I was reading around the web today looking for ways to make the blog better and I stumbled on a post over at sitepoint about 10 must have Wordpress Plugins. Surprisingly, I’m already running most of the ones listed, but I thought it was time for me to make another list of my favorite plugins and the reasons I like them. So here goes:

• Comment Timeout 2.0.1 – One of the worst things on a blog is comment spam (you know those “I read your post and it is good” comments that get left by ‘Super Duper Webhosting Wow’). Akismet helps keep down a good bit of that, but the comment timeout plugin gets the rest by doing something Wordpress *should* do automatically. After a set time period (one month, one week, days) the comments close. It gets extended a bit every time someone comments in order to keep the discussion alive. It works rather well and has reduced my time editing spam to almost nil.
• CommentLuv – One of the best ways to help out people who leave comments on your site. It crawls their site and if possible, grabs the latest post (though newer versions of the plugin also have the ability to allow the person to choose one of the last five posts) and links back to it. Giving both you and the poster some deep link luv. Its developed in to a kind of movement and has its own site and program to go along with it. If you want to see it in action, leave a comment here…
• Google Site Maps – The big G loves to crawl your site. Providing them with a map makes it easier, and the google site maps plugin makes it mindless. Add the plugin, set the parameters and its done. No more worries and you have a good site map for the robots to find.
• LinkCurl – LinkCurl takes the tags (or categories) you add to your post and grabs a handful related links and appends them to your post. It takes a little longer to post the post due to it crawling the web, but it helps add links to your site (and the little boost from return traffic is swell). I’ve edited the code a bit to make it work a little better. If you’d like my copy, let me know and I’ll send it to you (or post it here).
• Quoter – Allows commenters to quote other comments. That way, if there’s something Gruntled said that you don’t like you can make sure to comment on his comment. Comment.
• Related Posts – If your readers liked the post they read, maybe they’d like this other one? This plugin recommends other posts for your readers to read. After all, its all about getting them to stay on your site right?
• Subscribe to Comments – Does what it says it does. It allows your readers to subscribe to the comments when they comment. Automatically emailing them if anyone else comments, that way they can follow the discussion.
• Top Friends – Top Friends allows you to list your friends in a block on the side and post a link to their most recent post. This is cool as it gives some updating love to your friends or blogs you like. Also shows the frequency of their updates.
• Wordpress Mobile – In this day and age, there is no reason not to have a mobile enabled site. I pull my site up on my Blackberry all the time (as though someone else is going to update it) and I hate it when other sites aren’t enabled for mobile devices. You’d think that in the age of the iPhone and the Blackberry that everyone would be. Well, now with Wordpress Mobile, its as easy as activate. Check it out, you’ll be glad you did. If you use it, let me know, I’d love to see your site on my phone!
• All in One SEO Pack – This provides Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog. You can control the keywords, description and more from the simple to use admin interface with this plugin. Now you have NO REASON not to be SEO approved!

All of these plugins are in use here on the site and they are in no way all that I have. If you have a favorite plugin, let me know what it is, I’d love to check it out. Also, most of these can be installed directly via the plugin manager in WP these days…

Related External Links

• 10 Quick Win jQuery Plugins | Steve Reynolds Blog
• SEO Tools (136 tools) | Domain&Hosting Review, Make Money Online …
• Trends in Web Design Involving WordPress | I'd Rather Be Writing …

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Yar, I’ve been using Twitter for a while now and I’ve finally developed a list of five of my current favorite tools for twitter. I thought I’d share them with you.

Twhirl is perhaps my favorite desktop app for twitter. Its cool because its done in AdobeAIR and can run on Mac, Linux and Windows (making it fully crossplatform), you can reply, retweet, and tweet right from it and it updates on its own. Follow friends, keep tabs on whats happening and even view profiles for other twitter users. When I’m not twittering on my blackberry, I’m using twhirl.

SocialScope Its still in private beta, but this app for mobile devices is amazing. When I’m on my berry, its what I use to keep track of twitter AND facebook status. You can update both as well. If you’re rockin a smartphone, register for the beta. Its getting better every update.

I came across this next one on a post on Twitter Tools by Felicia Day. Twitterholic is a good ranking of top twitterers based on number of people following them. Its no big surprise Obama is number 1.

