If you are already familiar with WordPress sites, you may just have noticed that this blog has a smaller Meta widget than default installations are found with. The MiniMeta Widget is really quite a powerful little plugin, however I only use a few of its functions. Rather than wasting space on displaying this site’s comments RSS feed, or links to WordPress.org etc., visitors are normally just presented with a log in link and the main RSS feed url. Once somebody has logged into this site, they just see a log out link, as well as a site admin link to the WordPress dashboard.
However, you can also use it to display different links depending on whether a visitor is logged in or not. If you only want people who have registered to be able to click through to a website, or perhaps you would like to present admin links for the blog, but only if the visitor has registered and is logged in, then you can alter the plug-in’s configuration accordingly. Unlike the default WordPress Meta widget, you can also apply styling and decide whether the widget should only appear on the homepage or other pages.
Oct 21 2010
Logging In Changes The Appearance
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Oct 21 2010
That New Post Is Over Here Google!
Continuing this series of posts on WordPress plug-ins that I’d recommend to people starting up a blog, this one is on a sitemap generator. This plug-in is strictly backroom only – your visitors won’t explicitly see it in action.
Although sitemaps are sometimes included in a website for people to get a run down of what pages exist, and sometimes their hierarchy, this plugin creates the sitemap for search engines. Although titled “Google XML Sitemaps“, it actually also informs the Ask, Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo search engines about your site.
Every time you write a new post, or edit an old one, a new sitemap is generated and the search engines bots will be able to find your fresh content.
Why should you care about all this? If you don’t want visitors to find your site, then you don’t need to worry. However, most people are happy for new visitors to take a long around, and the more the search engines know about your site (specifically its content and obviously the URLs they can be found at), the more often you’ll appear in a search result. Obviously a lot more SEO comes into the equation, however in terms of an install and then forget about it plug-in, you can’t really go wrong with it.
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Oct 20 2010
Spreading The Data Around
One of my aims when technology is involved in my life is convergence. I like it when services, devices or general concepts are integrated at some sort of level. If one of my gadgets is capable of interacting with another, even if only by linking to it via several other devices or services, I want to see just how far it can be pushed.
As a simple example, if I post some thoughts about Kazakh Driving from my phone (via a tweet), that tweet (which will originally appear at twitter.com) is then automatically published on this blog, and also then posted as a note in my facebook profile. (Actually it is duplicated in facebook, as I use a different method to pull in tweets as status updates. I think the notes version will automatically embed pictures from a post on this blog, where as the status update is obviously just plain text).
So… Tweet (twitter) >> Blog Post (chrismerriman.com) >> facebook note …
reply left on facebook note >> blog post comment created
Anyway, if people leave a reply to my post on facebook, in the past this would be split from any conversation that occurred natively on this site. Now, using the Facebook Comments TNG plug-in, comments left on any facebook notes are automatically imported back into this site. If friends choose to comment on my status update, this isn’t picked up, but I am happy to have at least some of the discourse unified in one location. If you happen to import your blog posts to a facebook page (most often this will be if you run a business or club), this can also be catered for.
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Oct 12 2010
From Plain To Recursively Interesting
In the last of today’s posts on WordPress plug-ins, I wanted to take a quick look at a very versatile stack of code. The Executable PHP widget plug-in makes it possible (in many cases) to create a brand new type of widget without having to write an entire plug-in to create it. Obviously you can create widgets that display text or images with just a default installation of WordPress, however if you want to use some PHP code to create a dynamic area that reacts differently according to some variables, or actually has some code to process, you would normally need to get your hands pretty dirty and either actually write a plugin to backup the displaying of this section, OR hardcode it into your template’s sidebar.
The first involves too much work for me (DanD is the coder amongst my friends here, I’m a bodger when it comes to software creation), and the second isn’t ideal if you upgrade or completely change your theme – you need to remember to keep a record of your changes, and re-integrate them into the new theme’s files.
So, by placing a widget in your sidebar that is allowed to contain PHP code that will be run, you can suddenly do a lot more with your site, very easily. At one point, about three years ago, I had a lot of widgets that used this system, however I eventually managed to realise that load times were more important than having every possible bell and whistle integrated on the front page. That said, if you run a blog dedicated to digital cameras, and simply want to run a little script that pulls in information on the latest models’ zoom levels or ISO speeds, or perhaps grab the best live prices for huge memory cards, the possibility is there for you. The recursive reference? PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor…
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Oct 12 2010
ChrisM, AntiSceptic or SilentlyScreaming?
If you have registered for a lot of different sites, teams and organizations online, you may find it difficult to remember the exact URL, and user name you’ve chosen in the past. This isn’t a problem if you keep your bookmarks fresh, but if you want to give your membership details to a friend, you want to ensure you don’t go giving your YouTube account name when talking about a forum for antique watch enthusiasts. Unless you always use the same nickname, and the site in question has an easy to use search facility, it is quite likely that people won’t be able to find you.
