Category Archives: Technical
WordPress Plugin: WordPress.com Stats
If you’re already using Google Analytics for WordPress (see our post on Google Analytics for WordPress) then you already have a ton of information about your blog’s traffic. So much information, in fact, that it may be hard to get a bird’s eye view. That’s where WordPress Stats comes in.
WordPress Plugin: Flexi Pages
The built-in Pages widget does a good job of listing, well, pages, but its options are limited. Which brings us to Flexi Pages, a highly configurable WordPress sidebar widget to list pages and sub-pages. Can be used as an alternative to the default ‘Pages’ widget. It even has a special option to include a Home link, which can come in handy if the title of your home page is something other than Home.
WordPress Plugin: Advanced Category Excluder
Advanced Category Excluder doesn’t just let you omit categories from the category list. It lets you omit categories from just about every form of item there is. You can even specify categories to be omitted from your RSS feeds. It’s glorious!
WordPress Plugin: Wordbook
It’s handy to be able to post it to your blog and not have to turn around and then also post it to Facebook. That’s where Wordbook comes in. It’s a great little plugin that takes each blog post and submits it automatically to your Facebook feed (photos and all).
WordPress Plugin: Google XML Sitemaps
Maintaining this manual Google XML sitemap file for a blog would be a very tedious task to do manually, as the format is quite strict. What’s a blogger to do? Surely not update the sitemap XML file by hand after each post? Enter the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.
WordPress Plugin: Google Analytics for WordPress
Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool for web analytics and conversion tracking. But to work, a snippet of JavaScript code (provided by Google in your Analytics account) has to be added to each page you want tracked. For non-coders this means modifying template’s footer PHP code, which can be a little daunting. The simpler, better way is to let WordPress do the heavy lifting for you, which is where this plugin comes in.
WordPress Plugin: Akismet
This great comment spam fighting tool is a must have, even for sites that require registration for commenting. Right now you’re saying, “But, Akismet already comes with WordPress,” and you’re right. But a lot of folks don’t understand it or use it, probably because it requires a WordPress.com API key to install. But honestly, don’t let this scare you away. WordPress API key’s are drop-dead simple to get. Just follow these quick steps…