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Archive for June, 2008

14 Plugins To Improve Your WordPress Blog

08.06.03

Plug WordPress is one of, if not the, leading blogging platform at the moment. It’s also an Open Source project. This means that anyone can contribute to its development. There are thousands of WordPress plugins available, to do almost anything you can imagine. However, this can get a little daunting.

Here are 14 plugins I currently use on DaveFleet.com and why you might want to consider using them.

Akismet

Akismet is the standard for preventing comment spam on WordPress blogs. There are other spam plugins available, but I’ve found Akismet to be more than up to the job.

Akismet comes packaged with your WordPress installation and it’s 100% worth the minimal effort required to activate it.

All in One SEO Pack

The All in One SEO Pack gives you a whole bunch of ways to easily improve the search engine optimization for your blog.

This plugin lets you quickly add meta data for your title, description and keyword fields, modify page titles and so on for your entire site, all from one place. It also lets you dig down and edit the meta data for each individual post. Another simple but useful plugin.

FeedBurner FeedSmith

If you’re not already using FeedBurner, I highly recommend you investigate it. It gives you easy access to some useful stats about your readers, while also providing some great tools for promoting your content.

FeedBurner FeedSmith automatically detects all the ways to access your site’s RSS feed and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed instead. It also offers an option to forward your comments feed, too. If you’re not sure about the quality of the plugin, FeedBurner recommends it.

Google XML Sitemaps

The Google XML Sitemaps plugin generates a “XML-compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.” The major search engines all support this way of feeding them the pages you want to include in their indexes. Another useful tool; it has the additional benefit of stopping Google Webmaster Tools from whining at me about the lack of a sitemap whenever I click through its reports.

Login Lockdown

Login Lockdown adds some extra security to WordPress by restricting the rate at which failed logins can be re-attempted from a given IP range. Gives me a little extra peace of mind, which I appreciate.

Redirection

Redirection lets you easily manage 301 redirects, 404 errors and a whole bunch of other things without needing to mess around with your .htaccess file. Great for non-technically-minded people. Me? I just like its simplicity.

Subscribe to Comments

The Subscribe to Comments plugin allows your readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. I love this feature on other sites as I rarely check back once I’ve commented normally. I was thrilled to find an easy way to implement this on my site.

Twitter Tools

Ok, fine, I’m lazy. I don’t want to type in the one line of text to let my Twitter followers know I’ve published a new post. The Twitter Tools plugin does it for me. It also lets you post directly to Twitter yourself if you like (not that I ever have) and pull your “tweets” (Twitter messages) into your blog.

This one is a love-it-or-hate it plugin. Some people detest the idea of this; others appreciate it. One warning – be careful when you’re re-categorizing posts – Twitter Tools will post notifications of those posts as if they’re new. If you’re doing any work around page names, tags or re-categorizing posts, be sure to de-activate this plugin first.

WordPress.com Stats

The WordPress.com Stats plugin is one of the most useful tools I’ve found. Alongside Google Analytics, this lets me dig down and see what’s going on on my site. It tracks total views, post/page views, referrers (very useful) and clicks. I love it.

WordPress PDA & iPhone

WordPress PDA & iPhone is a wonderfully simple plugin. It takes the long, unwieldy and user-unfriendly homepage people would normally view on a mobile device and re-formats it to show post summaries instead. With a very simple installation process, this is a great way to optimize your site for people on the go.

WordPress Reports

I discovered the WordPress Reports plugin very recently.

WordPress Report complements the WordPress.com Stats plugin nicely, pulling data from FeedBurner and Google Analytics and formatting it clearly so you can easily see what’s going on on your site. While WordPress.com Stats focuses on today and yesterday, WordPress Reports gives you a seven-day trend on key information including “rising” and “falling” posts, popular content, pages per visit and so on.

WP-Print

WP-Print helps you link to a printable version of your posts. Alongside fitting them neatly onto the page, this plugin also creates a list of the URLs you’ve linked at the bottom of the post so hard-copy readers, who would otherwise miss out on them, can benefit from those pages too. Just install the plugin, paste one line of code into your template and you’re up and running.

Zemanta

Zemanta lets WordPress help you write your posts. It examines the content of your posts and suggests pictures, links and tags for you to add. I just discovered this one recently and haven’t had a chance to test-drive it fully yet but I’ve noticed a few other people, Jason Falls for example, using it already.

There you have it – 14 plugins that I use and which might help to make your blogging life easier.

Do you use any of these? If you do, what do you think of them? What are your favourite plugins?

(hat tip to Chris Brogan for sparking the idea for this post. Photo credit: ChrisB in SEA)

Update: For some reason I’ve been getting an obscene number of spam comments to this post, so I’ve closed the post comments.

Posted in: 301, blogging, tools

Tags: analytics, plugins, SEO, WordPress

9Comments

Plurk – Ooooooh Another Shiny New Twitter-Like Thing!

08.06.02

Twitter (when it’s up) has been lighting up today with talk of yet another shiny new toy for people to play with – Plurk.

Plurk?

Yes, you read it right – Plurk.

