WordPress Web 2.0 Spot-Er

While there are many plugins available for WordPress blog system, some are truly stand out as a clear winners due to the innovative ideas that became the base of their design and creation. I have previously written about several plugins in my post WordPress Most Innovative Plugins List but in this one I want to do something different …

I want to take my hat off to people behind those plugins!

So here is my list of people whose work you might want to watch for and integrate into your bloggin efforts.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Or click here to learn What is RSS And How YOU Will Benefit From Subscribing. Thanks for visiting!

There is more arguments on subject of providing full text feed or partial to your visitors then on subject of Christianity. Don’t worry … I have no intentions to get into religious arguments on this post, although I religiously believe in advantage of WordPress over other blog platforms.

In this post I want to introduce a new plugin that takes this advantage to a new high! Providing your visitors choice to subscribe to full or partial rss feed (summary) now is as easy as installing one great plugin – DualFeeds.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been watching this plugin closely but decided not to write about it on initial release. WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin sounds like a superb idea and one that will become a true life saver for many bloggers but …

Early releases usually have issues and bugs and this one wasn’t an exception . Hint: Anytime you decide to try a new plugin that updates database or modifies tables – be 100% sure you have a good backup or you will get burned! But looks like Keith (author) was able to act on reports from early adopters and address the issues, so it is time to let you know about it.

Read the rest of this entry »

You are not misreading! The title is correct and I’m going to share in this post an information that will make your WordPress blog really Suck-in some subscribers .

We are all part of multiple social groups, associations and organizations whether willingly or not is a different issue but what perhaps is most important – we tend to act in accordance to our associations. Sometimes opinion of the group is so overpowering that we tend to do things as everyone else, even when it goes against our previous thoughts.

So without digging into psychology and simply knowing that it is true – why not take advantage of it? Your WordPress blog can greatly benefit from increased subscribers number and present you with more options to express your opinion, share your experience and perhaps monetize your efforts.

Read the rest of this entry »

WordPress plugins are what make the platform such a great tool as they not only extend the functionality but also greatly enhance reader’s experience. And at same time they present a problem, as sometimes you have to choose one functionality over another.

But lucky us – most of them come as open source or with a license that allows you to modify the code and fit it into your vision. Such was the case with a “Brian’s Threaded Comments” plugin I integrated couple nights ago. It provides a great option to thread your comments and also reply directly to each individual comment, keeping a conversation more personal. I have seen it used on many blogs but default install was lucking integration of MyAvatars plugin, which adds a “face” to each comment by pulling information from MyBlogLog profile.

Read the rest of this entry »

If your ping list has grown beyond the original, included with your blog – I bet you quite familiar with a problem of super long wait after hitting that “Publish” button.

I know it annoyed me quite a bit until I have finally decided to research the issue and how to work around it. While pinging RSS aggregator services is quite necessary – amount of services on your ping list greatly contributes to the problem I described above. But fear not, once again solution is here.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some might say that it is a rather unusual headline coming from someone who builds entire blog around benefits of WordPress and making it into a true Web 2.0 platform. But as everything else in this world WordPress is far from perfect and dealing with my recent issues I have discovered 2 things that I had no clue about.

What is even worth – presence of these 2 problems severely impacts your WordPress blog performance and slows down your blog. But as always I will not just stop on describing the problem but also provide you with a guide to turn this problem to your advantage and get ahead of 99% of other bloggers using WordPress.

Read the rest of this entry »

WordPress functionality is greatly enhanced when plugins are added but picking the best is not always an easy task. Each plugin needs to be evaluated by you prior to adding it to your blog for one simple reason – each new installed plugin adds to load time of your blog. If you are not using it – de-activate it.

If you don’t believe me, just take a look at source code of your own blog and between “head” tags you will find that most of the plugins you use that provide an output on your page – there a file or two been loaded on each view. Add too many and it will considerably increase load times. But in this post I want to discuss some brand new plugins for you to consider as functionality they provide might be well worth the load time!

Read the rest of this entry »