If you aren’t using Twitter Tools by alex king or TwitMe by Johnny Mast to update your twitter status with your blog posts (both wordpress plugins) then you’re missing out. One of the best ways to drive traffic to your blogs and posts is by letting your “followers” know of current postings and both do an excellent job of that. Twitter Tools is the more robust allowing for a little more customization and options.

Lastly, Take a look at another wordpress plugin, TweetBacks by Joost de Valk. TweetBacks Show the tweets about your posts and pages as comments on your blog. This helps you gauge who is talking about your posts as well as drives more people to twitter. Works well.

Oh what the hell. I came across this gem today and I wanted to share. Twistori. Twistori makes use of the Twitter API to search out tweets with certain words (love, hate, believe, feel, think and wish) and then streams them to you live. Its a little earie to see it in action, but quite addicting….

Related External Links

• 10 Quick Win jQuery Plugins | Steve Reynolds Blog
• Toolmonger » Blog Archive » 4-in-1 Bucket Tool
• Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger » Blog Archive Test of a new …
• Trends in Web Design Involving WordPress | I'd Rather Be Writing …

Generated by LinkCurl

One of my favorite things to do is to try out new plugins and I have to say, the new plugin interface in WP 2.7 is AWESOME. Absolutely Awesome. I can search and install without leaving my admin area. Something that other suites have been able to do for a while and its something that helps bring Wordpress to the forefront of Blogging platforms. That being said, if you’ve ever checked out my Plugins Used page, you’ll know, I like me some plugins (I have about 55 active plugins at the moment).

Here’s a list of my favorites…

• All in One SEO Pack – Anyone who isn’t using this plugin is shooting themselves in the foot. This plugin helps make it easy to add keywords, titles and other much needed objects to your pages and posts. Plus, its kinda cool… now you can say, “Yea, I’m doing the SEO thing. Are you?”
• Comment Email Responder – I think I’ve talked about this one before. Its a godsend! Now, you can notify your commenter via email when you reply to their comment. This does two things, one, it lets them know you’ve commented and two, it pulls them back to the site. Often times to comment again. Its been a big help in retaining readers here.
• CommentLuv – It started as a simple plugin to pull your commenter’s last post and has evolved in to a movement. Even cooler is the fact that they run contests that your commenters are automagically entered in. Its a good way to add links to your site as well and to help out your friends by Deep linking to their posts.
• Comment Timeout – Yes, I run akismet, but with the Comment Timeout plugin, I have to clear a lot less spam. You can specify a time period for your comments to close (after the last comment was made). On here, its set for a month. A month after the last comment or the post, the comments close on that post. Helps keep a lot of spam out. A lot.
• Google Sitemaps – The last one I want to talk about today is the google sitemap plugin. It simply generates a sitemap of all your pages (or just the ones you specify) and puts it in a location. You can then alert google, yahoo, ask, etc. that you have a sitemap and it will help the bots crawl. Its good for increasing your ranking and it does something that WP should do anyways.

Thats just a short list of some of the plugins I like and use, I’ll cover more next week, don’t you worry. Is there a plugin you use that you think I’d benefit from??

So apparently Wordpress 2.7 is out today (or sometime last night) and of course, they are recommending that you upgrade immediately. Your sites won’t die if you don’t, but don’t expect it to go smoothly.

Among some of the changes to wordpress are a new layout for the admin areas. I had just gotten used to the way 2.6 was doing things, and they’ve totally changed it in 2.7. Its a little smoother looking, but it seems to run about the same. Navigation is a trick, but once you pick up on it, its pretty good. There are options to install plugins directly from the dashboard and other admin sections which is a nice change. The layout is all web 2.0ish and rounded corner looking. In all it seems to be a decent upgrade, though they probably could have gone with a complete new version.

I did run in to a problem upgrading one of my sites to 2.7. There’s a reason they warn you to disable all plugins before upgrading. Several of the plugins I had on the site were not friendly with 2.7. I was able to move ALL of the plugins from the plugins directory to a different directory and then do the upgrade. Once that was done, I copied them all back to the plugins directory and added them one by one. It didn’t take too long, but I could have avoided it all together if I had just disabled the plugins to begin with. Let me know what you think of 2.7!

It doesn’t get much better then this. Adobe Air has allowed some developers to do some pretty cool things with code lately and I have to think, that from a blogger’s standpoint, Moderator by Daniel Dura is the best thing since, well, wordpress.

