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Twitter Tweets and Other Updates

Twitter Tweets and Other Updates

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I got the new Twitter Updates plugin to work, finally, except that the date on my Tweets is Dec 31st, 1969. Sheesh. I have no earthly idea, really.

I also got the archives, pages, and categories plugin to work.

Please tell me if you have any problems with loading the page.

Blog Adjustments and New Plugins

Blog Adjustments and New Plugins

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VirusHead Blog changes and updates:

  • WP-EMail – You can email any post now. There’s a link at the bottom of each post that will open a pop-up window, and there’s a tally on the sidebar of the most emailed posts. At the moment, there is only one. I sent myself the Green Day post to test the system. It’s like butter.
  • Simple Tagging: I decided to go with the Simple Tagging Plugin rather than continue to use Ultimate Tag Warrior – Simple Tagging is easier for me to use, and it has a lot of features that I really like. The Technorati tags link directly to the tag page at the – guess what – Technorati site, and the others link internally to a page of all the posts with the chosen tag. The extra features I like (and I’m not using all of them) are the ability to list a specified number of related posts, the little menu of suggested tags, and the auto-complete type-ahead dropdown menu to add tags. I never used the heavy Yahoo tag suggestions in UTW. I prefer to do my own indexing regardless of the popularity of key phrases.
  • Bad Behavior – I’ve installed this plugin as a first line of defense against spambots. Akismet is already installed to pick up most of the rest. Some people were having trouble every once in a while with seeing the verification image used by Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam. I love Peter’s plug-in, especially since you can add your own words as verifiers; I made up words for fun every once in a while. Still, it’s not worth it if anyone has trouble. I’ll see how well the Bad Behavior/Akismet combination works out. At the moment, Bad Behavior has blocked 3659 access attempts in the last 7 days. The total can be, and is, displayed in the footer.
  • Recent Comments List – updated to version 1.9.

You can see all the plugins that I’m using at any given time (care of WP-Plugin List) here.

To Do:

  • Create a separate page with Simple Tagging tag cloud. I don’t really want it on the sidebar. I’ve read the documentation, but the page template they refer to simply doesn’t appear and I’m a little stymied. I’ll do a little more research on that. Done 5/27 – but I still need to play with the format.
  • Consolidate some of the tags – there are far too many and there is a lot of topic overlap. I still have some hundred or posts that don’t have tags at all.
  • Now that this design is well and truly complete, I’m getting tired of it. It would be a real pain to change it now. I’m not using the WP widgets yet – everything has been hand-inserted except for the features that originally came with the SeaBeast theme. I would like it very much if I could figure out how to put the two sidebars on the left while keeping them SEO-friendly. I just prefer to read text that is on the right-hand side of the page.
  • Experiment a little bit with web-friendly fonts. Is there a better one than I’m using?
  • Figure out how to make the font a little smaller in the footer display of Bad Behavior. Never mind. I just adjusted the code in the plugin.
Playing with WordPress Plugins

Playing with WordPress Plugins

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I’ve been playing with a variety of plugins for WordPress. I’ll be nice and not list the plugins that I don’t like. These are the new plugins that I’m actually using:

  • The most useful one is Google Sitemaps (Arne Brachhold). It creates an automatically-updating Google-compliant sitemap of your blog with a built-in configuration page for your administration panel. Excellent!
  • The WordPress Akismet comment spam filter works really well, but I wanted something at the gate too. Even scanning the hundreds of daily attempted posts was depressing. Peter Keung’s Custom Anti-Spam plugin is a simple word image generator that has stopped the spambots cold, at least for now. The image isn’t very difficult to read, unlike some, and you can customize the pool of words to display – which is kind of fun. And of course, I’ve still got Akismet for backup if that fails.
  • I am very fond of the Kill Preview plugin (Owen Winkler). It seemed a simple thing, but there seemed to be no way to turn off the preview when you’re writing a post. This did the trick.
  • Mullet (Jonathan Broom) produces the “long-tail” listing of post titles at the bottom of the page. It lists only posts that aren’t already on the page – much better than just having the “Previous” link – and you have to love it just for the name.
  • Sociable (Peter Harkins) automatically adds links to popular “social bookmarking” sites. Mine doesn’t have Technorati listed yet, but it looks like it will be added soon. You can change the configuration to include as many (or as few) as you want. Hover with the mouse if you’re not familiar with the icons. It’s such a viral thing that I can’t resist. I have it on the single post pages, so you’ll see it if you look at comments, but I decided not to have it on the regular blog home page. That would be a little too much, I think.
  • I have installed and tested, but not actually started using, Anthony Girasoli‘s Get Recent Posts plugin. It lists the most recent posts, by content or excerpt, but for only one specific catagory. I’m thinking about using it to make a dedicated page for the JW posts.

There are some other plugins that I’ve already been using, of course. Here are my faves:

  • Recent Comments List (Jared Bangs) is on my sidebar. It lists recent comments in descending order, arranged by post title. It shows the name of the commenter, and links to the comment.
  • One year ago (Borja Fernandez) shows titles of your posts from… um… one year ago, although you can change it to X years or posts ago.
  • Ultimate Tag Warrior (Christine Davis) is what I’m using for the tags at the end of each post, as well as the tag cloud at the bottom of the page. It has a lot of options, and I like it, but I still haven’t figured out how to make a tags page that would list all the linked tags.
  • WP-Amazon (Rich Manalang) makes it easy to search for and add items from Amazon to my posts. I do that occasionally, sometimes more for the image than anything else. Configure it with your Amazon associates id. Who knows? You might earn yourself a free book or two.
  • WordPress Database Backup (Scott Merrill) is a convenient way to backup the blog and download it. I’m not entirely comfortable with database administration, and this gives me peace of mind.

Comments? Criticisms? Suggestions?