1. It’s about more than privacy. Google’s new policy is a pivot, in order to remain relevant – TechCrunch
2. Google search chief Amit Singhal: ‘The users who have seen [Search Plus Your World] in the wild are liking it – Search Engine Land
3. Viral Infographics: Apple’s Cash Pile Explained – MBAonline via AllThingsD
4. Why Every Entrepreneur Should Self-Publish a Book – TechCrunch
5. QR marketing evolving rapidly as marketers learn to use codes more effectively – Search Engine Watch
6. Sports Blogger Ousted Over False Paterno Tweet – Mashable
7. Facebook Readies IPO Filing – WSJ.com
8. Touchscreen vs. Keyboard: some options for the touchscreen-averse – AllThingsD
9. ‘We hereby declare 2012 as the Year of the WordPress Meetup’
10.  Greater Kansas City Chamber: Big 5 ideas make early progress – KC Business Journal

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. Simply give it your WordPress.com API Key (see our post on Akismet for detail on this) and in return you’ll get a dashboard item telling you the quick and dirty version of what’s happening on your site, with a wealth of additional information just clicks away. And don’t worry about server load: WordPress Stats is a hosted analytics solution just like Google Analytics. Great stuff.

Check out the WordPress Stats plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself.

Other Great Plugins to Explore

There are lots of great plugins that we’ll be talking about in the coming weeks (FeedBurner Widget, Flickr Feed Gallery and NextGEN Gallery for example). Which ones would you recommend? Post below in the comments or drop us an email and let us know which ones you find most useful. =)

Flexi Pages

WordPress has come a long way since its humble beginnings, and these days it’s more and more common to see it being used not only as a blog but also as a content management system. 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. =) You can specify the sorting order, pages to exclude/include, and even specify if subpages are displayed. Very handy, and great tool to have if you’re doing more than just blogging.

Check out the Flexi Pages plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself. As usual, don’t forget to donate to the author!

Next time we’ll cover WordPress Stats, a great tool to get a quick and dirty overview of your blog’s traffic without having to leave WordPress.

Advanced Category Excluder

A lot of blog themes use a post’s category to handle pages differently. You might have a category, for example, just for items that you want to show upon the home page. Your theme’s homepage PHP code would sniff out only those posts with the Home category and then display those, and only those, on the homepage. In a case like this, though, you don’t want Home showing up in a normal sidebar category list. What to do? If you’re a coder, or just a savvy WordPress user, you might use replacement Category widget provided by Widgets Reloaded (see our post on Widgets Reloaded) to exclude the Home category’s ID. But for non-coders who don’t even know how to determine a category’s ID, there’s Advanced Category Excluder. Whew!

But 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!

Check out the Advanced Category Excluder plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself. As usual, don’t forget to donate to the author!

Next time we’ll cover Flexi Pages, a great tool to help keep hidden categories from showing up in unwanted places.

Widgets Reloaded

The built-in WordPress widgets are great, but were designed for simplicity and ease of use. If you want true control over the output of your widgets (like to exclude certain items, change the order, or display the results of a custom query) you need something more sophisticated. And that brings us to Widgets Reloaded, the wonderful little plugin that replaces the existing Archives, Bookmarks, Calendar, Categories, Pages, Search, and Tags widgets and also adds a new one called Authors. Each of these allow you to specify a wide range of parameters as if you were calling the individual functions directly from your template’s PHP code. The result is flexibility and control like never before. Non-coders beware. =)

Check out the Widgets Reloaded plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself. As usual, don’t forget to donate to the author!

Next time we’ll cover Advanced Category Excluder, a great tool to help keep hidden categories from showing up in unwanted places.

Wordbook

Having a presence on social networking sites like Facebook is almost as important as having a website at all (even more so in some cases). So when it comes to getting your message out, 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) without having to install a special application at Facebook. Once activated the plugin will ask you to visit Facebook and generate a “one-time code,” which is similar to an API Key like we’ve discussed in previous posts. The Wordbook settings screen provides a link to Facebook that will generate this code, so it’s all very easy to do. Just click the link, login to Facebook, follow the directions and it will spit out your code. Then take that (copy and paste will do nicely) and give it to the Wordbook settings screen and voila!

One caveat, though: If you go back and edit a blog post after it has been published, Wordbook will immediately repost it back to your Facebook feed as if it’s new. Avoid this by temporarily deactivating the plugin just before you make the edit and then reactivate it after the edit is published.

Check out the Wordbook plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself. As usual, don’t forget to donate to the author!

Next time we’ll cover Widgets Reloaded, a great replacement for some of WordPress’s stock widgets.

Twitter Widget Pro

More and more companies are using microblogging services like Twitter to keep in touch with their target audiences. So surely there must be a way to integrate your Twitter feed with your WordPress blog, right? Right! Meet Twitter Widget Pro. This little gem adds a widget item to your blog that you can then effortlessly add to the sidebar of any widget-enabled theme. Just add the widget to a sidebar (Appearance > Widgets) tell the widget the name of your Twitter account (no password required), set a few options and you’re golden. The widget is even smart enough to know if Twitter is unavailable and can display a message instead of just sitting there trying to load forever. And with heavily burdened Web 2.0 sites like Twitter occasionally having outages, you really have to love some good old-fashioned fault tolerance. As a bonus, the widget’s HTML output is heavily laden with CSS selectors so your web guys can style it however you need (if necessary).

Check out the Twitter Widget Pro plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself. As usual, don’t forget to donate to the author!

Next time we’ll cover Wordbook, a great tool to help add your blog posts to your Facebook stream.

Google XML Sitemaps

Search engines do a great job of finding web-based content on their own. But sometimes they need help, and in recent years they adopted a standardized format that site owners can use to submit sitemaps (lists of pages on a site). The format is called the Sitemap protocol and it basically involves putting an XML file listing a site’s indexable content somewhere on the site where search engines can download and process it. Maintaining this XML file can 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.

This little wonder updates your blog’s sitemap file each and every time you publish a new post (unless you wish to update it manually). It not only updates the sitemap file, it also gives Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask a big heads-up that there’s something new to come see. You can tell it to exclude certain categories, tags, or posts from the sitemap and set up simple rules for priority and update frequency. Note: For Yahoo automatic notification, a Yahoo Application ID (similar to a WordPress API Key, discussed in our prior discussion of Akismet) is required (sign up for one here).

Check out the Google Sitemap Generator plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself. As usual, don’t forget to donate to the author!

Next time we’ll cover Twitter Widget Pro, a great tool to display your Twitter feed in your blog’s sidebar.

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. Simply feed it your Analytics account code and you’re off to the races. For more advanced users, the plugin’s settings screen also features the ability to track outbound clicks, and can even be configured to place the JavaScript in the header, if needed. Great stuff, and very easy to use.

Check out the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself. As usual, don’t forget to donate to the author!

Next time we’ll cover Google XML Sitemaps, a great tool to help search engines (not just Google) find your blog.