Archive for the ‘Plugins’ Category

Well, literally not figuratively . Or is it the other way around?

I was thinking about premium WordPress plugins.

What do you use?

If you don’t use them, why?

I have two.

One I lost. Yup, forgot what it was called and where I downloaded it. The other one is an RSS bomber, which I have yet to use. At least I know where that one is!

Out there in the big wide WordPress plugin world, there are many premium plugins that enhance your SEO, promise to fetch you traffic and even bake you a cake of you let them. Ok, I am making up the cake baking bit, but if there was one, I’d know about it.

So can your words be music to my ears? Can you tell me what you recommend as premium WordPress plugins, point me to any reviews that have caught your eye?

If you have created a WP premium plugin, come and tell us about it, as I said I am all ears today

Sarah

There are many WordPress plugins that enable you to harness the power of Twitter; the following are a few that you may find useful: 

TweetMeme Button
Used here on blogmistress.com – the retweet button up in the right hand corner of posts! It’s really simple to use and let’s anyone retweet your post. So if you’re reading this – click it to try it out

TweetMeme Twitter Follow Button
Places a follow me button on your site. Nice and simple – install this plugin, go to widgets and place in your sidebar then add your twitter username.

WP to Twitter
We mentioned this in a previous post – What, Why, How – WordPress Plugins and having had a look at the settings and trying it out it’s very handy for automatically tweeting your published posts.

This plugin can send a default message when new and edited posts/pages are published but also you have the option of writing a custom tweet for a post.

It’s all pretty simple to setup, there are advanced options but to test this out I was happy with the default settings and just popped in my twitter account username and password.

And if you want to show your Twitter stream in your sidebar, there are a number of plugins available, but we like the look of Twitter Widget Pro – partly because it has been tested on the latest version of WordPress (at time of writing – some weeks into the latest release) and because it handles twitter feeds well, including the @username, #hashtag, and link parsing, amongst other things.

Of course, as with all plugins, the thing to do is search for your ideal plugin yourself, taking into account when it was last updated, how many people have downloaded it, and even popping to the WordPress.org site to view comments, etc.

Have fun!

really it is .

I recently read a guest blog by Jackie Barrie, she wrote a lovely guest blog about email marketing and left a tip on the post that was very useful, read it here (sorry, can’t give away the punchline).

That lead me thinking along the avenue of what people share when they read and write on the web.

When I comment on a blog that doesn’t use Disqus as a commenting system (which allows me to add my comments also onto my facebook page and twitter updates) then I use Twit That. Twit That is just dragged and dropped into your browser toolbar and I share what I commenting on and what I am reading.

I did share a lot via social bookmarking, but lately that has fell by the wayside.

With the advent of Facebook liking, where you can ‘like’ a blog post anywhere on the web and it will update your facebook profile, I wondered if there would be anymore sharing on my blogs where it’s installed. Nope, apparently not.

People prefer what they feel comfortable with, tweeting, twit that – ing, social book marking. Yes, sharing is caring, but it has to work for the person that uses it and well as the person who owns the content.

And the ‘why‘ people share.

Funny gets shared a lot. Those cheezeburger lolcats I see zip around the web, along with jokes, petitions, fundraising requests and one or two poignant requests for help. I thought perhaps the most shared stuff has to have a request in it, but on further reflection the things that are most shared are the things that touch us. Either by our heartstrings and then our pursestrings, or through the desire to make someone smile and share something warm.

If that’s right I should be ending with a cat or burger-eating cat joke with a just giving page attached, but somehow I just haven’t got it in me!

Don’t construe that as an attempt for the poignant tug of the heartstrings share, it was acceptance that some posts like this one, will be ordinary, they won’t be shared and they won’t be liked to death over on Facebook. There’s nothing wrong with that, understand its nice to read something that’s easy on the heart, purse and soul every now and then.

In reading and writing content, not everything has to pack the killer punch. It does have to satisfy a need though.

Sarah

So – what are “plugins”?

Basically, they add functionality to your WordPress blog or website. There are thousands of them available, all created by elves who love to share their geek creations with the world. (OK – so they’re not elves, but the plugin programmers love that WordPress is open source and add what they can to the collective!). And while they may be free (mostly), if the added functionality is useful for you, it is a good thing to make a donation to that plugins creator, if such an option exists.

