Archive for the ‘WordPress Plugins’ Category
by James Johnson on January 26th, 2012
Working with an open-source platform that provides open-source plugins means it’s often cheap to build and maintain a website using WordPress, however because the platform and plugins are often open source it can also create a security headache for site administrators and that’s where Ultimate Security Checker comes into play.
The program is simple to use, essentially users simply search for “Ultimate Security Checker” in the WordPress repository and upload it to their server or they just install it direct from the WordPress plugins search section inside the admin area of their websites WordPress setup.
Once installed the program will ask you to run a diagnostic at which time Ultimate Security Checker will examine your blocks file settings, server settings, WordPress database and required plugin updates for stability. Read More
Categories: WordPress Plugins
Tags: Ultimate Security Checker, wordpress
by James Johnson on January 19th, 2012
The Clean Options plugin is probably one of the easiest to use yet most effective plugins currently available for WordPress website users.
As you may already be aware when some plugins are deleted they fail to remove their database tables from your websites MySql database, conversely they leave commands nested inside your WP-Options table. In some cases poorly constructed plugins can slow down your website and keep it slow even after removed.
WP’s Clean Options plugin however helped you find those orphaned plugins and delete them with just a few simple clicks.
To get started simply search for “Clean Options” from the “Add New” screen in your WordPress admin areas Plugins screen or download and install the plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/clean-options/
One installed the plugin is located under “Tools.”
After clicking on the plugin you will see the following screen: Read More
Categories: WordPress Plugins
Tags: Clean Options, Clean Up Your Blog, Wordpress Plugin Review, Wordpress Review
by James Johnson on January 12th, 2012
Managing a large scale website and all of the links, images and redirects you’ve created can be nearly impossible. For example if you wanted to make sure that every single outbound link you’ve ever posted still worked you would have to visit every page on your website and test those links. You would have to do the same to check for broken images, broken blogrolls and for other custom fields.
Thankfully you don’t have to manually check for broken items on your website if you simply download a WordPress plugin called
Broken Link Checker.
BLC is a program that crawls your website the moment you install it and then looks for links that go to “page not found pages”, “pages that time out” and pages with other errors, the program then notifies you of “broken links” directly through your WordPress backend. Because the program does not rely on
WordPress theme integration it will literally work with any WordPress template you choose to install.
Broken Links checker is 100% free and can be downloaded from the WordPress.org plugin repository or by searching for the program through your WordPress admin area.
Once installed the program will crawl your site, the crawling process could take several minutes or several hours. I recently ran the program on a site with 13,500 posts and after several hours the entire site was crawled.
Read More
Categories: WordPress Plugins
Tags: Broken Link Checker, Wordpress Blog Management Plugins, Wordpress Broken Link Checker
by James Johnson on January 5th, 2012
When adding recent posts to your Twitter account there are many WordPress plugins that can get the job done, however I rarely stray away from the WP to Twitter plugin because it’s use of custom fields and Twitter OAuth access have guaranteed that my posts will reach my Twitter account with the type of output I desire. I currently run WP to Twitter on 6 different websites and in each case the plugin has delivered as promised from it’s use of shortcodes to full URL shortening access and more.
Once you have uploaded the programs plugin to your WordPress install you will find a screen explaining the different post update shortcodes that can be used by the program. As you’ll notice you have the option with each tweet to add such output as post titles, blog name, a short excerpt from your content, category information, date timestamps, the posts URL and even the post author name. These options are all great ways to brand your content in a unique fashion that isn’t your standard “Post Title – Link – Blog Name” format. Read More
Categories: WordPress Plugins
Tags: Twitter Plugins, WP To Twitter
by James Johnson on December 22nd, 2011
I am not an advocate for WordPress plugins, most of the time users go overboard with their installation and in turn WordPress sites become server intensive power hogs that are slow to load and hard to administer. With that being said there are a handful of new plugins this week that attempt to make a developers life easier, both by speeding up a WordPress installation and by allowing for simple output protocols to be achieved.
Here are 5 new WordPress plugins for developing a faster and smarter blog.
