It does not take long to generate a fairly large list of old posts. This will make #54 for me, and I have not been a very prolific writer, especially the first couple of months. Keeping your older words of wisdom easily available to your newer readers is one of the challenges facing anyone that has been writing for a long period. Some ways to handle it are mentioned in one of my earlier plugin posts. Here are some plugins that try to help out on a larger scale.
Finding WordPress Plugins
A weekend full of a nasty head cold kept me offline and unable to work on a post on plugins for today. Actually, it kept me from doing much of anything at all, including a training class I was supposed to take all day Saturday. I did finish re-watching Firefly, then Serenity, so the weekend was not a complete waste, just mostly. So for today’s post, I am just going to list a few places you can find out about plugins.
Twittering Your Blog: 7 WordPress Plugins
These days, Twitter is one of the major ways to share your posts. And everything else you feel like. The signal to noise ratio is not the best, but it is far too widespread (and spreading) to ignore. And making it easy for people to follow you there means a ready made audience you can tell about your new posts. So the first thing you need to do is add a button on your site so they can follow you. Then, make it easy for yourself to post tweets about your posts. Oh, and check out Dan Zarrella’s advice about what words to use when tweeting your post.
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Jindal didn’t go over so well
Governor Jindal obviously had a hard row to hoe. He was following one of the best political speakers of our time, who has enormous personal popularity right now. Worse for Jindal and the GOP in general, we want to believe in President Obama. We want him to show us the way out of the current mess the nation, and the world, is in. So Jindal would have had to really hit it out of the park to just avoid losing ground even if Obama only gave an average speech.
Unfortunately for Jindal, Obama didn’t give an average speech, even for him. It didn’t have the punch of the 2004 convention speech, or even his acceptance speech last August. But it hit the people more strongly than his inauguration speech. That was easy to see watching MSNBC and their graph of reactions from both Obama and McCain voters, and is even more apparent on CNN’s Report Card on the speech.
Of course, Jindal did not help himself at all with the actual speech. Complaining about a non-existent maglev rail planned between Disneyland and Las Vegas, and about a volcano monitoring provision that has saved lives in the past, is not a good way to establish that people should trust you. Especially when you are the governor of a state that not only relies on hurricane warnings, but also has an actual high-speed rail corridor included in the latest proposals.
And the response to the speech has not been pretty. While Paul Krugman is a liberal, so can be expected to not care for Jindal’s speech, the Republican side has not been all that nice either. In fact, he has been panned by about everybody that has the stage to do so.
It is really hard to believe that someone so intelligent and capable could be so tone deaf. But it is a long time until 2012, so it is likely that the governor will be able to shine up his image, removing some of the tarnish that was applied last night. But he will have to stop repeating GOP talking points and be a leader in order to do that.
4 Digg plugins for WordPress
Continuing from my guest spot on LinkersBlog, I am looking at plugins that are geared toward just one or two social sites, rather than large numbers of them. So here are a few plugins that focus on Digg and 2 or 3 other sites.
Twitter Benefits
I have only been on Twitter for about a month and a half now, don’t have many followers, and am only following a few dozen people. I started using it because of the Rick Sanchez (@ricksanchezcnn) news hour (Hey CNN, take an hour off of Situation Room and give it to Rick. He just gets going and has to stop.) and have been using it more and more ever since.
Social Site Plugins for WordPress
Today post is a little different. I was asked to write a guest blog by LinkersBlog.com. So the post that is normally here today, is over at his site. I will be posting here as normal on Monday, with a follow up to that article, looking at a few more social plugins.
Jobs and the GOP
It is a day of bad news for various states around the country. California is so far in debt, it is starting to shut down, Kansas is keeping tax refunds and can’t pay workers Friday, and Alaska is suddenly facing a huge budget shortfall. And all of these situations have something in common. They are being facilitated by the Republican Party.
Styling Your Blog: CSS Plugins for WordPress
Everybody likes to make their blog reflect themselves as much as possible. For most of us, this is hard, since we are not PHP programmers and can’t really afford to pay someone to design a custom theme just for us. Fortunately there are a lot of people and companies out there that are willing to design all kinds of themes they make available for free, either for advertising or just to share their creation. This wide choice of themes allows you to find something close to what you want. And the plugin developers have been busy designing ways for you to tweak things to make them even closer to your desire.
Politics are strange.
I am somewhat confused. I have friends that say that is easy to do, so they would not be surprised to hear it. But I do not understand why Senator Gregg’s withdrawal of his name is a black eye for Obama. They did not approach him, although whether he approached them directly or Reid passed his name is up in the air, so if he pulls his name out, it should not reflect on them.
