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Wordpress Plugins used at SODEVE

Until now, I have wasted many hours searching for the best Wordpress plugins that might help me to make this blog looks great. Hopefully this list will help you to save your precious time.

  1. C6 Excerpt
    To get a more flexible excerpt out of your blog entry
  2. Feed Burner Feed Replacement
    To redirect feed request to Feedburner. Thus, reducing traffic load.
  3. Google Sitemaps
    To make Google indexes your blog better
  4. Link To Me Textbox
    To nag people to link back to your blog entry
  5. Most Commented
    To display blog entries with most comments
  6. Recent Comments
    To display recent comments made by your blog visitors (not the alien, big brother, or the janitor) DOH!
  7. Related Posts
    To display a list of your blog entries which somehow related to the current entry.
  8. Run PHP
    Allows you to run PHP code in your post.
  9. Sexy Comments
    Make the comments look like forum post.
  10. Ultimate Warrior Tag
    Allows you to tag your blog entries.
  11. WP-Email
    Allows your visitors to send blog entry to his/her friends through email.
  12. WP-PageNavi
    Better page navigation for your blog.
  13. WP-Polls
    Add polls to your blog.
  14. WP-Stats
    Shows your blog statistics.
  15. WP-UserOnline
    Displays the visitors of your blog
  16. WP-Syntax
    Beautifully highlight source code embedded in your blog entry
  17. WP-Translate
    Translate your blog to many languages. Klingon and Elvens is not yet supported.
  18. WP-Postratings
    Let your visitors rate how good/sucks your writing skills are
  19. Gregarious
    Let your visitors share your good/sucks blog entries to other people

The WP-Postratings and Gregarious added one day after this post published :)

Firing Blanks at Your Blog? Nudge .. Nudge .. Wink-Wink .. Say No More

I was reading my RSS Bandit (thanks to Kang Kombor) when I bumped an article about classification of blog posts. I will write down the excerpt here:

  1. The SpeedLinker
    This is where you gather links to something interesting in other blogs.
  2. The Quoter
    This is when you saw other people saying good things in their blog and you rewrite it in your own blog.
  3. The Entertainer
    This is where you entertain your readers by putting hilarious video from Youtube.com
  4. The Questioner
    This is where you ask your readers a question to start a discussion. You definitely need readers to begin with :-)
  5. The Updater
    This is where you inform your readers regarding the progress of an ongoing project. It could be report on your own project/blog
  6. The Newsreader
    This is where you share interesting news you get from press release or newspaper.
  7. The Recycler
    This is where you put your old post as new, with additional update of course
  8. The Guest Poster
    This is where you let someone else creating post in your blog.
  9. The Announcer
    This is where you announce something to your readers. DOH!

Source
The 9 Essential Posts that Every Blogger Should Know

 

And I think this post itself will become the example of ‘The Quoter’ type of post.

Great Advises on Blogging

I always consider blogging as a mean to improve yourself. By sharing your knowledge, you actually become more knowledgable on that subject you are writing about. To create an article, usually it starts with what you know. Moving to the next paragraphs you realize that you forgot a detail about something, you then googled, read a book and find answer to your own question. Thus, now you know more about the subject you writing.

I was highly inspired by these advises so i decided to record them in a single post which we can refer again and again

OK, It’s time to relax and let the points sink down into our brain. Hopefully it will be useful and affect us in may good ways.

Expose Your Wordpress Blog to the World

I bump into 3 interesting articles on Digg today. After reading these 3 articles, I can conclude that to get your blog fully exposed to the world you need to follow 3 steps:

  1. Get your blog quickly indexed by the search engines
  2. Optimize your blog to be crawled by the search engines
  3. Make sure you have the right plugin to support point 1 and 2

Get Your Blog Quickly Indexed by the Search Engines

Adam McFarland taught us how to get this on his article. So according to him, there a few steps that fasten indexing of your site. They are:

  • Register your domain name. For cheap domain name, Netfirms always have this cheap $5 .com/.net/.org domain. But Godaddy also offer even cheaper for .info domain which is at $ 0.99 (yes .. 99 cents !!!)
  • Put up a home page. Once you got your domain and hosting, you need to install the Blog software. Since I only have experience with Wordpress, I can’t recommed you any other blog software. Personally to me, Wordpress is good enough. So many people support it by creating plugins/themes. Because of that, I never look at the other way.
  • Setup a blog and sign up for FeedBurner. The registration is quick and fast. They even let you select the buttons to connect your feed to many RSS Readers.
  • Write a few articles and submit to directories. Adam recommends iSnare and EzineArticles.I think I will submit one of my previous post.
  • Get a link from an indexed site. To do this I participate actively on Google Groups and Digg. Any better idea?

