Posts Tagged ‘WordPress’
Posted on February 12, 2009 - by Khaled
25 WordPress Plugins you need to have a better blog
WordPress is the leading blogging platform! And it will probably continue to be so. Among the top 100 bloggers, 32% use WP.
After almost 5 years of blogging using WordPress and after trying, testing, tweaking and running literally hundreds of plug-ins and extensions, I found some really noteworthy WP plugins, that are easy to use, to customize and to install yet they are really useful and they can improve drastically your whole blogging experience. The current trends are taken in consideration while choosing this list!
1. Akismet This one just rocks! Almost perfect when it comes to dealing with comments spam! It checks new comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You can review the spam it catches under Comments/Spam.
2. All in One SEO Pack All your Search Engine Optimization needs for your blog.
3. Bird Feeder A tiny little plug-in that automatically Tweets your published posts to twitter.
4. cforms II For now, no forms are better than cforms! Unless you have some bucks to spend! cformsII offers unparalleled flexibility in deploying contact forms across your blog. Features include: comprehensive SPAM protection, Ajax support, Backup & Restore, Multi-Recipients, Role Manager support, Database tracking and many more.
5. FD Feedburner Plugin Easily redirect your feeds to your feedburner account feed. Just install, set and activate!
6. Flickr Photo Gallery This plugin will retrieve your Flickr photos and allow you to easily add your photos to your posts.
7. Google XML Sitemaps Google sitemaps are, as you know for sure, a must have for blogs and web sites in general. This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO!….
8. Gravatar Gravatar allows you to add a face to your comments! Make yourself recognizable all around the blogosphere. Add the Gravatar plug-in to your blog to generate a gravatar URL complete with rating, size, default, and border options.
9. IntenseDebate Comments A revolution in the comments world! IntenseDebate Comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website. Full comment and account data sync between IntenseDebate and WordPress ensures that you will always have your comments. Custom integration with your WordPress admin panel makes moderation a piece of cake. Comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations enrich your readers’ experience and make more of the internet aware of your blog and comments which drives traffic to you!
10. Lightbox 2 The famous well known and really useful JS effect used to overlay images on the current page.
11. Limit Posts Limits the displayed text length on the index page entries and generates a link to a page to read the full content if its bigger than the selected maximum length.
12. moodlight Moodlight allows your visitors to add their mood on posts via comments.
13. Related Posts Returns a list of the related entries based on keyword matches. If this is your first time using this plugin you will need to run the setup script first in order to create the required full text database index.
14. RSS Footer Allows you to add a line of content to the end of your RSS feed articles.
15. Scissors This plugin adds cropping and resizing functionality to WordPress’ image upload and management dialogs. Additionally, images that are resized in the post editor are automatically resampled to the requested size using bilinear filtering when a post is saved.
16. Sociable Get yourself some traffic via enabling your visitors to post/Share your blog posts in lots of Social networks. It automatically adds links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.
17. StatCounter All the stats you might really need!
18. Subscribe To Comments Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. If you don’t the full powered Intense debate or disqus you could at least use this to engage your visitors in endless discussions.
19. Theme Test Drive If you love experimenting with your themes this is an interesting choice! Instead of having a stand-alone installation for testing sakes just use this plugin. Safely test drive any theme while visitors are using the default one. Includes instant theme preview via thumbnail.
20. Twitter Tools I use it in combination with Bird Feeder. A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter.
21. WordPress Database Backup Don’t ever loose your blog Database ever again. On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Have it saved on your disk or emailed to you.
22. WP-Polls If you only need a good nice light weight poll plugin here you go! Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page. WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers. Use WP-Polls Widget to add the polls to display single or multiple polls from WP-Polls Plugin.
23. WP-Syntax Syntax highlighting using GeSHi supporting a wide range of popular languages.
24. WP Security Scan Perform security scan of WordPress installation.
25. WordPress.com Stats The easiest way to monitor rapidly the traffic of your blog.
I hope you will find these plug-ins useful and handy to increase your blogging productivity and to improve your blog. Please do share with me the plug-ins you are already using on your blog. Don’t forget to share using the buttons below and to subscribe via RSS or E-mail. Or just follow me on Twitter!
Posted on January 6, 2009 - by Khaled
WebScienceMan is here!
WebScienceMan is plugged and running
After a few years of running this blog under the name of No Relation, I decided a while ago to Change the name along with a full redesign (which did not happen since almost two years). So now this blog is running under the name of “WebScienceMan”. This change was discretely announced before! Read the about page to have a better idea about the motives.
REVAMPING PROCESS
During this revamping process the CMS was upgraded to WordPress 2.7 (this was very smooth and I really love the new features of this version). I also created a new graphic design that dubbed “The Rainbow Cliff theme”. I’ve laid this graphic over the structure provided by Paper C theme (which was a gift from a friend of mine) after retouching some HTML, CSS, PHP and JS. New Plug-ins were installed among which I will mention:
So you may have understood that from now on there will be polls and surveys carried on so don’t dither to come back, check and vote.
ADVERTISING
From now on you can purchase an advertising spot on WebScienceMan to advertise your products, your services, your site or whatever. Find out the details here.
Posted on December 27, 2008 - by Khaled
Revamping, refurbishing and renaming
I decided to revamp and rename my blog. It’s time to do so and to focus a little bit more on it. I will probably be able to have more time to blog more effectively! I will keep writing and posting about the same things I used to. But starting from the beginning of 2009 this blog won’t no longer be called “No relation”! and the CMS will be updated to WordPress 2.7. I will have a new theme too and some more cool stuff!
May be the above graphic will give you some clue about the future directions of this blog! So stay tuned!
And if you have any comments or inputs don’t dither to share them with me!
Posted on March 30, 2008 - by Khaled
Smooth and fast upgrade to WordPress 2.5
Upgrading to the new version of WordPress (2.5) was easy and smooth and without hassles or problems of any kind. I’m also loving the new administration interface and all in all I’m very pleased with it. WordPress is now more flexible customizable and extensible and yet easier to use. The design of the new customizable dashboard is just lovely… In fact this new version was designed by Jeffry Zeldman’s Happy Cog (and of course built by Automattic). Definitely a milestone is reached with this version. Everyday I’m more and more convinced that WordPress is the best blogging option around! At least this is true for me and for many others (did you know that WordPress powers around 0.8% of the whole web?).
More info here.
