Halloween is round the corner, and the spirit of haunted festivity is already in air. Each one of us has started preparing for one’s own party. Some of us are carving the pumpkin, and others are working to create a haunted costume, whereas some of us are preparing smiling ghosts and dancing skeleton. The spirit of Orange and Black is in the air.
Halloween stands out from other festivals in its spirit. It is perhaps the only non-religious festival
The verdict has come and the winner of WordPress Plug-in Competition 2009 at WeblogToolsCollection has been decided. Congratulation Godfrey Chan for making your way to the top of the list!
Before I talk in detail about the Section Widget plug-in which Godfrey Chang designed to win this competition, let us first introduce you to the two runner ups: Ron Rennick the designer of Advanced Export for WP and WPMU plug-in, and Chris Northwood, one who designed Live Blogging plug-in for WordPress. Congratulations!
Each runners have been given prize money each of $500, whereas, the winner Godfrey Chang took home prize money of $2,000.
It is time now to see what made these three guys stand out from the crowd and win the competition. I will start the discussion with describing Live Blogging plug-in created by Chris Northwood followed by a brief discussion on Advanced Export for WP and WPMU plug-in that Ron Rennick designed. Then we will discuss Section Widget plug-in at the end of the post. You guessed it right, I have saved best for the end.
Live blogging plug-in will add live micro blogging functionality to WordPress blogs. The plug-in is simple to install and integrate in your WordPress blog seamlessly. The plug-in updates all the connected users’ page in real time. The users do not need to reload the page to see what has been posted.
This plug-in has a simple backend interface and support multiple hooks that could be triggered when a new post is made, but at the moment only hooks for twitter and Meteor are operational.
Ron’s Advanced Export for WP and WPMU plug-in helps the WordPress users and users of WordPress Multi-user (WPMU) manage their exports. Instead of exporting a big, fatty file, which often becomes unmanageable, this plug-in helps users by breaking the exports into smaller and manageable chunks.
Each chunk contains one section of the blog. The plug-in has been tested on WP & WPMU versions 2.7 – 2.8.2, and found to be working properly. This plug-in will make it easy to manage large blogs.
This 2009 WordPress Plug-in Competition winning plug-in helps a WordPress blog show section specific widgets on the pages. You can now fulfill your desire to display certain things just on the front page sidebar, while keeping them away from category or archive pages. In just a few clicks you can create a tabbed section widget for your blog using this plug-in, and to do this you do not require any knowledge of PHP.
Section Widget plug-in makes life easier for all of us. Now, we can do a lot many things in our sidebar. The first thing I am going to do is to add Author Bio to my page that should not appear on any other page. What would you do with it?
In the time when every website and every marketer were talking about providing more; like more free stuffs to visitors, more free space, more control over how much one speaks, more features, more tools, etc., there was one company which was planning to curtail our freedom of expression.
No one ever dream (not even in the wildest dream) that this limiting tool will be accepted; forget about its being successful. Nevertheless, twitter came and changed the way we communicate just by asking, “What are you doing?” and expecting a reply in 140 characters.
I don’t think, anyone needs a lecture on the power of twitter here; hence, we should go directly to see the list of top 5 twitter plug-ins for WordPress.
This is quite a simple plug-in, but do not get misled by its simplicity. TweetMeme button is one of the most widely used twitter plug-ins. It helps your visitors retweet your post effortlessly. This plug-in also provides retweet counts for the number of times your write-up got retweeted.
This is another great twitter plug-in that every WordPress website should have. TweetBacks plug-in helps you search the conversation that happens around your blog posts on twitter and display it in the comment section. It is up to you whether you want to display the twitter conversation between the comments on your blog, or you want to display it separately. In either case, you will be listing the conversation happening around your blog on twitter.
WP to twitter provides an easy way to update your twitter followers about the changes in your blog. This plug-in uses Cli.gs URL shortening services to embed your blog-post’s URL in the message it automatically tweets through your blog. You will need Cli.gs account and its API for this plug-in to work wonder for you.
You use TweetBacks, and you are very much satisfied by it, but there is something which you feel should be there. If the above written description talks about you then you are looking for TweetSuite that integrate WordPress and twitter.
This plug-in provides you server-side TweetBacks, Retweet-This buttons, digg-like Tweet-This Button, automatic tweeting of new posts, Most-Tweeted Widget, Recently-Tweeted Widget, My-Last-Tweets Widget, My-Favorite-Tweets Widget, etc.
This plug-in quite simple, and does just one work. It takes your latest tweets and displays them in your WordPress blog. Twitter for WordPress offers many customization options. If you use widgets in your WordPress blog than just drag and drop this plug-in the sidebar, but if you are not widget-friendly then you will need to put the following code in the sidebar to display your public tweets:
Couple of days back, I was talking to a friend about blogging, blogging platforms and related stuffs. We had a heated discussion, and he seemed to be a fervent supporter of blogger platform while I was advocating WordPress. In the course of our discussion, he asked “Why the heck are you so fond of WordPress?”
“…because it is highly extensible and free,” was my reply.
The reason that I wrote what I wrote above was to convey you that the real power of WordPress lies in its extensibility; in all the free plug-ins that are available for us to use. WordPress has free plug-ins for almost every purpose, and in many case, these free plug-ins are more effective than the paid ones.