Moderator is a pretty cool wordpress plugin that adds the ability to approve, spam or delete comments right from your desktop. Its like digital signage on your desktop of your blog. Doesn’t get much better then that does it? The kicker, AIR is a multiplatform (mac, linux, windows) tool so anyone on the big three can make use of this easy plugin.

Installation was a snap, simply unzip the moderator files to your wp plugins folder and activate it in your admin section. Go to the moderator section under the settings and install the code (if you haven’t installed AIR it will do that for you at the same time). Start it up, put in your info and you’re off and running.

So far I haven’t had any comments *ahem* on the site to make use of it, but I hope to shortly… *ahem*. If you use it, let me know what you think.

So a friend is attending some conference somewhere and in one of the sessions he was in he learned of twitter.zappos.com. Apparently, the shoe GOD zappos has instituted a twitter feed to their site that allows visitors to see the good and bad of the twittersphere when it comes to zappos. Simply mention the word zappos in a twit and you’re in the feed. its rather cool and its led me on a search for a plugin that does the same…

I came across two that are kind of similar the first is Twitter Fountain. TF creates a flash like animation of whatever the search term you specify. Its ok but not really what I’m looking for…

The other is closer. TwitterDoodle searches the twits and creates a post based on your search and search intervals. The post can be posted to the front page or not and you can create as many searches as you’d like. Its actually a pretty cool tool. Here’s a post of the mentions of Delusions of Grandeur (not just this website but any time those words come up in a twitter!) in the twittersphere. How cool is that??

If you have another twitter tool you’re using, let me know about it….

One of the plugins in use here is the Yahoo Shortcuts plugin which aim to help make your blog supafly! Its an easy way of adding photos, links, maps and other rich media to Your blogposts with little effort.

The cool thing, is that they’re currently mailing out FREE t-shirts to those people who are using their wordpress plugin! I highly recommend you grab the plugin and the shirt before their all gone!

