Since my redesign, I’ve been experimenting with a few new plugins here, and thought I’d share a few of my findings and fun. Some of the plugins, you won’t even notice because they work in the background controlling things like spam and spammy visitors to this site. Others are put in place to make my life a little easier and your experience a little more fun! Here are some of the WordPress plugins I’ve recently installed on this site:
- U Comment, I Follow: this plugin is by Randa Clay and it destroys the “nofollow” attribute assigned to links left in comments – fully allowing Google to follow the links and give inlinking credit to commenters who leave their links on this blog. The ‘nofollow’ attribute was supposed to reduce the amount of spam left in comments. ‘nofollow’ told the Google and other search engines “Do not follow (or count) this link” – in an attempt to de-motivate comment and trackback spammers. If the spammers know their link is not going to be counted, why would they persist? Ahhh – but persist, they do and the ‘nofollow’ stuck. The ‘nofollow’ still does exist on this blog – however, if you are a regular commenter here.. your link will be followed after you’ve left a specified number of comments. Everyone deserves link lurve! Thanks, Randa!
- Automattic Stats – the ever popular WordPress.Com-type Dashboard stats are now available for single-user, self-hosted WordPress users. I’ve had it installed for the past two days and it’s really cool. You DO need a WordPress.Com account and an API key. If you are using Akismet for comment spam protection, you can use the very same API key for Automattic Stats. Thanks WordPress guys!
- http:BL – by Jano allows you to verify IP addresses of clients connecting to your blog against the Project Honey Pot database. Thanks to http:BL API you can quickly check whether your visitor is an email harvester, a comment spammer or any other malicious creature. Communication with verification server is done via DNS request mechanism, which makes the query and response even quicker. Now, thanks to http:BL WordPress Plugin any potentially harmful clients are denied from accessing your blog and therefore abusing it. You DO need to grab a free account from Project Honey Pot in order to get an access key.
- Show Top Commentators – over on my sidebar you’ll see the “This Weeks top commenters – thanks!” and it lists out the weeks Top 20 commenters.. and keeps track of how many comments each person has left. The more comments you leave, the better the chances are for you to have your name in lights… well ok – not lights really, but at least your name listed with the link back to your site (assuming you’ve left your link in my comments)… which is a nice perk because it gives you an incoming link from my PR6 front page! Just my way of saying “Hey! Thanks!” The plugin resets itself every Monday.
- Viper’s Video Quicktags – by Viper007Bond, provides an easy way of embedding videos in your blog posts – - from YouTube, Google Video, IFilm, Metacafe, MySpace, Vimeo or your own videos in these formats: MOV, API, MPEG, WMV, or FLV (Flash).. among others. Just simply click one of the new buttons that this plugin adds to the write screen (rich editor included) and then paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box — easy as that. You can fully configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, alignment on the page) and much more. Best of all, it won’t break your page’s (X)HTML validation. (that last bit was the clincher for me… I like to post videos sometimes, but the embed code always breaks validation).
That does it – my WordPress plugin fun for this week! Big thanks go out to the plugin developers who have created these wonderful bits and bytes for public consumption. If you are a WordPress user and are taking advantage of these, or any other great plugins, please consider dropping them a line and saying “Thanks for the GREAT work!” . . or better yet, if they happen to have a donation button on their site, take a moment and drop them a buck! These folks make WordPress blogging fun!
Lisa – I love knowing what tools others are using. There are a few on this list I have not heard of yet, but I’m off to check them out.
The other one I recommend if you aren’t already using it is Alex King’s Popularity Contest. It can be configured in many ways and provides a ton of information in the background as well.
Lisa – thanks for the mention, I appreciate it. Love your site!
Nice roundup!
Of course, being a master blogger (!) I’m already using four out of five of these – and only because I haven’t ever needed to post video.
Personally, I still find Google Analytics a better solution for stats, but I’m sure the WP guys will upgrade the system at some point in the not too distant future!
I love seeing which plugins people use, great stuff. There is a plugin to do this automatically that I use – google for ‘vipers plugins used’ – which saves me time publishing the list.
(love the redesign by the way)
Welcome to the Do-Follow revolution, let’s hope that by the time you get to do the first update of your book WordPress will have this as a standard.
Char – Thanks! I have tried Alex’s Popularity Contest plugin and have it running on the backend. Alex always does such amazing work!
Randa – no problem, thanks for the great plugin!
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Paul – I’ll be honest and say I’ve not given Google Analytics a try (gasp!) I think I’m the last remaining hold out in the entire world. l-)
Steve the WordPressguy – thanks for the recommendation on the plugins plugin – - I’ll have to give it a shot someday. (*)
Stevie – now that would be a bonus, for sure.
Well, if you decide to try it then it’s worth noting that they’ve just upgraded the interface – making it much more powerful than it was before, and putting all the important stuff in one place (kinda like Mint). I really like what it can do – oh, and it’s free!
I use it with this plugin:
http://www.semiologic.com/software/google-analytics/
Complete coincidence that this post goes up during “Geek of the Week” week… 8-|
No coincidence at all, Mr. SmartyPants. Don’t judge me. :-b
I use the viper video tags and i like it alot, but i noticed in my feed it doesnt show up as a video, just a link.
But love it makes it easy!
Really like the design, Lisa.
Some great plugins you’re using here.
You may also find AJAX Edit Comments plugin useful that allows your readers to edit their comments on-fly after the submission – in case they had a typo or would like to add smth else to their comment.
Yeah Lisa these are some great changes.
Hi Lisa, I’m another “just a girl in the world” (love that old song, I was 17 and everythig was amazing!!) and I’m italian. I’m reading day by day your “WordPress for dummies” in english and finding it really illuminating, thanks!
One question for you: I like so much the aphorisms appearing at the top of your blog and I’m wondering if you did it by yourself or if there is a plugin. I looked for something similar in wordpress/extend/plugins but no way to find anything…
Thanks for your reply!
Ok, I found it…