Optimizing Wordpress Blogs for Search Engines

Christian Van Den Berge taught us how to get this on his article. So according to him, these steps need to be done to optimise your Wordpress blog for search engines indexing process:

  1. Using Permalinks. Permalinks can be setup on your Wordpress Admin module. (Option - Permalink).
  2. Put titles up front in your URLs. I use “/%category%/%postname%/” which should have the same effect
  3. Tags. You need to install Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin to enable tags in your blog.
  4. Page Titles. By default, Wordpress already set your blog title into “Blog Title - Post Title”. Unless you want to include the tags into the title as mentioned on point 3, you do not need to do anything.
  5. Choose your Post Titles carefully. I believe that in order to be a good post title, the title should be the general idea of the post. I think capitalizing the first letter of every word in the title should make it more attractive.
  6. Autolinks. I don’t use Autolinks. I believer Autolinks might increase the chance of killing my webserver.
  7. Related Post. Use this plugin to add Related Post. Originally, the plugin will use the other posts’ Title as the factor to determine whether they are related. Currently, it has the ability to use keywords for each post. You are very likely need to edit all your previous posts that don’t have keywords.
  8. Ping Services. Wordpress 2.1 (the one used here) has an automatic ping service to be signaled whenever you publish a new page. You might want to add the number of ping services through feedburner.
  9. Google Sitemaps. First, submit your site to Google here. Then you submit the site to be reviewed here. You will be required to send an original page or add a meta tag on your header. In my opinion, the latter is the easier one. Then you need to create the xml site map file, you can automatically do that using this plugin. Finally, submit your xml sitemap to Google here.
  10. Categories. Christian’s idea is that the Categories must be structured such as : “Programming - C# - Threading”.

Legend: : Done : Not (Yet) Done

Hopefully now we have a good understanding on how to get our Wordpress blog exposed to the World. The final treat is the list of best plugins for Wordpress. Please carefully pick one that really benefits you/suit your needs, without introducing significant increase in the server load.

Add multiple social-bookmarking buttons to your Wordpress Blog easily

I was reading Wikipedia on social bookmarking which lead me to this social-bookmarking-button-generator. It’s really useful so I use it immediately. After selecting all website, I download the zipped file. I extract and upload the images to the server (at “/images” folder) and then i modify ’single.php’ by copy-paste and modify the content into

single.php

 

<?php$current_url = ‘http://’.$_SERVER[”HTTP_HOST”] . $_SERVER[”REQUEST_URI”];
$current_url = str_replace(”:”, “%3A”, $current_url);

$current_url = str_replace(”/”, “%2F”, $current_url);

$current_url = str_replace(”&”, “%26″, $current_url);

$current_title = urlencode(the_title(”",”",FALSE));

?>

<table border=”0″ cellspacing=”0″ cellpadding=”0″>

<tr>

<td><a href=’http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<?php
echo $current_url; ?>&title=<?php
echo $current_title; ?>’ target=’_self’>
<img border=’0′ src=’/images/digg.png’ alt=’Digg This’ title=’Digg This’ /></a></td>

<td><a href=’http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php echo $current_url; ?>&title=<?php
echo $current_title; ?>’ target=’_self’><img border=’0′
src=’/images/delicious.png’ alt=’del.icio.us’ title=’del.icio.us’ /></a></td>

<td><a href=’http://reddit.com/submit?url=<?php
echo $current_url; ?>&title=<?php echo $current_title; ?>’
target=’_self’><img border=’0′ src=’/images/reddit.png’ alt=’Reddit’ title=’Reddit’ /></a></td>

