings are low)
• My favorite artist is the Band of Matthews of Dave
• And, most alarmingly, I really like young goats but don’t have them yet

In case you’re as curious about that last one as I was, Ilse was kind enough to  inform me that it was supposed to read kids instead of goats.  Trust me, it is kids, and not goats.

So now that the non-English-speaking world perceives me as a little man who likes young goats and watches smelly television , I think it’s time to cut my losses. Global Translator has been uninstalled. I tried it out on the promise of “making the site more accessible to non-English speakers.” It is certainly a worthy goal, but I wasn’t doing anyone any favors, especially myself.

I’ve uninstalled several other limited-value plugins over the past few days and hope to trim the list down to below 30. There’s nothing worse than upgrading to the latest version of WordPress only to have a long since abandoned plugin break everything. Combating this is the excellent WordPress Plug-in Installer plugin, which makes plugin installation a 20 second vs. 5 minutes process, and the new WordPress Plugins site, which allows publishing, voting, popularity ranking, and comments for all plugins (I’ve been begging/voting for this for a long time.)  Must. Fight. Urge. To. Tweak.