Plurk describes itself as:

A really snazzy site that allows you to showcase the events that make up your life, and follow the events of the people that matter to you, in deliciously digestible short messages called plurks.

My first impression – Plurk is a bit like Twitter with a little FriendFeed thrown in for good measure.

Messages have the same 140-character maximum as Twitter’s but on Plurk, unlike on Twitter, you can reply directly to other peoples’ messages (I refuse to call them “plurks”). You can also add extra bells and whistles to your messages like smileys, and there’s a Facebook-style “Dave is…” intro to posts which you can modify to things like “Dave loves…,” “Dave shares…” and “Dave likes…” and so on.

The big difference, though, is the “timeline.”

Your timeline is your home screen and where you’ll spend 99% of your time on Plurk. It allows you to easily view and scroll from left to right using your mouse or keyboard as plurks are created by you and your friends throughout the day. It gives you a clear view into what everybody is up to recently and lets you stay caught up on what your friends are doing.

Essentially, the timeline lets you visualize who’s posted what, and when. It’s a neat solution to the problem of messages quickly scrolling off the bottom of peoples’ screens, which I frequently get with my Twitter account.

So why the buzz?

Evidently, a couple of “A-list” people (Plurk’s words, not mine) discovered the service this weekend and wrote about it, bringing with them a bunch of new users… and so the viral marketing goes.

Of course, this is good because, y’know, we can’t just move to any of the existing Twitter competitors like Pownce or Jaiku when Twitter’s down, right? We obviously need another tool to fill the gap left by… oh wait… there isn’t a gap.

I don’t get it. Twitter is popular because of its simplicity and its user base. Plurk has neither, and I just don’t need another social network diluting my time further. This feels a lot like the hype around Pownce when it launched. Now… *crickets*

I feel bad because Plurk is based near Toronto (Mississauga, in fact) so the quasi-Canadian in me wants it to succeed. What’s more, the site gives me a warm, welcoming feeling that Twitter just doesn’t have. It’s fun to use, it’s well thought-out and it could be neat.

Perhaps, if Twitter’s outages continue, Plurk could steal away some of its users. Lord knows our patience has been pushed to the limit recently. Alternatively, it could carve out another niche (Venture Beat suggests it’s targeting high school teenage girls) and co-exist with the elephant in the room.

Unfortunately, though, I just don’t see the need for another tool like this. I’ve been wrong before, though.

What do you think? Twitter-killer, cool new addition or waste of attention?

Posted in: social networks, tools

Tags: Jaiku, Plurk, Pownce, Twitter

7Comments

HubSpot’s Press Release Grader – Rate Your Press Release

08.06.01

HubSpot’s Press Release Grader is a free tool that aims to help you improve your press releases.

You may remember HubSpot from their Website Grader tool, which I reviewed back in April (I was late to that one – it’s been around for months).

Press Release Grader is a simple, free tool that analyzes your press releases and gives you some ideas on how to improve them. It’s easy to use – just copy & paste your press release into a text box, enter your company name and website URL, give your email address and you’re on your way.

Analyzing Your Press Release

Press Release Grader looks at a bunch of areas of your release:

Overall Score – out of 100
General Statistics – word count, link count and readability (by grade level)
Content Suggestions – contact information (phone/email), whether you include an ‘about’ section for your company and a link to the company website, an “end of content” marker, gobbledygook words
Link Analysis - how far down the page each link occurs, the target page title and how your anchor text matches up with that, whether you include links featuring relevant keyword text
Word Cloud - showing how frequently you use key words

Is It Useful?

I used Press Release Grader to analyze four releases that I’ve written, resulting in scores from 71 to 87. I also plugged-in one other random release, which got a 21 (ouch!). I did consistently get some error messages with that release, but it didn’t seem to hinder the results for that release and the others all worked fine.

A few particularly useful things from my perspective:

The gobbledygook checker is a nifty little tool for making sure that no jargon slips through (I’m happy to say there were none in my releases)
The link analysis is useful for making sure you use relevant text in your anchor text – something that may slip through the cracks sometimes
The word cloud helps to ensure that you focus on the right things throughout your release – if your release is about fishing, you’d better be sure that “fishing” appears prominently in your word cloud.

Suggestions For Improvement

I was a little perturbed by one thing – the format of the end of content marker isn’t limited to three pound signs (###). Canadian Press style is for “-30-”. Of course, that’s not a problem unless the final score really matters to you, but it might be nice to have other marker formats included.

One other quibble – it’s a little search engine optimization-heavy. Much of the page is taken up with pointers on positioning and setting-up your links. For me, it would be much more useful to take a closer look at the grammar, sentence structure, etc, of the release. Something like a percentage of sentences that are way too long, with links to each of those sentences, would be more useful for me.

Still, it’s important to remember that this is just one way of looking at your press release. As the tutorial video (below) says, “…remember, Press Release Grader is a piece of software, not a human being, so it might not always give a perfect evaluation of your press release.”

Press Release Grader isn’t a silver bullet solution. That’s fine. It is, however, a useful tool to kick-start a little thinking around improving your press release.

Note: Press Release Grader is currently in beta, and the company is looking for feedback on the tool.