The first plugins that you will come across are the Akismet spam filter and Hello Dolly. The first is a welcome standard that we urge you to activate and use, the second is pure frivolity from the WordPress creators and you can either use it or delete!

The way we recommend you approach adding more plugins is to source them from the WordPress.com site (ideally) and to install and activate one at a time. Sometimes plugins can conflict with each other or with a theme – if your WordPress suddenly dies, the first thing we look at is the plugins.

Probably the best way to go about choosing a plugin is to first of all identify what you need, so for this post I have decided I want a cool twitter plugin.

You can review the plugins available on the WordPress website, in which case the first place to go to is WordPress Plugins and search for what you want – in this instance ‘twitter’ and I’ve decided to sort by Highest Rated and after looking at a few I’ve chosen WP to Twitter as it looks pretty interesting.

To add a new plugin, from your Dashboard go to Plugins > Add New – here I am going to search for the specific plugin chosen ‘wp to twitter’ and once the search results come up click on install to the right of the description.

The full description and information will come up but as I’ve already looked into this plugin I am ready to click on Install Now, it shouldn’t take long to install and once done you’ll get a confirmation to show it’s installed and also asking if you want to activate it.

Plugins cannot be used on your WordPress until they are activated – Plugins, Installed and activate (an option under the plugin’s description) - once you have done this you either have to sort out their settings or go to widgets and pop them into the side bar, see WordPress Widgets, What, Why How Post.

Now I’ve activated WP to Twitter I will need to give it more information, as no extra menu appeared in my dashboard sidebar menu I’ve had a look in Settings and it is there at the bottom of that menu. Your plugins options, etc will be available from the Dashboard menu – either within Settings, Tools, or perhaps with a menu item of its own.

So, now I’ve installed the plugin, activated and popped the required information into the settings. That’s it, all done!

While I am in my dashboard I’ve also decided I no longer need some plugins that I had previously installed so time to delete some. To do this simply click on plugins and here you’ll see a list of what you have, if you simply don’t want to use a plugin for now click on deactivate, if you really didn’t get on with that plugin and no longer wish to use it click on delete.

Hopefully having read this you’ll see that there really isn’t much effort or geeky stuff to be done to get a plugin working on your site and if you need help just leave a comment and we’ll get back to you.

If you are unsure of what you should have and would like us to give your WordPress a healthcheck click here to book a session with the blogmistress

You may already, of course – know how many people are visiting your WordPress blog or website. But just in case…

It’s not wise to fret over erratic stats – we’ve all done it – enjoyed a day or several of good visitor numbers to then see a slump and start to wonder about our strategies… Instead it makes sense to consider that there may be factors affecting how busy your blog is, or isn’t.  On one blog with which I’m involved it can depend on the weather; when it’s horrid outside, our stats are higher – it’s a quite a social blog site so can be welcome on a cold, stormy day. With Blogmistress we blog less at the weekends, so of course the number of visitors dips for a couple of days – I prefer to see the steady upward trend on the weekly view (and thank you, by the way!).

So, which stats will suit you.

To be honest, I think for most people the WordPress.com stats plugin is more than adequate. You’ll need the API code that you used to configure your Akismet spam filter and enter that same code to configure the WordPress.com stats. Then these will show up on your Dashboard (you can choose different settings – mouse over the top of the box to see the configure link).

We have one client who has always enjoyed Statcounter and was not keen to lose it when we moved his online rug shop to WordPress – so for him we installed the Statcounter plugin – and he continues to monitor what’s going on with his shop. I can understand wanting to maintain the familiar, especially when getting used to such a different system as WordPress can be to a static website. Statcounter is so easy to work with and was a standard for all websites we worked with.

Now if you want to really get stuck in, there is a plug-in for the real time web analytics of Clicky – this is for those of you who really want to analyse, set goals and campaigns, and even watch live activity with the upgrade. One to consider if this can be useful for you.

And then of course there are the Google Analytics plugins – many available and you need to settle on the one that best suits you. We’ve used Google Analyticator often; that does what we want.

Have a look at the available stats plugins yourself if the above don’t meet your needs – just search for statistics or analytics in Plugins, Add New and away you go.

Have fun, but don’t get too hung up over what’s going on, or spend longer than you need to on analysis. As ever, if you’re unsure what will work best for you, give us a shout…

Babs