1. WP Separate CSS
As a fan of tweaking my websites design on a fairly regular basis I often find that purchased themes pose one significant problem, whenever an update is made available some developers provide all new files for that theme. Unfortunate that means If I update the theme without backing up the CSS file I lose all of the changes that made the theme my own. WP Separate CSS solves this problem by allowing users to create a separate CSS file that is then added into the theme’s CSS output. Simply upload the program, create a .CSS file within the plugins folder and edit that file instead of the typical style.css and other files. Once the .css file is saved the changes are loaded alongside the templates .css files. Read More
Categories: WordPress Plugins
Tags: Be It Facebook Sidetab, Custom Registration Link, Google Web Fonts For Wordpress, New Wordpress Plugins, Quick Plugin Reviews, wordpress, WP Put The Meta, WP Separate CSS
by James Johnson on December 8th, 2011
The Social Metrics plugin for WordPress has quickly become one of the very first options I add to my new WordPress blogs as they are being built. The plugin in it’s most simple of terms allows me as the administrator on my website to examine which social networks are having the greatest impact on the posts I create.
Using Social Metrics is extremely simple, after downloading and simply clicking activate the program can be visited in a section located directly below the “Dashboard” option within the WP-ADMIN area:
After clicking on the “Social Metrics” section the main display is then shown. Before choosing any settings the program automatically displays your newest posts first.
As you can see from the screenshot below the title for each post is displayed (you can click on the hyperlink to visit each story). Next you’ll find some of the most used buttons on most sites (Twitter, Facebook, Google+,StumbleUpon, Digg and LinkedIn). Next to each type of social sharing button is the number of shares it has received. Unfortunately Reddit is now implemented which is a real shame given the buttons increasing prevalence. Read More
Categories: WordPress Plugins
Tags: Analytics, Social Metrics, Wordpress Analaytics
by James Dunaway on December 5th, 2011
For anyone just starting out in SEO or even existing SEO professionals, there’s arguably no quicker or easier way to experiment and learn than by running your own blog. In fact, I’m of the opinion that ALL SEO professionals should have their own side projects. If you don’t, you spend your entire full time job just keeping up with competition and never eclipsing them. Running your own site gives you more freedom and exposure to techniques you wouldn’t use on client sites. So don’t wait, it takes just minutes to set up a WordPress site and here are the first plug ins you should add to kick off your SEO campaign: Read More
Categories: Blogger Tools, Blogging Resources, Blogging Tips, Blogging Tools, WordPress Plugins
Tags: blog, plugins, seo, wordpress
by James Johnson on November 17th, 2011
The robust WordPress platform allows developer to quickly churn out competent plugins that can make our lives as web designers easier. In this weeks newest WordPress plugins we examine a new way to display Facebook Fan Box output, take a look at a grammar and plagiarism plugin and dive into the world of a page specific feedback tool.
We also examine a new way to import audio files from YouTube without the need for their included video and examine how users can easily use their social media logins to comment via the WordPress commenting system.
Take a look at each of the plugins below and let us know which one you find the most useful. Read More
Categories: WordPress Plugins
Tags: Facebook Plugin, Social Media, Youtube
by James Johnson on November 10th, 2011
If you’ve built a recipe website using WordPress and you’ve become frustrated by the lack of visitor results you’re receiving from Google search it’s likely that your recipes have not been formatted using Google Rich Snippets, an option that provides a better way to leverage SEO results by wrapping your content in the correct type of Google Recipe search formatting.
In order to accomplish this goal I suggest HRecipe, a simple to use program that allows recipes to be entered directly from “Post Pages” while editing those recipes as required in the future.
The program can be found in the WordPress.org plugin repository HEREÂ or found through a plugin search from your WordPress administrator area.
Once installed simply navigate to a new post and click on the “HRecipe” logo which is found next to your image, video and other upload icons at the top of the edit area. After clicking on the logo link you will see a page that looks like this: Read More
Categories: WordPress Plugins
Tags: Food Blog, Food Blogging, HRecipe, Recipe Plugin, Wordpress Recipe Plugin
by James Johnson on November 3rd, 2011
The Amazon Simple Storage Service is one of the best ways a website owner can choose to store their websites images, not only is the service simple to use it also provides faster website load times by serving a websites images from Amazon controlled servers.
If you’re using a WordPress and you don’t mind paying a very small fee (approximately $10 per 150,000 pageviews) you should definitely be using this plugin.
Installing the plugin is a simple process, simply download the file from the WordPress repository by either visiting HERE or by searching under “Amazon S3 for WordPress” in your WordPress plugins administrator section.
Once installed navigated to the plugin and you will see the following display options: Read More
Categories: WordPress Plugins
Tags: Amazon S3, Wordpress Server Load
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