Thirteen ways to blogging success
In no particular order…

1. Find a Niche. Pick a subject (or a couple of subjects) and blog about those specifically. Don’t jump from Britney, to Politics, to Software reviews to auto racing on the same blog. Your posts would be everywhere and no one would be able to follow. If you want to blog about a variety of subjects, create multiple blogs (they can all be subdomains!). Look at the big guys, they all have a fairly narrow subject and they stick with it.
2. Blog regularly. Regular blogging helps keep you on your toes. It provides more content for your visitors and it gives them a reason to keep coming back. Not to mention, but it looks really bad when there is a month span between posts. Almost like you don’t care to blog.
3. Write about what you know. I’m a dad, a history major, a backpacker and an IT guy. It would be insane for me to blog about cars or soccer or even milking cows when I know very little about those things. However, I can blog about family experiences, computer related topics and even history and politics to some extent with a little credibility. It helps to sound like you know what you’re talking about. You wouldn’t go to the Doctor for a physical if his doctorate was in poetry would you?
4. Communicate with your readers. This is one thing that a lot of bloggers fail to do. Yea, you’ve written the post. Maybe your job is “done” but it shouldn’t stop there. If susie leaves a comment on your post follow up. Either a reply in the comments or an email to susie thanking her for her comment and commenting on it goes a long way to gaining a new reader. Besides, your readers are more likely to check back if they know you’re going to reply.
5. Don’t do it for the money. Yea, money is nice and its always good to be able to pay the bills so the lights stay on, but if you’re blogging strictly for money, your posts will show it and you’ll get tired of blogging. Not to mention, your readers will get tired of reading the CRAP you put out.
6. Relate to your readers. I know it sounds silly, but the better you relate to your readers, the more readers you’ll have. Instead of spouting off statistics, numbers and links, try and tell your story (think of each post as a story) on a personal level. If you add a bit of personality to your writing your readers will be more likely to relate to the post and find that nugget of wisdom in it you want them to have.
7. Post things you like. If you like something, chances are your readers will too. If you’re disgusted by something, again, chances are your readers will be too. One of the best things you can do is post about things you like (it goes back to posting about what you know).
8. Keep a journal. Call it what you will, but journaling on paper was the precursor to blogging as it is today and it still has a valuable place in every day life. Unless you’re a hermit living in your mother’s basement (sorry Gruntled) you’re not going to live connected to your computer/blog 24/7. Keeping a small notepad on you will help you remember what you wanted to blog about the next time you log on line (like that outfit the really fat guy was wearing at the mall today, or something your professor said in class about making sausage). Its easy to come up with ideas to blog about, its harder to remember them.
9. Write as though you’re having a conversation with a friend. This is a tricky one that could get a lot of bloggers in trouble and it shows in the blogs that use broken English as their main language. The trick is to write so not to seem stuckup and snooty. If you write as you talk (make sure grammar and spelling are correct) your readers will have a much easier time reading and will be more likely to come back.
10. Do not use a FREE blogging site like wordpress.com, blogger, livejournal or myspace. If you really want success as a blogger, pony up the $10 a year for a domain name and find some inexpensive hosting. Know though, that as with most things, the cheaper the hosting the cheaper the service. If you go for a cheap hosting plan, don’t be upset when you experience outages, downtime and poor customer service. The cheaper hosts aren’t concerned about quality so much as quantity.
11. Have fun. I mentioned post things you like above, but you also need to have fun. Successful blogging is a job (whether or not you see it that way) and as with most jobs, the more you enjoy it or have fun doing it, the more likely you are to continue doing it. Imagine that instead of blogging we’re talking about making widgets. You spend every day punching a time clock and standing on a manufacturing line making these widgets. Every widget is the same as the last. For the sake of arguement, lets say, they’re money making widgets. Each one is the same color. The same size and shape. After a while, the newness of the “job” wears off and you hit the snooze button in the morning because you really don’t want to make widgets again. Blogging is a lot like that. If you don’t enjoy blogging (I mean really enjoy blogging) it becomes a chore and one thats easier to give up than most. Don’t constantly blog about the fact that you aren’t making any money. Instead, blog about things like what you did with the little amount you have made. Blog about your children, pets (well, dogs really) or your favorite pair of shoes. Blog about things that are fun to blog about.
12. Comment on other blogs. Establish a network of blogs you visit daily. It doesn’t take long to pop in to five or ten blogs and leave a comment. Even if its just a “hey, this was a good post” comment. Almost every blog around will at least let you drop a link to your blog back in. Some of the cooler ones let you drop a couple. And every link counts.
13. Make social networking your friend. I don’t mean myspace. There are plenty of other SN sites out there. FaceBook (there is a really cool WordPress plugin for facebook), entrecard, digg, thoof, bloggingzoom, sphinn. These should all be your friends and you should be visiting them daily. One of the best ways to gain readers is to figure out what the hot button topics are and post about them. I don’t mean the “John chow said” type posts, but blog about the hot stuff in your own voice. Yea, hot button topics are good, but the same old crap isn’t. Bring a new and different (conflicting?) view to the scene and more people will visit and comment.

Thirteen Wordpress Plugins worth Using
In no particular order…

1. Akismet – Akismet comes default with wordpress installs these days. Its one of two plugins that do. Akismet is perhaps the single best tool against fighting blogspam that we have available today. Why my install of akismet has already blocked over 6,000 spam posts and blocks at least 100 a day. If you’re not using it, you really, really should be.
2. Commentluv 0.993 – CommentLuv is perhaps one of the coolest plugins I’ve installed to date. What it does is scrape the url you submit when you make a comment and it gleans the last post from your feed and adds it to your comment as a “Last post from” type addition. So you get some really good back links over time if you keep commenting on my site. I’ve received a lot of positive feedback over this one…
3. Comment Timeout 2.0.1 – This is another great comment plugin, this one though helps with spam like Akismet. Comment Timeout does what it says. You can set an amount of time (I think I have mine set to 30 or 60 days) that comments are open on a post before they are closed. Certain triggers like a large number of comments will cause the comments to be kept open on a single post, but for the most part this helps prevent spammers from going through your old posts and adding comments. Its helped cut down on the spam a lot as well.
4. Douche Bag – I haven’t used this one a lot but its fun to have. The guys at YoungGoGetter came up with a way to label comments you don’t like.. You simply add a tag to the comment and the image of your choice is shown (currently its a brown bag with the word douche on it).
5. WeatherIcon – This one isn’t so much a do something plugin, but I’ve had it on my blog for virtually ever. Its nice to know the weather here in teh ATL and I can, all I have to do is hit my blog. Besides, its pretty cool. Isn’t it??
6. WP-Polls A good way to encourage participation on your blog is to give people something to participate in. From time to time, I like to run a little poll to see what the general masses are thinking (I am in no way associated with any official polling company). Thats where this gem from Lester Chan comes in to play. You can specify the items in the poll and display them in a sidebar or a post. Its pretty nifty.
7. WP Grins – Clickable emoticons for comments. What more could you ask for??
8. WPG2 – I use gallery (menalto) for my image management and I needed a good way to integrate it in to the wordpress site. The team working on WPG2 has done an amazing job at making things work the way they need to. Could ask for a better gallery plugin.
9. wp-recent-links Some people use their wordpress install for little more than listing links every day of places they like and visit. I like to use my blog for blogging, but the wp-recent-links plugin works wonders for when I find that little nugget of gold on the web that I want to share with people I know (I was going to say like… but then I remembered Gruntled. I simply add my link and a description and bam. Its posted for the world to see. Plus there’s a cool link archive page.
10. Show Top Commentators – I’m not sure what a commentator is (I believe its a normal tator…) but I do know I like to show the top commenters on the site and this plugin does that. Its great for keeping track of monthly contests.
11. Wordbook – Recently, I created a facebook account (facebook is so much cooler than myspace) and this plugin allows me to post my blog posts on facebook with out any extra work on my part. Now thats nice.
12. Quoter -Allows commenters to quote other comments (dynamically or server side if they have Javascript disabled) and any other text in a page (Javascript only). Is nice when I want to specify what the heck I’m replying too.
13. In Series – I’ve used this only once since I added it (my posts about Disney) but its nice and for sites that are posting series of how-to’s its a god send. You can specify which posts are in the “series” and it adds a table of contents to the post making it easy for your readers to read all the articles in the series.

