To the Rescue
Nevertheless, allowing people from foreign countries to be able to quickly translate your Blog into their own language can attract people internationally. They may be somewhat familiar with English but can read and grasp thier own native language much easier. WordPress plugins come to the rescue once again. There are a host of them out there. I can’t necessarily recommend one because they all have been written at various times and not all of them work with all themes. This is a time you will have to experiment and see what works for you. I however do recommend Wibyia. Wibyia is the software used at the bottom of this blog. There are many functions available with this toolbar and translation is one of them. This toolbar can be found at www.Wibyia.com .

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.

It was a very festive time there. I remember looking around and there wasn’t anyone who wasn’t having a great time. The restaurant is known for their meter long bratwurst dinners. Yup almost three feet! I didn’t have that but I’ll bet my pork chops were one and a half inches thick. Next time I go I think I’ll bring along a designated driver. Boy did that stout look good. You can click the picture to enlarge the photo.

I also read Gary Vaynerchuk’s book, CRUSH IT! If it isn’t a wake up call for everyone to get into action and live your dream nothing is. One of the first things you learn about Gary is he wraps his passion with his life. Even though he spends countless hours on his business, it’s not really work to him. It’s his life, his passion, and he wakes up every day looking forward to his passion, his work, his business. He says, and I’m paraphrasing here, if you are true to yourself, be it as a baseball fan, a pilot, a mountain biker, skateboarder, wine connoisseur, an interior decorator, stop doing what you hate to do, and start following your passion, you will be able to monetize it and enjoy your life’s work.

The second part of the book is about the action steps necessary to do. If you follow this blog, I’m on the right path. Certainly there are things I wish I could do more of but till I’m in the position of telling my boss to take a hike (coming sooner than you think), I’m spending a lot of time doing a lot of things. I can’t stop learning and still have weekly training. I’m coaching and teaching others. It seems it never ends, but… I really enjoy it. It’s not a hobby, it’s a passion I’m enjoying and eventually my income streams will pick up to the levels I expected. This I’m sure. So if you haven’t got the book yet, I highly recommend it.

I wrote a wordpress plugin to feature syndication of other tribe members. I actually had written some code that accomplished what I wanted but I needed to package it as a plugin and a widget. You can see it over on the right hand side called “Visit My Colleges”. It is a widget that will randomly pull an excerpt of one of the last three blog posts for a given list of colleagues. This will feature a college or tribe member. It does require a gravitar email address so without knowing some of them you will get a default picture sometime.

I expect it to also provide back-links for each tribe member you supply. There is no reason why a group of 25-50 people couldn’t be syndicating their syndication partners in this fashion. It will be configured in the dashboard and you can add as many or few as you want. So everyone who opens the site a different person’s except will be displayed. I use a combination of a gravitar API and a RSS parser in a PHP library called Simple Pie. Ya, its called that!. The plugin is about 98% done and will be available for everyone within 2 weeks. I need to do some regression testing with some other themes to see how it renders. I’m going to have a website for it with some FAQ’s I know will come and some video instructions. It will install just like any other plugin. I’m going to ask for people to register to get it and when they do, I’ll send them a link. I have a few others along the same lines right behind it. Some of the ideas might be “Last Three Tweets”, or “Breaking News”, or “Football Scores…” I’m sure I’ll think of more. Throw some ideas down in the comments.

I’ve always seen the trailers to the movie called ‘The Secret’ and my wife picked it up last week. I finally sat down to watch it. I’ve always been aware of what they call The Secret so there was nothing terribly new or profound that I saw in it.

What I did get out of it is that I sometimes tend to dwell on the bad things that could go wrong. My wife is aware that I have been changing for the better over the last two to three years so giving my 16 year old daughter the keys to my Cadillac has to mean something, right? I used to tend to think that I always ended up having the adverse consequences happen to me, like the tickets I get when I run into the bank to get some change to feed the parking meter because I don’t have any quarters. Or stepping out of my house in the morning when it is still dark outside and find the neighbors dog visited my grass last night. Or getting stuck behind the guy who’s afraid to go to the center of the intersection to wait when having to take a left hand turn. I guess I don’t mind waiting a light or two. When it comes down to it, what the heck am I in such a hurry for anyway. These are supposed to be the times you cherish.

Hope everyone else had a great weekend and hope your week is remarkable!

Sit back and watch to see how it’s done.

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