Today we thought we would take a day out from the normal day-to-day activity of the Blog to record our thanks to some people who usually don’t even get a mention. However, without these people it would be impossible for us to bring you all the latest tales of The Bear’s exploits. Many of these people work without pay; they do it purely for the love of it.

First off, we have WordPress, which, for those of you who do not know, is an Open Source Content Management System. Put simply, it is the system that runs our blog behind the scenes. They have recently won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award at the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. It is our publishing system of choice and it doesn’t even cost a penny – a whole host of volunteers maintains it. It is like the Microsoft Office of the blogging world except because it is open source we get to download it and all updates free of charge. In addition, just because it is free, doesn’t mean it is not straight out of the top draw with some of the best support available through the Codex and Forums.

Every day thousands of new people turn to WordPress to power not just their blogs but also to control full sites and communities like our own. They do this safe in the knowledge that because they are opting for the open source option they are not compromising on usability or scalability, as is the case with many paid for legacy CMS systems. Everybody involved with the WordPress community, from developers down to users like ourselves, is part of the overall experience. We share ideas and all gain from the experiences of other users.

Without WordPress, this blog would not be here today.

Another who is responsible for a great deal of work behind the scenes if Milenko over at digitalnature. He is the person responsible for our WordPress theme: Mystique. Mystique is a free WordPress theme that attempts to top commercial themes in terms of its design and functionality and includes one of the best, advanced user interfaces of any commercial theme we have seen.

For those of you who know nothing about blogging: if you think of the blog as a car, then WordPress would be the engine and chassis while the theme would be the bodywork and the way everything looks to the user. Milenko works tirelessly on this theme, which only today we have upgraded to version 1.30, and again he releases it under the GPL Open Source agreement and asks only for donations for his work. Just as with WordPress, a user community who share ideas and experiences helps Mystique.

Those of you who have been following our blog for a while will know we have had some terrible experiences with Web Hosting in the past. However, since we have transferred everything over to Just Host everything has just worked. They have proven to be one of the most reliable web hosting companies we have dealt with. Their service is fast, reliable and all at a very reasonable price. Furthermore, their response to requests for technical support is swift and helpful. It is easy to say; “well that is what they get paid for,” but so many other services are not the same. We hope you are listening Weycrest!

The following are people who work on WordPress plug-ins to add features to our blog and as such deserve our thanks…

Finally, we would like to thank you all for dropping by from time-to-time and reading of our exploits. We run this blog for fun and we have a great time doing it but it would get mighty lonely around here without you all.

Thank you.

…and hey, let’s be careful out there!