» plugins

I looked at my sidebar today and noticed I’d made it to TR10.

Yay me! Thanks to all those who have commented, without them I’d still be on TR0.

I’ve had the tumbleweed plugin on my blog now for about 3 months. Over that time I’ve noticed a steady increase in the comments on my posts.

Whilst this can probably be attributed to the blogs steady growth and readership and of course the fabulous quality of post and content - it may nevertheless have been aided by the little fellow with the cross eyes and the number on his chest reminding me of my progress, ensuring that I worked that little bit harder to stay on track and keep a focus.

Wordpress Plugins for you blog

Wordpress plugins are legion, there are 1000’s of them out there. Here is a selection of some of the ones I use with a little paragraph on some of the reasons why.

Adsense Injection

I’m trialing a new wp plugin called simple forum. Its pretty cool, I see lots of uses for it on quite a few blogs that I’m running.

You can see it in action over at my Blog Forum page

Read gems like

QSP (Quick Short Post)

Since installing the math comment plugin my spam levels have fallen off of the planet. Akismet hasn’t had a comment now for weeks, which is a prety good show I think.

I’d recommend installing it, its saved me from a chore of checking the mod queue daily, a chore that used to bore me silly.

In a recent thread, Andy talked about building a ‘posts you may have missed’ plugin.

5 recent posts you may have missed
# 5 Posts you may have missed plugin - 2007-04-18 10:45:07
# tumbleweed plugin - 2007-04-18 10:21:14
# Run a local business? Get directorified! - 2007-04-03 11:31:57
# Discontinuing MyBlogLog visitor tracking - 2007-03-25 18:05:17
# NOYDIR wordpress plugin - 2007-03-01 12:59:59

Whilst building my tumbleweed plugin, I found myself stumbling on the sql for the code required to pull the info, so decided to save Andy the trouble and anyone else for that matter and build the thing myself.

Last updated:July 3rd 2007  Download it here Ok as promised in a prior post Ive put together a little plugin to calculate your TR ratio.

The measurement is worked out a little like this

It counts your last 3 months number of posts and then subtracts the number of posts that were commented on. With the remainding number, it calculates what this is as a percentage of your 3 month post rate.

So, in my case - during the last 90 days I made 35 posts of which 16 received less than 3 comments. My blog therefore is currently TR6 (45% of my blog posts received no comments)

Inspired by Joost de vaalk’s noodp plugin for wordpress and the recent Y! announcement, I decided to provide a NOYDIR plugin.

You can download it here. Unzip it, put it in your plugins folder, and activate it. It then adds the following line to the section of your theme:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOYDIR">

For those who are wondering what this is for, you can check out the Y! searchblog.

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>
<META NAME=”Slurp” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>

So there you have it. If you do not want them to use your directory title and description in their SERPs you can now opt out by inserting either of those tags.

I recently installed a plugin that enables you to show your top commenters. It’s there to the right of the screen. I wanted to reward my mostive active participants.
As some of you may have read already, I don’t nofollow my commenters I think it’s a lame thing to do to people who take the time to comment on what you have said. Some blogging platforms place restrictions at the core program level making it very difficult for people to do very much about it. Not everyone can get in there and hack or change things they dislike. Lots of bloggers probably don’t even realise that their commenters are nofollowed simply because they are not as tech savvy as the next person. Not everyone surfs with a customised css file or firefox search status plugin! It’s refreshing to read that people with a broad reach like Robert Scoble are re-evaluating their positions although some like Anil Dash remain less convinced.

Anyways, this isn’t another anti nofollow rant, its more a case of talking about building a readership and rewarding those who participate and some of the stuff that has to be done to make that happen.

The other day I added digg dugg to my list of plugins. Its pretty cool I like it. I was looking at a way of pulling in some related material to tag on to the bottom of my blog posts. I wanted to be able to plugin a keyword and pull posts from somewhere based upon whatever that word was. I looked at the digg duggplugin and thought cool, that might well work.
I couldn’t see a way of adding db variables straight off the bat into the digg dugg function, so after a little bit of fannying around with single.php I came up with this approach. (I may have missed something and wasted the past hour or so doing this, but what the hey, it works, Im happy)