Approaching the end of this evening’s posts about WordPress plug-ins, this one is about Tagline Rotator. If you didn’t already know, a tagline can be found in adverts, often under or after the product name, and on a lot of web sites.
For SEO reasons, you should choose yours carefully, make sure it is targeted towards your audience and content, and it should stay constant.
However, I can never really decide which tagline of the few I’ve thought up I want to keep, and not that many have an obvious (to a search engine at least) connection to my posts. So I use the tagline rotator plug-in to automatically change it each time a new visitor arrives, or someone clicks on a link to somewhere else on this site. You will also notice the tagline change if you just refresh the page. There are 38 different ones available, although as the selection process is random, you may find you come across the same one a few times before you’e seen them all. Most should be fairly self-explanatory, but if one catches your eye, and you can’t fathom it out, just let me know.
Oct 28 2010
First, Second Or Thirty-Eighth?
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Oct 28 2010
When You Are 64
A little over six months ago the server that this site is hosted on was hacked. I still don’t know how they got in (it is likely that someone else on the same server had an outdated version of some software installed, and once in the hacker somehow gained root access), but once a friend alerted me to the presence of malware links, the fingerprints of the hack were clearly traceable on almost all the PHP files in use across all my sites.
One of the tricks such hacks use is to encode their urls in Base64, hiding in the theme files for your WordPress installation, meaning a simple text search for the url won’t work. Go and google or wiki for more info on Base64, but King Of Flibbles could be encoded to c3RlaW5lciBiaW5vY3VsYXJz … not very easy to read, nor to pick up with a cursory scan of the source code.
This is where you either need to learn to read Base64, if you have shell access you can grep the files for Base64 references, or simply install something like the TAC (Theme Authenticity Checker) plug-in. Whether you are installing a new theme for the first time, and therefore want to check it before activating, or suspect you may have been hacked and want to check all the theme files are still OK, the plug-in will do all the hard work for you. It also lets you know just how many (normally formed) static links there are in the theme, you can easily tell if it has been stuffed full of SEO sapping links.
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Oct 27 2010
Subscribing Made Easy
Whether people come and visit your site to read the latest developments in the world of console comparisons, to catch up with the latest photos of your family and friends, or enjoy checking what complete strangers are up to, it is great when they make the effort and leave comment for everyone else to read and perhaps reply to.
One problem I come up against (as a visitor, rather than site owner) is I tend to leave comments at a wide variety of sites and don’t have time to check for replies in the conventional manner. My Google Reader account is already full of all the RSS feeds I have the time to follow, and keeping bookmarks for a million and one sites just clutters up the browser’s menus, and realistically means you’ll forget to check them very often.
This is why I am very happy when I come across another site that uses the Subscribe To Comments plug-in. The premise is simple – if someone fills in the e-mail field correctly, when leaving a comment, they will be e-mailed by your site should somebody else then leave a new comment on the same post. This means the visitor doesn’t have to actively check whether any replies have been left, and also improves the chances that a visitor who randomly came upon your site will return.
One issue is that the latest versions of the plug-in have had the checkbox to subscribe to comments left unticked as default. This was due to a conversation had between WordPress developers, who decided that to comply with anti-spam legislation (as there is no double opt-in etc.), visitors should have to explicitly indicate that they want to receive further communications. This makes sense (especially legally) if you are a business operating in America with their CAN-SPAM regulations. However, on a personal site like this, I tend to think it is more likely that I’ll have family, friends and random strangers who will not notice, or neglect to tick the box. For this reason, I modified the code to revert its behaviour to the old system of relying on visitors to un-tick the box if they don’t want to be told about new replies. You can either search for Subscribe To Comments on this blog to check my post detailing which lines of code to change, or check the comments section in this plug-in’s post over at txfx.net.
In terms of settings, you can check which addresses have subscribed to the most amount of posts, which posts have the most amount of people subscribed, and also tailor the text that is used when presenting the option to subscribe.
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Oct 27 2010
Please Tell Your Friends
Next in this series of posts describing the plug-ins I use on my various sites is the ShareThis plug-in (I’ve linked directly to the WordPress specific section of the site, to read more about the system in general, just click their logo at the top of the page). Although no longer activated on this blog, I keep it installed, and on the other more niche orientated web sites, it is active.
Even if you don’t happen to use Social Bookmarking/Networking sites a lot yourself it is quite likely that your visitors do. I suppose if you only ever write about Max Bygraves albums, then perhaps your average reader doesn’t fall within the typical market sector that use reddit, stumbleupon or twitter, however it can’t hurt to try it out.
The plugin adds an expanding area to the bottom of each of your posts, which contains links to whichever schemes you hope your readers will submit the post to. For example, if a visitor finds your post very informative, they have the option to submit the URL to facebook or twitter or digg, with some of the fields pre-filled. You can also use the data collected to check some statistics about your visitors. To be honest, the plug-in didn’t see much use on this site, and as I was having problems with CPU throttling from Bluehost at one point, I disabled any plug-ins that I couldn’t justify keeping live.
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Oct 27 2010
SEOSTT2
I have written about the SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 plug-in before, however a few features have been added, and I see from my server logs that this site has recently started to get visitors from countries that didn’t appear very often previously. So, for the new readers, or those interested on whether people arrive at their WordPress blog because they were searching for WordPress plug-ins, here is a quick refresher… SEOSTT2 (acronyms are ugly, but typing out the full name will get boring) checks the referring URL if a visitor comes from a search engine, and extracts the exact search term they entered when they discovered your site. This information is then stored, and be used in a number of ways.
You can keep all the information gathered as private, and simply check the plug-in’s page to discover the most popular search terms that led to your site (both recently and since the plug-in was installed). You can choose to display those same tables of search terms in a widget on your sidebar (or of course in a post), however what most people will do is have post-specific information added to the relevant entry. For example, if this post was found by people searching for Kazakhstan Blogs WordPress SEOSTT2, at the bottom of the post a link with that text, and linked to this same post, could automatically appear. Some people argue this adds SEO value to your site – I don’t know whether this is true, but do find it interesting to discover the sometimes random terms that lead to a particular post. You can also have the search terms converted to tags on the post, and block certain search terms from ever appearing.
One thing to remember is that if you install the plug-in, it isn’t retro-active – you will need to wait for new visitors, as it can not magically backdate its processing to old visits. Wait a while, and you’ll start to see patterns emerging as to what topics attract visitors, and if you feel the urge, continue to write new posts on that topic to encourage new and repeat visitors.
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Oct 21 2010
Logging In Changes The Appearance
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.
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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 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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