If you’re like me, you’re a bit hesitant to upgrade to the latest release of Wordpress. DoG was running a very good install of the last 2.2.x release and I wasn’t in a rush to upgrade it for several reasons. The largest reason and one you can still see some of the effects of on the site, is that the theme I’m using, Redoable by DJR hasn’t been updated for the 2.3 branch and most likely won’t be any time soon.

If you’re not currently running a theme compatible with the 2.3.x branch of wordpress, I would recommend changing your theme to one that is or wait to upgrade until you’re comfortable with doing the work yourself. I’m in the process of a redesign and I wanted to use some of the native features in the new releases of WP so I went ahead and made the jump. It wasn’t all cake though, there are some hoops to jump through before you dive right in.

1. Download the latest version to your server (if you have ssh, log in and do a wget) via wget or ftp if you can.
2. Log in to your admin area and disable ALL plugins (yes Virginia, even Akismet. No, don’t worry, you’ll have akismet back up with in 15 minutes). They make it nice and easy in wordpress to disable everything at once (there’s a link at the bottom of the plugin management page that disables everything with one click).
3. Set your default theme to the Default wordpress theme. This is recommended practice for several reasons one, the default theme is standard in wordpress releases and WILL work on your site immediately after the upgrade where as your current theme may or may not.
4. Unzip and copy (again really easy in ssh) the new release to your blog directory. Make sure to copy the contents in wordpress to your blog’s directory and not just the wordpress folder.
5. Run http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php – This is a crucial step as the database changed from the 2.2.x versions to the 2.3 branch. You need to update the database or nothing on the site will work correctly.
6. Check your site. Once the upgrade has completed you can check your site. Your posts and everything should display properly using the default theme.
7. Login to your admin area and UPGRADE ANY plugins that say there is a new release. **THIS IS IMPORTANT** as the database changes rendered the way some plugins accessed the information. If you don’t upgrade the plugins you might get errors (like the UTC category error on this site). Its easy and will take hardly any time at all. One of the features I LIKE about 2.3 is that it lets me know when I need to upgrade the plugins.
8. Activate all your plugins – Or at least the ones you still want to use. I went through and cleared out some of the ones not in use here on the site and it helped a bit.
9. Select new theme – You *should* now be able to reset your theme to the one you want. There may be some errors, if that is the case check the wordpress.org site for answers, chances are that someone has already had the same issue.

In all, it should take less than an hour to do the upgrade. If you’re unsure, there are plenty of people who will do it for you (often for a slight fee). I’ve found the best way is to be prepared. Download the new version before you start anything and make sure you read the upgrade notes. If you’re using a custom theme, make sure it will work. I’ve found that most themes will with some minor changes to the way they call some of the WP hooks.

Good Luck young Skywalker.