WPPW – ©Feed

November 19th, 2008 10 Comments »

The wordpress plugin that I’m writing about this week is one related to your RSS Feed. RSS Feeds have become really important nowadays. You should take as much care for your RSS Feeds as you take for you actual blog.

©Feed

What this plugin does is, it actually extends your feed. Means that, it add things like Related Posts, Digital Fingerprint, IP of the Feed reader etc. to the bottom of your RSS Feed. Now, why is this plugin important ? Mainly because, you can add a digital fingerprint to your feed. It is nothing but an unique key. You can later search for the fingerprint on Google or CopyScape to find blogs that scrape your content with plugins like wp-o-matic and such. Take a look at the plugin in action, on my feed :

copyfeed

Also, it adds a list of Related posts to your feed, which is really useful. Because, most of the subscribers just subscribe to your blog based on your most recent posts. They’ll not know about the great content that you took pains to create, in the past. So, do some justice to those content by giving them a second life :)

WordPress Plugin Wednesday – Update URLs

November 12th, 2008 13 Comments »

There are 3,319 WordPress plugins out there as of this instant. Some plugins like Akismet are very popular and come along with WordPress. But, some like Exec-PHP, though very powerful, are less known to people. So, starting from this week, every Wednesday, I’ll be picking a useful plugin from the directory and will be posting about it here. I’ll be calling this series as WordPress Plugin Wednesday – “WPPW”. (cool abbreviation huh ? I thought it out, trust me).

Velvet Blues Update URLs

Don’t get confused by seeing the plugin’s name. The first part is just the name of the developer’s site. The real function of the plugin is the latter part of its name. It “updates URLs”.

The plugin is only a little over a month old. But, it comes in very handy when you want to move your WordPress blog to a new domain, into a subdirectory or to a subdomain etc.. Though WordPress recommends not to use your domain name (or URL of your blog homepage) in your link, 90% of us bloggers are lazy (even me) to do it. We link to our own posts just the way we link to external sites.

So, whats the problem ? When we move our blog, all these links end up pointing to a 404 page. In order to fix this, we can use this Update URLs plugin. What the plugin does is that it goes through all the posts and replaces all the old URL with the new one that you specify. Now, don’t you call that an useful plugin ?

If you have any specific plugin that you want me to write about, you can let me know.

GotBanners – Making 2 Columns

December 20th, 2007 23 Comments »

If you have installed GotBanners and if it displays only one columns of banners, here is your solution. I started getting a lot of mails asking me how to do it. So, here is the answer. Its fairly simple.

It purely depends on the space you have. You need to have atleast 290px width to accommodate 2 rows of 125×125 banners. Because, GotBanners automatically adds 5px margin to each banner. If you have lesser space, alter this line in gotbanners.php :

echo "<style>.gotbanners { text-align: center; } .gotbanners img { margin: 5px; } </style>";

Change the 5px to something lesser. If you just have 250px, you’ll have to change it to 0px.

Hope its clear for everyone. If you have any other questions, feel free to contact me.

11 Ways To Help Your Visitors Promote YOU

September 13th, 2007 7 Comments »

Social bookmarking sites are among the most popular sites on the web and they are the greatest sources of traffic for any blog. So, you should make sure that your posts hit the doorsteps of these sites. Having a busy schedule (:P) it is not practically possible for us bloggers to go and submit our posts to these sites. Instead we can let our visitors do it. It also makes sure that only the posts that people like are being submitted. So, here are 11 tools that can help your visitors promote your site/blog :

Official Tools :

Many of these social bookmarking sites have their own official tool to be used on blogs and websites.

  1. Digg : One of the most popular tools out there. They integrate like a charm into your website.
  2. Del.icio.us & Tagometer :Launched just towards the end of 2006, the Tagometer has gained a lot of popularity.
  3. Reddit : Cool buttons from the most popular Digg-alike.
  4. Facebook : The recently most-hyped social network’s “Share” buttons.
  5. StumbleUpon : Let your posts get discovered. I would call SU as the best source of “Instant Traffic”.

UnOfficial Tools :

These tools, thought unofficial, allows users a wide range of options to share and also saves a lot of space.

  1. MadKast : One of the easiest tools out there. But, i would call this a bit Intrusive, since they occupy the space near the post title.
  2. AddThis : The easiest and the most popular out there. Especially because of the fact that it can be used on Non-blog sites too with ease.
  3. Social Bookmark Link Creator : A very flexible plugin that allows you to generate the links for these bookmarking sites.
  4. Sociable : Very popular wordpress plugin, mainly due its very cool look.
  5. Share This : Probably The most popular Social Bookmarking plugin out there for WordPress. I use this too.

Bonus (Err.. Not Really)

NetScape Widget : I have separated this from the rest of the list due to the fact that NetScape might get closed down. Otherwise, a great tool to use for NetScape. Though unofficial, it competes with the official ones of Digg and Reddit. Kudos ! ! !

Hope you enjoyed the list and feel free to add to the list, if you know any more.

Got Banners – My First WordPress Plugin

September 3rd, 2007 24 Comments »

I’m very happy and proud to announce the release of my first wordpress plugin called “Got Banners”. It is a simple banner rotation plugin. Let me tell you a little about how i went to create this plugin.

I wanted to run 125 x 125 banners on the right sidebar of this blog. But, i wanted them to be put in a random order each time the page loads as seen on TechCrunch. I searched a lot for a script like this. But, no luck. So, i created my own PHP script and started using it. Then, i emailed John Chow, telling him about this script and that it might also be useful on JohnChow.com for rotating the 125 x 125 banners. He appreciated it and suggested me that i develop this into a wordpress plugin and that was very nice idea and inspired me to make this plugin today.

This is the first stage of this plugin and i’d like to hear some comments, suggestions etc.. from you. You can find more information about the plugin on its own page : Got Banners.

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