48 WordPress Plugins I Can’t Live Without

October 21st, 2009

Down below I have the forty eight or so plugins that I use on this blog. I have a little blurb about what they do. Because wordpress is so customizable and most of the themes are different, there may be reasons to include one that are missing here and reasons I have some others don’t. But for the most part these are essential. I am almost positive there are new one’s out there that I should have but these have been serving me well. Feel free to suggest others.

Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”

All in One SEO Pack
Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. As a fan of SEO, I think it’s like putting together a three dimensional puzzle, I like this plugin and it is one of the mainstays of SEO for wordpress. Of special interest is the “Dynamically Generate Keywords for Posts Page:” option. The plugin even has it’s own forum if you’d like to learn more.

(http://semperfiwebdesign.com/forum/)

CommentLuv
Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment. Rewards your readers and encourage more comments.

Comment Relish
Increases your readership and RSS subscription rate by simply sending a short ‘Thank You’ message to users when they first comment on your site.

Contact Form with Captcha
Simple Contact Form with Captcha Enabled

Custom Field Redirect
This plugin will do a 301 redirect on any page where you set the “redirect” key in a custom field. The value you set will be the URL to where the plugin will redirect you. In the dashboard when you create a post you have the ability to enter a custom field. If you create a “redirect” key is will go to the location designated.

Dewplayer
Insert Dewplayer (Flash Mp3 Player) in posts & comments. There are a lot mp3 players. This happens to be the one I’m currently using.

Disable Revisions
Disable revision functions in WordPress and delete all entries of revisions in database. It is extremely important to back up your database before install this plugin. I always hate when there ends up being 8 revisions of the same post. This should be a custom option built into wordpress to begin with.

Exclude Pages from Navigation
Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation. IMPORTANT NOTE: This will remove the pages from any “consumer” side page listings, which may not be limited to your page navigation listings.

Facebook Sharecount
The Facebook Sharecount plugin shows the number of shares on Facebook your posts get and allows users to share it themselves.

FeedBurner FeedSmith
Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

FeedBurner Widget
Adds a sidebar widget to easy customize and display your FeedBurner subscribers stats RSS button.

Get Recent Comments
Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar.

Make sure you configure this plugin after activation.

Google Friend Connect Integration
Easily integrate Google Friend Connect with WordPress. To get started, please enter your Google Friend Connect Site Id number in the GFC Integration admin page and choose whether to turn on the social bar or not. You can add Google Friend Connect gadgets to your sidebars by visiting the widgets page. For help and support see the official Google Friend Connect integration for WordPress page.

Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.

Homepage Excerpts
Homepage Excerpts are great when your theme doesn’t provide this functionality.

LinkWithin
Displays recommended stories and associated thumbnails from your blog. This is at the bottom of all my single posts. It provides nice pictures you see below.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer
Saves your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin. The reasoning behind this is your blog will ping technorati and many other ping services. If you edit your blog, let’s say a typo or misspelling or indentation etc, every time you hit publish you are pinging the services. You may be banned and didn’t even know it. When this goes, so does your SEO. Visit plugin site

One Click Plugin Updater
Upgrade plugins with a single click, install new plugins or themes from an URL or by uploading a file, see which plugins have update notifications enabled, control how often WordPress checks for updates, and more.

ONW Simple Contact Form
This Plugin creates a simple contact form.

Popularity Contest
This will enable ranking of your posts by popularity; using the behavior of your visitors to determine each post’s popularity. You set a value (or use the default value) for every post view, comment, etc. and the popularity of your posts is calculated based on those values. Once you have activated the plugin, you can configure the Popularity Values and View Reports. You can also use the included Widgets and Template Tags to display post popularity and lists of popular posts on your blog.

Random Pages widget
This is a widget that displays a list of random pages/posts on your widgetized sidebar.

Recent Posts
Returns a list of the most recent posts.

Robots Meta
This plugin allows you to add all the appropriate robots meta tags to your pages and feeds, disable unused archives and nofollow unnecessary links.

RSS Shortcode
Makes it easy to display an RSS feed on a page

SEO Smart Links
SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.

SEO Super Comments
Use your blog comments to get more traffic.

SexyBookmarks
SexyBookmarks adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts.

SimplePie Core
Does little else but load the core SimplePie API library for any extension that wants to utilize it. It is needed for the Single RSS Colleague plugin found below.

Simple Tags
Simple Tags : Extended Tagging for WordPress 2.3, 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 ! Autocompletion, Suggested Tags, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Mass edit tags !

Single RSS Colleague
A plugin to feature a colleague or tribe member for syndication. You will find it under by social badges on the right hand side bar labeled “Visit My Colleagues”. I will be making this available to everyone sometime next week.

Subscribe To Comments
Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

Translate
Adds a sidebar widget to display languages into which you can translate your blog.