For the purpose of this article, I have decided to talk about 5 such free SEO plug-ins that will help you optimize your site for search engines. Unlike other articles that writes about 10 plug-ins for modifying title tag, while ignoring other SEO tweaking, in this article I will write about 5 different plug-ins that do different SEO job, that mean, one plug-in talking about one SEO issue. Let’s have a look:
All in one SEO pack is the first plug-in to go in the list, as it is the most used SEO plug-in for WordPress. At the time of writing, 3,318,834 people have already downloaded this plug-in. This plug-in lets you write your title tag, Meta Description tag, and Meta keyword tags. This plug-in does not have any compatibility issue. It can be installed out-of-the box and used even without any customization. This plug-in is designed with beginners in mind.
As the name suggest this plug-in generate XML site map for Google. You do not need to do anything to generate an XML site map, once you are done with the plug-in installation. Google site map generator plug-in automatically generate XML site map for Google to use, as soon as you update your blog. This helps Google in crawling and indexing your WordPress website or blog better.
Many WordPress as well as SEO experts squelch when they see WP Super Cache in the list of SEO plug-in, but I have included it, nevertheless. I did it because of the power WP Super Cache poses to improve the loading time of your WordPress website. This plug-in generate static html files for your blog, which then is served to most of your visitors, it doesn’t work for the visitors who participate in discussion on your blog. This way the server does not need to generate static pages every time someone requests some information.
It is well known fact in marketing that you have not achieved what you cannot measure, and this apply to blogging as well. To solve the analysis issue for all kinds of websites, Google offers one cool tool: Google Analytics for WordPress. This tool needs no introduction; hence I will just say that there is a plug-in that will link your Google Analytics account with your WordPress website.
Did you ask what the Google Analytics is used for? To say the least, it helps you generate and analyze website statistics of your website in every possible way. If you have decided to use just one tool to gauge the success of your website than it better be this.
Fred came to your WordPress site, and liked one write-up. He got excited and wanted to share his experience with his friends on folkd, what should he do?
Simple. He should use the folkd icon, which is one of the many, present at the bottom of the post he read, and share the story with his gang. Thanks to sociable social bookmarking plug-in, sharing has become very easy.
Sociable is a social bookmarking plug-in that has built-in support for every major social bookmaking website. This is must have promotion plug-in for any WordPress website.
If you are not on Facebook and twitter then you are nowhere. If your stories couldn’t be found on digg and StumbleUpon then your story cannot be found anywhere. To say the least, this is the power of social media. If you have not embraced the social media until now then do it soon before it is too late for your website.
You must have heard this kind of rattling about social media from every nook and corner. Well, the people making such hue and cry about social media are not wrong, but the hue and cry is indeed a bit of exaggerated. Nevertheless, one need to be on the social sites to be successful, and it holds true for your blog as well.
Let me introduce you to top 5 social media plug-ins that will make your WordPress blog social media friendly.
This is by far the best social bookmarking plug-in for your WordPress blog. It supports almost all the major social bookmarking sites. In total it supports 99 social bookmarking sites. Sociable is highly customizable. You can add, remove, and rearrange the bookmarking buttons just by dragging and dropping to suit your need. Click here to download Sociable now.
If you got a good ranking then why not flaunt it? This plug-in does exactly that. You can use RankingBadge plug-in to display Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, and Technorati rank in your WordPress blog’s sidebar. Click here to get your copy of RankingBadge now.
Social Homes plug-in adds a sidebar widget that displays favicons linked profiles of all your profiles on the social media sites. The new version of the plug-in will let you add any link to the any website, which essentially mean that this plug-in support every social media site.
To use it, all you need to do is to add the URL of a website and its name. The plug-in will then fetch the favicon from the website you have entered, and assign it to the URL for display. This is an easy tool to display all your social profiles in the sidebar of your WordPress blog. Click here to download Social Homes now.
No discussion on social media can be complete without mentioning the 140-character magic, twitter. This plug-in automatically tweets your new posts. It works well with schedule posts as well. Tweet This plug-in use your favorite URL shortening service to shorten the blog posts’ permalinks to be posted on twitter. The new version of plug-in also has in-built support for Plurk, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Ping.fm, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. Click here to download Tweet This today.
Did you ever wanted to have a personal bar just like the DiggBar on the pages you send your visitors to? It is possible now to have this with The WordPress Bar. Now, even if you send your visitors away from your blog through outbound links, the visitors remain connected to your blog with your blog bar, which appears at the top of the page you sent him to, just like the DiggBar. This bar does many more things. You need to check this out to know what all it has to offer.
Click here to download The WordPress Bar today.
Here are links of content sharing websites I bookmarked at Delicious.
If you want to define any online business you will start by looking at its pages. To be a truly successful online business you will have to optimize your site and create appealing content that persuades your visitors to make a deal of some kind. What all websites need is hosting on a web server and there are a couple alternatives to choose between.
Web Hosting Think Abouts
There are a few think abouts when it about that time to pick a web hosting plan. Obviously you have to make sure that you get plenty of bandwidth, disk space and an optimal uptime. Actually, most web hosts will offer unlimited bandwidth and disk space so it will probably not be a big issue. The one thing that often separates web hosts is in their pricing – take your time and compare to save money.
Shared Hosting
For many websites is shared hosting well and enough to meet all of their needs. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on a dedicated server you can spend a few measly dollars on shared hosting, which means that you will share server with a couple of other website owners. This type of hosting is in general of high quality but make sure that you partner up with a reputable and well-known web host as there unfortunately are a couple of bad apples out there.
Downsides to Shared Hosting
Even though shared hosting is of high quality there still is one downside that can affect your website. As you share a single server with others there is a chance of your site becoming slow at times which can result in the visitors leaving your site. Other than that shared hosting is a great way for new online entrepreneurs with a small budgeting to kick-start their business.
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