Greetings, fellow WordPress Fans…

I discovered a plugin about 2 years ago that greeted people when they visited my site. It knew (by magic ) who had sent the person, google or a certain forum and welcomed them.

A little banner greets the person and invites them, after welcoming them to stay in touch via RSS or email and you can customise it to say what you want. For a small fee you can remove the creator of the plugins name

This marvelous tool is WP Greet Box. I love it, I love it to bits. If someone visits from a social bookmarking site they are welcomed, fellow Googler, Stumbler etc. I am a member of a forum and when people pop over to view a post from that forum, I personalise that greeting to them, and demand they leave me a comment, they know who they are and are bemused by it. On one social network, Nikki Pilkington, Ida Horner and Steven Healey regularly post links to their works on Birds/ Blokes on the Blog and the Greet Box welcomes them appropriately too. Often  it simply says ” Thank you for clicking Nikki, Ida or Steven’s link”.

Yesterday on twitter I was chatting to Graham Hunt of Entrepreneur Solo fame, and author of the Bootstrapping guide and he had seen the Greet Box and loved the idea of it. Sadly it conflicts with another plug in or the theme of his site, whilst he is working it out, there is another option.

Referrer Detector You can read all about the similarities and differences between the two plugins on the download page. Given the choice, I’d use the WP Greet Box, when there is no choice for reasons of conflict then I use Referrer Detector. No point in missing out on greeting our readers is there?

Ian McAllister pointed out that sometimes the conflict is another plugin called YARPP. YARPP shows related posts in your side bar or elsewhere on your blog. If you get the time, check out the link – the floating tabs are sublime, just run your mouse across them.

Now if only someone would invent a wave goodbye box for when someone leaves my site, I’ll be truly happy

Sarah