TweetMeme Retweet Button
Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.

Ultimate Google Analytics
Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site.

What Would Seth Godin Do
Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and another to return visitors.

wp-cache
Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system. Once enabled, go to “Options” and select “WP-Cache”. One note of caution. TURN this off anytime you are changing anything. Then when you are done, turn it back on.

WP-Cumulus
Flash based Tag Cloud for WordPress

WP-DBManager
Manages your WordPress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

WP-PageNavi
Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog.

WP-Print
Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.

WP-Sticky
Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog. Modified from Adhesive by Owen Winkler.

WP-UserOnline
Enable you to display how many users are online on your WordPress blog with detailed statistics of where they are and who there are(Members/Guests/Search Bots).

WP Security Scan
Perform security scan of WordPress installation.

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It’s About People Not Products

July 3rd, 2009

So someone wants to start a business? An online business at that? Where 95 plus percent of people don’t ever make one thin dime? How are they going to do that? Those are the questions we certainly hear from our self talk and from others that share their ideas with when they first start. Not everyone is geared to be an online marketer. Most people are not even prepared. Most will start by finding a product on a click bank type affiliate site and start figuring out where they can advertise. They start using Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace and anything else they can lay one of their affiliate links down. They justify it by saying it’s advertising. In reality it’s spam. If someone or anything reminds people of someone selling to them what will they do? Run for the hills, Some simply think if they have a page with their product with all the features and a button that says ‘buy me’ on it, people will start purchasing. After all, it’s a great product and it should sell itself. The product may be good but they haven’t grasped the idea that they may be only 1 of 25000 people selling that product. How do they get traffic to their site? Even then, why would they buy from them? What differentiates that person from the other 24,999?

That’s where marketing takes over. Marketing is not simply fancy advertising. Marketing consists of psychology, creating, communicating, fulfilling, exchanging, educating, writing, research, and plain hard work. Are you ready to learn all that? Even then, where are you going to learn all that? You’ll need trainers, mentors, books, video to start to grasp what is involved. Your best bet is to learn from someone who has gone through the same things your going to have to. Personal development is a given. You will need to read books and listen to audio to learn the correct mindsets you’ll need to ingrain upon your self. You’ll also need to develop networks of people that are based on attraction principals. The things you learn will be shared openly with this network. You will also learn from them. You will earn trust. You will start to cultivate relationships that will be based on you, not your products.

Boy those two paragraphs sounded a bit harsh didn’t they. There’s a bit of truth in there for me, but I’m also sure it’s true for most online marketers when they started. The good news is there is a lot of training out there now that is being provided. We don’t have to spend as much time learning from our own mistakes. Being able to hear and understand what others have gone through works just as well. Networking with the right group can save even more time. It has outright become a science. Getting involved with the right group can provide you the materials for success and the only thing that will be left to do is to implement what you learn. As contradictory as this sounds, online marketing is a people business. It’s about nurturing relationships. About helping and educating people that you’ve come to know. It’s about sharing your personalities and nuances with each other. It’s empathy and understanding. Selling is never about the product. It;s about relationships and the sooner anyone who wants to get into the 5% of people who make money, or the 3% that become vastly rich, learns this, the quicker it will happen.

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I made a wrong mistake

July 1st, 2009

Good evening everyone. Well I have a dilemma that I have to deal with over at Facebook. Well over on Facebook you have the option of not hiding your birthday. Well I have quite a few Facebook friends, 3000+ and I had quite a few people wish me happy birthday. I was given virtual flowers, chocolate, gifts, and even had some people make videos. It was quite overwhelming. This morning I wrote a note thanking around 200 people and I still had some to go. This evening I decided to respond to the messages I received. I wrote up a standardized thank you and commenced answering what I would figure 50 messages. A few minutes into doing that I got a warning message that I was doing something against their terms and to stop. OK. I stopped. Well I also had over 25 friend requests so as I usually do, I accept and put a welcome message on their page. I was into about 10 of them when I got a message saying I was suspended. No account, a lot of hard work over the last year, and I hear Facebook is hard to deal with.

I guess I could panic and be mad, but their system has no way of knowing whether something is legitimate or spam. I kind of wish they had that policy instituted on Twitter. I grumbled a bit and then crafted a letter simply explaining what I was doing. I’ve heard that they will re-instate after a while but it could range between a few days to a few weeks. That’s all I really can do. Now I’ll have more time to spend on this blog. This is a lesson we all can learn from. When you rely on other internet sites to carry your message you need to be prepared in case they simply suspend you or drop off the earth, whether for a valid reason or not. You need to try and get in a position where you host all your own content or as much as possible yourself. You also have to be looking for the next social medium that will replace some of the old and be able to easily adapt.

So as Yogi Berra once said “I made a wrong mistake.”