Archive for the ‘Plugins’ Category

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Stand back, stand back, clear the decks… I need to experiment.

Here’s the scenario

Birds on the Blog has a brother, he’s young and just getting started. Birds needs to keep and eye on him without losing her own space and momentum. We all know siblings get up to and Birds wants to be supportive without interfering. What can she do?

Is there a thing such as a ticker (I know Blogmistress will tell me off, no moving, no distractions) that will go across the top of Birds to let her know what her little bro’ is up to?

A quick search shows me…

There is the notices ticker plugin

Then there is the news ticker plugin

and then there is this one, a ticker for a widget

It seems that keeping an eye on your little brother is an international thing

Have a look and let me know what you think will suit Birds needs best.

Over to you

Sarah

Sometimes, often, blog posts can disappear. Well they don’t necessarily disappear, they may just move for some reason. It happens. Or you may have deleted something very old that is no longer relevant. Or if you have moved your website and/or blog into your hosted WordPress, well there are bound to be some stray links…

What you want to do is know of the links, if possible, and to suggest alternative pages for those defunct pages.

The Broken Link Checker plugin does exactly that – it monitors your blog and lets you know of any broken links:

1. Plugins, Add New, search for Broken Link Checker and install
2. Go to Settings, Link Checker and take a look at what it found (it is that quick)
3. If you have any broken links, a link is provided for you to view these. We had a broken link to an external image from one of our blog posts – so knew to change that.
4. Set a frequency for the links to be checked – the default is 72 hours but to be honest I think weekly is sufficient (that’s 168 hours)

There you go – now there’s no excuse for broken links in your WordPress blog and/or website.

Now – one of the vitals tasks that you must set for regular action is to backup your WordPress. You want to backup the database, and your WordPress files – in the eventuality that you do lose everything, for some horrible reason (and it happens to the best of us), you will be very glad that you did.

So, first install the WP-DB-Backup plugin and set that up to suit you:

1. Plugins, Add New, search for WP-DB-Backup and install
2. Go to Tools, Backup and take an immediate backup (I tend to have them emailed to me and store the last two, but you can store them on your computer or on your server). I generally select everything listed, however if your WordPress is particularly large you might want to be more selective – only you know what’s essential and worth the time and additional space required for larger backups.
3. Set to backup up regularly, at least weekly, I suggest.

Then you want to backup the WordPress files – these include your images, your plugins and your themes directories, so install WordPress Backup by Blog Traffic Exchange:

1. Plugins, Add New, search for WordPress Backup and install the one by Blog Traffic Exchange.
2. Go to Settings, WordPress Backup and set the interval – the rest will be taken care of (if your host permits – you may have to provide your ftp details for the required folders to be created).

And there you go – hopefully you’ll never need your backups, and remember you don’t have to keep all of them, just the last one or two.

Today I’ve been busy scheduling blog posts for the next few weeks, with school holidays looming and even hoping to take a week off myself (woohoo),  and while we did touch on this particular plug-in the other week, I think it does deserve it’s own post, being such a handy tool for those of us who write blog posts when the muse takes us, or if you have several people contributing to your blog.

The WordPress Editorial Calendar plug-in is one I use daily (and I know that Sarah uses it to excellent effect on her Birds on the Blog site – essential for her when juggling a couple of dozen writers!).

Whenever you create a blog post, whether draft, scheduled or make it live, it then shows up on the Calendar (viewed from Posts, Calendar) – and then the fun bit – you can drag and drop the scheduled and draft posts to wherever you want them! Now if you want to specify the time you do need to set that within the post itself, but being able to move the the posts with such ease is priceless.

It can be hard to formulate a comment sometimes when you are reading a blog, and if I can’t make a comment and I like the blog the next thing I look to do is share the content as a way of saying thanks to the writer.

I recently discovered Facebook sharing   this button when added to your site allows the post to be posted to your Facebook profile so those that see your status updates might like it and have a look. I have used this one a lot lately and now I look for it more when I am looking to share posts.
If you want to try it, you can download it from here and then upload it to your plugins  http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/facebook-fb-share-wordpress-plugin.zip

I still love the most popular plugin that Babs installs on every Blogmistress blog, the TweetMeme button that little green button will tweet the blog from your twitter account sharing it with your followers and helping to attract people with similar interests to you. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweetmeme/ It’s not just me who loves it, it’s installed on 100,000 other websites who want to make sharing their content easier.

But what about sharing buttons? How do they work for you? You see, many sites have the addthis sharing widget and I have never used it, not once, not ever. Even though I can still share on Twitter and Facebook using it, for me there is something about the button that just makes me want to press it!

More enticing is Sexy Bookmarks, anyone use that? I saw it on someone else’s site (and I forget who, as I look at so many) and it said “Caring is Sharing” and then there is a drop down box with just about every share site in the world on it! They also have one that says “sharing is sexy”. How can you not use that?

Last, but by no means least – has anyone installed a Google Buzz button yet? I tried it on one of my blogs, but it conflicted. If you use it – how does it work for you? Love it or Loathe it?

Sarah