This is where the DandyID Services plug-in enters the fray. You can can see a very simple example of how it works by visiting the About / Contact Me page here at ChrisMerriman.com. The DandyID Services plug-in is designed to display the icons, site names and obviously the underlying URLs in your sidebar (via a widget that becomes available once the plug-in is activated and configured. Obviously you’ll actually need to tell DandyID about which places you have a membership, but their accounts are free to operate, and it doesn’t take too long to collate all the info you’ll need.
(The post it titled as it is because depending on where you look for me online, you’ll find me as ChrisM, AntiSceptic or more often than not, SilentlyScreaming).
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Oct 12 2010
Who Sent You?
Next in the excitingly alphabetical list of WordPress plugins that I tend to use whenever I set up a new site is Donncha O Caoimh’s Comment Referrers. Once again the premise is quite simple, and the code doesn’t appear to put any great strain on your server.
When a browser visits your site, a referrer is normally presented, which lets the server know which page somebody was on when they clicked a link to get to yours. In my case, this is normally a search engine query, and I find it useful for two reasons. One, if a spammy comment has got through the systems in place to deflect such dross, you can often tell if a visitor came to your site for genuine reasons, or is simply looking to place a link.
What do I mean? If you run a site dedicated to clothes for people larger than average, and someone arrives after searching for plus size lingerie, it is entirely possible they have a real interest in the topic. If, however, they have searched for “plus size lingerie powered by WordPress leave a reply”, you can be 99.99999% sure they want to dump a link to their site on yours, will likely not return, nor actually contribute to any discussions. I should point out that not all referrers seem to get passed to the plugin, or perhaps appended to the e-mail that WordPress sends when a comment is awaiting moderation, but I still find it useful to have some information to hand.
Secondly, discovering what people are searching for when they find you means you can tailor your future posts to the sort of audience you tend to attract. More on another plug-in that specialises in this specific area at a later date.
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Oct 12 2010
Countries, OSs and Browsers
Back to the series of posts I am writing on WordPress plug-ins that you may want to consider checking out, whether you are writing posts for friends and family to stay in touch, or reviewing local bars. This time I wanted to let you know about a plug-in that checks the details of any person or system that leaves a comment, trackback or ping to one of your posts, and then displays the relevant info next to it. It is called, somewhat non-cryptically, Comment Info Detector, and you can see it in action if you click on any of the posts here that already have a comment published. A flag is used to indicate which country the person came from, and two icons, representing their operating system and the browser used are also displayed. The default settings should be just fine, but you can always tweak the code used to personalise the way the information is displayed. Finally, one option I am happy to see is the uninstall tick box. When selected, all relevant entries are removed from the WordPress MySQL table, meaning no bloat is left behind, should you decide to not use the plug-in anymore.
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Sep 22 2010
Clean Options To Speed Up
This plug-in (Clean Options) is designed to make your website run faster. This means pages will load more quickly, and less visitors will leave (most people simply close the tab if a site takes more than a few seconds to load). Search engines also penalise sites that take a very long time to load, so your search engine rankings could improve. Whether you run AnnaMerriman.com, KZBlog.net or JavierEppens.com, a faster loading site means more visitors and those same visitors will be more likely to return.
So how does the Clean Options plug-in achieve this aim? It checks your WordPress options in the SQL tables, and alerts you to any that are orphaned. If you have uninstalled a plugin that did not have a clean up procedure built in properly, or just deleted the actual PHP files from your server, then you will have excess options that take up space, and cause your server to slow slightly. If you have only ever used the same plug-ins, or already manually trawl through your site’s data via PHPMyAdmin, then this plugin may not find much to prune, however it never harms to have a quick check, and there are quite a few built in checks to ensure you don’t delete anything that is still needed.
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Sep 22 2010
Any WP System Health Users Reading This?
Yes, another WordPress plug-in based post, but not a review this time. As you may have guessed from the post’s title, I was wondering if anyone had used the WP System Health plugin on their blog? I haven’t yet tried it out, but hoped someone might be able to say if it was worth finding some spare time to have a play with it? Am I likely to be depressed by some of the stats that will arise from using a shared hosting server, and are the configurable values important enough to ensure you’re awake and sober before investigating and testing them? I’m not worried about it not properly covering multi-site installs, as I’ve not yet delved into that side of WordPress – another project for those mystical days where I find I have a few hours spare to educate myself a little more!
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Sep 22 2010
Calais Auto Tagger
This plug-in is something I should be using each time I write a post, but I have fallen out of the habit again. Calais Auto Tagger takes the leg work out of deciding which tags you should attach to a post, by using semantic analysis on your post content, and making suggestions.
If you tag your posts, people will find it easier to discover related articles on your site, and search engines will also have a better idea of what subjects your site talks about. This may lead to higher rankings, and therefore hopefully more visitors. If you discuss a topic, Google will pick up on those words and lead some visitors to your site. If you tag your post with medical, pimple, spot, zit, traditional medicine , for example, you will probably pick up more traffic, and if other posts are also correctly tagged, a visitor will find other articles more easily.
You will need to have v5.x of PHP in use on your server, but to be honest if your host is still using PHP 4, you either need to give them a reminder of the need to upgrade, or consider switching companies.
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