Still More Software

I can say without a doubt, there are far too many people out there making plugins for WordPress. I have already talked about quite a few I have tried out, first in this post, then in this one. But there was just too much to talk about, so I had to stop writing. But I did warn you there would be more to come. Now on with the fun.

Starting on the post pages, there is Comment Luv. It has been talked up by a couple of how-to blogger I have been reading as a way to reward commenters by giving them links to their blogs. And I admit, I like the fact it lets me get my blog posts linked in their comment section. It has lead me to a couple of enjoyable reads because of the titles that were in the section. And as a blogger, it is an incentive to make intriguing titles.

Another popular plugin promoted by people like Yan on Thou Shall Blog is Subscribe to Comments. It makes it easy for people to follow what is going on in the comment section of a post and contributes to bringing them back and making it a conversation. For plugin developers, it is the best substitute for a forum, since it makes it easier to share information about bugs and fixes with the users. Personally, I find it better than a forum, since I don’t mind getting an addtional email, but I hate signing up for new forums.

The only change I would like on it is for it to send just one email to notify you of new comments until you go back to the site. For busy sites, getting large numbers of emails can be annoying, although it does let you follow along without actually going back to the site.

Something else visible on the front end is the Quote Rotator. It does what it says, showing a selection of quotes on your sidebar. You can set how long the quotes stay, as well as the title and the font size. I currently have 75 quotes in it, and it is set to change every 5 minutes. But that brings up one of the things that is not so nice about it. Having to add in all of the quotes by hand. It would have been nice to be able to import a text file instead of doing a copy & paste 75 times.

Behind the scenes, I have added in the Do Follow plugin. I know there is a basic disagreement in the SEO and how to blog community about nofollow and how it can affect page rank. But I figure, if someone actually is interested enough in my writings to comment on them, the least I can do is let his links show on search engines. This might change if I had hundreds of subscribers and thousands of spam everyday. I doubt I ever have to find out.

On both the front and back end, I am using the Flaresmith plugin for my Feedburner stats. I was already going to be using Feedburner for RSS because it is built into the Vigilance theme. It just made sense to grab the stats while I was at it. Not that I have a lot of stats at the moment, but you never know.

One last plugin that deals with both sides of a blog is Simple Tags. The list of features is way too long to go into here, but it does about everything possible with regards to tags and tagging posts. You can Mass Edit tags, Auto Tag posts, use tags as meta keywords and much more. The parts I have liked the most are the Click Tags and Suggested Tags windows on the new post page. They make it easy to find tags you have used before and tags from other places on the web you may not think of. The tag cloud function is very versatile and customizable, as is the related posts function.

Well, another half a dozen plugins and I am not any closer to being finished. That is somewhat annoying. On the other hand, it is giving me something to write about on a semi-regular basis. Which means I will have another one of these in a week or so.

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