Tag Archive for WordPress plugins

More useful WordPress plug-ins

June 22, 2007 No comments

Apart from a widget that puts a login form onto a blog sidebar, I am not really on the lookout for WordPress plug-ins but here are two that came to my attention recently. I have found them to be useful; maybe you will too.

The first is WordPress Admin Themer. This allows you to store wp-admin.css in your blog’s theme folder, out of harm’s way from future upgrade cycles. A neater way of otherwise storing your customisations of admin pages – I keep changing the logout destination to the front page of my blogs – would be a bonus but the style plug-in is a good step forward.

One use to which I was going to put WordPress Admin Themer was to hide some elements of the WordPress dashboard page but I happened accross another plug-in that does just this kind of thing: Dashboard Editor. Activating this gets you an extra admin page where you can select the components that you want to see using the tick (check) boxes. You can even take things further by having your very own dashboard instead of what WordPress offers or by activating widgets for using with your dashboard. It’s all good stuff and I have got rid of extraneous pieces such as Planet News and the getting started section (I have using WordPress long enough that I should know my way around by now…).

Web 2.0, Web Development, Web Technologies

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TechnologyTales.com has moved server…

June 18, 2007 No comments

The last week on WordPress.com has featured decisions that some may question, to say the least. For instance, the death of Feed Stats was something that I saw as a retrograde step. Next, I saw a slight change to the appearance of my blog that led me to take full control of the situation; a previous discussion with WordPress.com staff about changing a theme to the way that I wanted it to be got me nowhere so I wasn’t about to try again… I might miss having advance notice of where WordPress goes next but I am not sure that I want to be a guinea pig either.

So, you now find this hosted by Streamline.net and, apart from a lengthy hiatus (at least, it felt like forever thanks to recurring thoughts of PageRank loss; yes, I know that sounds silly…) spent awaiting FTP access to be sorted out, the set up ran smoothly enough; I think that my request for transfer from a Windows server to a Linux one might have been the cause of the delay. Setting up a MySQL database was a breeze and it’s part of the package too. In fact, the Pro package that I am using is £31.99 ex VAT per annum, not bad at all, and, teething problems out of the way, it’ll be interesting to see how things will fare from now on.

Having a self-hosted WordPress installation is nothing new to me since I do it for my hillwalking blog and everything came together very quickly this time around. knowing what plug-ins add real value was a definite help: Bad Behaviour and Ultimate GA headed the list but a Spam Karma 2 is another option. Feedburner integration is another potential item on the configuration list. I have stuck with the Andreas09 theme but am unsure as to how far I will take customising it; it’s not a high priority right now. In fact, I may find another three-column layout that takes my eye now that I am not limited to the offerings available from WordPress.com.

The posts from the old blog have arrived over here and that seems to have worked fine first time around thanks the WordPress’ import/export functionality. I still have to get the images over but there’ll be time for that yet. Another thing on the to do list is to transfer over the links and set up any text and RSS widgets that have been a feature of the previous rendition of the blog. That means linking to wp-links-opml.php on the old blog using the import links functionality. There is no other link export function and you can only import into a single category; a link import/export plug-in that retains the link category information would be a bonus.

While I wonder if I have made a rod for my own back with my having two self-hosted WordPress blogs, it does feel good to have more control and it’ll be interesting where where this journey goes next.

Site News, Web 2.0, Web Development, Web Technologies

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Google Analytics

May 25, 2007 No comments

Furthering my excursions into things related to Google, I have been giving Google Analytics a whirl for my hillwalking and photo gallery website. Aside from the fact that it is updated once a day, it could have enabled me to eject WordPress plug-ins like Popularity Contest and FireStats getting the chop. As it happens, I also have a Google Analytics plugin installed but a little editing of the blog template that I have developed would get rid of that too.

That’s enough about WordPress plug-ins; let’s return to Google Analytics. It has all the usual stuff: who’s visiting, from where are they coming, what are they using to see your site, etc. In addition, it captures if they are coming back, how long they are staying on the site and how deep they are going. Bounce rate is another term that features heavily: it is when a user only goes to one page and then leaves. With a blog, this unfortunately seems to come out as a high figure and that is ironic given that the blog was meant to promote the online photo gallery; it has very much taken on a life all of its own. There’s more to the information from Google Analytics but it’s all useful stuff and I plan to make good use of it to improve how my site works.

Web 2.0, Web Development, Web Tools

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Going overboard on blog plug-ins and widgets?

May 24, 2007 No comments

This whole Web 2.0 thing is producing an embarrassment of riches for those wanting to share their thoughts on the web without having to go to the effort of developing their own websites from scratch. A decade ago, Geocities was pioneering the idea of web communities but, without the infrastructure and tools that we enjoy today, it and its kind were ahead of their time.

In these blogging days, life is a lot simpler but that means that temptations exist. Temptations like those caused by garish animated GIF’s in the late nineties, a lame attempt to spice up otherwise dull websites. Returning to the present, it is plug-ins and widgets that could convey the excess.

With WordPress, the plug-ins are more “behind-the-scenes” sorts of affairs but it is so easy accumulate several for stopping comment spam and keeping an eye on web traffic, to name just two applications, and so on that you need to be careful that a bag of nails does not result. In fact, I am now considering the rationalisation of what I have got while the number remains in single figures.

WordPress 2.2 adds widgets to the list of temptations; WordPress.com already has these but the number is small and you can be sure that that will explode now that self-hosted WordPress blogs get the functionality. The trouble with these widgets is that you need to be adept with CSS so as not to end up with an eyesore akin to those seen a decade ago, though theme authors can help with this. I am not activating the widgets capability for my hillwalking blog because I have many other (better?) things to be doing.

Another thought on widgets: the tag cloud widget previously held in captivity at WordPress.com surely must now find itself in the wild, a worrying prospect given how rubbish they can appear. However, Jakob Nielsen et al. shouldn’t get too concerned as trends that go too far scar the memory and preclude their return. Just consider those animated GIF’s…

Web 2.0, Web Development, Web Tools

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WordPress anti-spam plug-ins

April 12, 2007 No comments

I have just learned about and started to use two new tools on my other blog to combat comment spam. Akismet was doing well but I was moderating more than I should. One plug-in is Bad Behaviour and this interrogates incoming traffic and blocks anything that is attempting the nefarious. This cuts off spam bots before they can even see the blog. Spam Karma 2 is the other new weapon in my arsenal. It is another spam detector and using it alongside Akismet is following the defence in depth approach: when spam gets past one, it is unlikely to pass the other. Both can coexist together and there apparently is an Akismet plug-in for Spam Karma that does away with the need for Akismet itself. The array of options offered by Spam Karma may put off some but that means that extra power is there should it ever be needed.

Web 2.0, Web Development, Web Tools

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Post popularity plug-in

March 27, 2007 No comments

I found this WordPress plug-in called Popularity Contest while looking for something else, always the best way to find things. Come to think of it, I can’t remember what I was looking for. Anyway, the plug-in polls the popularity of your posts, a very useful piece of information, not that it should deflect from writing about those things about you want to write…

Web 2.0, Web Development, Web Tools

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