Archive for the ‘Plugins’ Category

This week the blogmistress asked me to find an online chat/support facility for one of our clients; of course I was delighted with the chance of playing with more plugins!

I had a look at some pretty good paid plugins but also free like livezilla but the client really didn’t need complicated information or software, just the ability to display himself as being online and available to help his customers.  I think there is a need for these fancy dashboards but sometimes information overload just to answer a simple question isn’t really necessary.

I did think of the skype online status plugin that I wrote about but this would mean potential customers would have to faff around if they didn’t have skype already so after a bit of searching I found this plugin:

Google Talk Chatback Widget – on my site it worked like a dream & looks really slick, so with excitement (yes, sadly I do get a little very giddy about these things) I was straight onto skype to our blogmistress letting her know I was going to install it to the client’s site… sadly it didn’t work, maybe conflicts with other plugins but rather than play around too long I decided to try something out, using a new text widget and copying the code from the google talk chatback page.

My first choice out of both options would be the plugin as it has a nice facility if you are offline the customer is pointed to your contact page, also the buttons that are added to your site look professional (although may need resizing, they are a bit on the large side).  Apart from that both do the same when it comes to using chat.

If your WordPress website is plugtastic (hmm, I made that up but you know what I mean, plugins a go go) and the above doesn’t work just go to the google talk chatback page and use the full code in a text widget, you can customise this to an extent (see more info here) by changing the font, size and colour.  It works and without the faff for you or your potential customers.

If you need help with this just comment

Yes, you have plucked up the courage to complete the little box at the end of the post. You have hit submit… What happens next?

If you have a web savvy blogmistress, you may get directed to a thank you page

Comments are the lifeblood of a blog, it encourages a community to form. Where you see comments (like on this blog) you know the advice is good.

So encouraging comments is something I am going to explore over the next few blog posts, and you can download them and try them and see which works for your blog. Remember, not everything works for everyone.

So back to thanking first time commenters, you can download the Comment Redirect plugin here

When installed, after the comment has been made it will redirect the commenter to another page. This can be where you thank them for taking the time to comment, encourage them to come back often and subscribe to your RSS feeds.

This isn’t the place for selling your ebooks or other products, but a welcoming page where your community starts to grow from. You will therefore need to create a New Page and then set that page in the Comment Redirect option under Plugins.

The great thing I like about this plugin is, your regular commenters won’t even notice it, so it won’t interfere with the smooth running of your blog, for your regulars it is business as usual.

As always, if you like this post – tell a few people and let us know how you get on with it

Sarah

This post is to all those out there in the big wide world of Wordpress that code plugins…

How do you name them?

The other day I was reading and loving Joe’s post about the Hottie McFoxy dashboard plugin, but it turns out if you read the post that it isn’t actually called a hottie mcfoxy dashboard plugin at all, it has a rather dull name that I can’t recall for love nor money. Which got me thinking about how I search for plugins and what I actually find for my efforts.

Looking for – a diary of blog posts scheduled and what I get is this…. pre-date-future-post not what I was looking for at all, but I am sure it does whatever it does very nicely, it’s just doesn’t help me… what I was really looking for was Calendar by Kieran O Shea . It did not cross my mind it would be called a calendar. A Calendar goes on the wall doesn’t it? What about a schedule? Err, nope. Not that either. In fact the list of plugins under schedule blogs seems to have  nothing at all to do with scheduling blogs!

I like to do my follow Fridays for twitter in a blog, so I was looking for the holy grail of plugins – I was looking for a fabled plugin that does something that really will make my life easier, the plugin that hyperlinks twitter names. Could I find it? I could find that Grail quicker! I stumbled across the actual plugin by accident after searching through a pile of plugins that pulled my tweets into the blogs, sent my blogs to twitter and all sorts of things, it was more luck than judgment that I found the easy twitter link plugin!

So back to my original question… how do you name a plugin? Do you give thought to non technical minded people looking for your excellently coded piece of Wordpress perfection? or is it something else?

Sarah

I’ve never been one for instant messengers and avoided them until a few months ago when I was tempted with a new phone and that was it, love at first skype!

Not a great one for talking on the phone, this suited me down to the ground – free messages from my mobile and also should I feel the need, I can call for free too.  Skype on my computer has been a great success too, right now I have the chat box open with my latest conversation with our blogmistress!

I thought this plugin would be great for anyone who is a skype addict, like me, or if you want your readers/customers to be able to contact you quickly and easily.

The only thing that you have to remember to do after installing, activating and setting it up is go into your skype privacy settings and make sure “Allow my status to be shown on the web” is checked, otherwise you will always appear offline.

I suppose the only downside to this is that you will need to make sure your skype status is up to date, but if you are like me I am always online unless I turn my phone off!

This plugin comes with plenty of display options, the one I am showing you is every option available but you can just have an online/offline button showing.

Here’s the link for more info and download – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/skype-online-status/

Recently I’ve come across a few blogs that use a lot of photos in their posts and to be honest, not too well, so I decided to have a dig around for a cool image viewer for WordPress and Shutter Reloaded is the plugin I think would be invaluable if you have images you want to share.

To try it out I have used the adorable ‘Ladder family’ on my site to show off this lightbox plugin (basically where you do not need to leave the page to view the images), of course you could visit Shutter Reloaded to see it works there!

What’s great about this plugin is that it’s quick and easy to install, there are five display options to suit most sites and it’s all very simple to customise too.

To download visit – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/shutter-reloaded/