<td><a href=’http://www.spurl.net/spurl.php?url=<?php
echo $current_url; ?>&title=<?php echo $current_title; ?>’ target=’_self’>
<img border=’0′ src=’/images/spurl.png’ alt=’Spurl’ title=’Spurl’ /></a></td>

<td><a href=’http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?u=<?php
echo $current_url; ?>&t=<?php echo $current_title; ?>’ target=’_self’>
<img border=’0′ src=’/images/furl.png’ alt=’Furl’ title=’Furl’ /></a></td>

<td><a href=’http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&Description=&Url=<?php
echo $current_url; ?>&Title=<?php echo $current_title; ?>’ target=’_self’>
<img border=’0′ src=’/images/blinklist.png’ alt=’BlinkList’ title=’BlinkList’ /></a></td>

<td><a href=’http://ma.gnolia.com/bookmarklet/add?url=<?php
echo $current_url; ?>&title=<?php echo $current_title; ?>’ target=’_self’>
<img border=’0′ src=’/images/magnolia.png’ alt=’ma.gnolia.com’ title=’ma.gnolia.com’ /></a></td>

<td><a href=’http://www.newsvine.com/_tools/seed&save?u=<?php
echo $current_url; ?>&h=<?php echo $current_title; ?>’ target=’_self’>
<img border=’0′ src=’/images/newsvine.png’ alt=’Newsvine’ title=’Newsvine’ /></a></td>

<td><a href=’http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do?href=<?php
echo $current_url; ?>&title=<?php echo $current_title; ?>’ target=’_self’>
<img border=’0′ src=’/images/simpy.png’ alt=’Simpy’ title=’Simpy’ /></a></td>

<td><a href=’http://technorati.com/faves?add=<?php
echo $current_url; ?>’ target=’_self’><img border=’0′ src=’/images/technorati.png’
alt=’Technorati’ title=’Technorati’ /></a></td>

<td><a href=’http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/edit.pl?new_url=<?php
echo $current_url; ?>&new_comment=<?php echo $current_title;
?>&linktype=Misc’ target=’_self’><img border=’0′ src=’/images/fark.png’ alt=’Fark’
title=’Fark’ /></a></td>

<td><a href=’http://www.blinkbits.com/bookmarklets/save.php?v=1&source_url=<?php
echo $current_url; ?>&title=<?php echo $current_title; ?>’ target=’_self’>
lt;img border=’0′ src=’/images/blinkbits.png’ alt=’Blinkbits’ title=’Blinkbits’ /></a></td>

<td><a href=’http://tailrank.com/share/?text=&link_href=<?php
echo $current_url; ?>&title=<?php echo $current_title; ?>’ target=’_self’>
<img border=’0′ src=’/images/tailrank.png’ alt=’TailRank’ title=’TailRank’ /></a></td>

<td><a href=’http://www.netvouz.com/action/submitBookmark?url=<?php
echo $current_url; ?>&title=<?php echo $current_title; ?>&description=<?php
echo $current_title; ?>’ target=’_self’><img border=’0′ src=’/images/netvouz.png’
alt=’Netvouz’ title=’Netvouz’ /></a></td>

<td><a href=’http://www.mister-wong.de/index.php?action=addurl&bm_url=<?php
echo $current_url; ?>’ target=’_self’><img border=’0′ src=’/images/mrwong.png’
alt=’Mr. Wong’ title=’Mr. Wong’ /></a></td>

<td><a href=’http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/bookmarklet?u=<?php
echo $current_url; ?>&t=<?php echo $current_title; ?>’ target=’_self’>
<img border=’0′ src=’/images/yahoomyweb.png’ alt=’YahooMyWeb’ title=’YahooMyWeb’ /></a></td>

<td><a href=’http://blogmarks.net/my/new.php?mini=1&simple=1&url=<?php
echo $current_url; ?>&title=<?php echo $current_title; ?>’ target=’_self’>
<img border=’0′ src=’/images/blogmarks.png’ alt=’Blogmarks’ title=’Blogmarks’ /></a></td>

</tr>

</table>

Have fun with yours =)

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