Twitter has recently become a must have for everyone, there seems to be a total Twitter mania. Thus hundreds of new tools for Twitter appear each day. I’ve already gave you a dozen of great Twitter tools for WordPres. Well, today I’m going to give you some more.
* Twitter for Wordpress
Great, easily customizable plugin that displays your latest tweets in the WordPress blog of yours.
* Top Twitter Links
This is a widget that will show currently popular tweeted links.
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Archive for the ‘WordPress Plugins’ Category
Top 10 Twitter Tools for WordPress
August 20th, 2009
10 Useful WordPress Tricks
August 14th, 2009
WordPress is an amazing blogging platform, there are hundreds of ways to make your WordPress blog better and extend its functionality. WordPress community keeps on inventing new tricks, hacks and plugins to give you an opportunity to reach the unbelievable goals with your WordPress powered web presence.
I like keeping myself updated with the latest events related to WordPress, and I like keeping up to date with the most useful tricks and plugins WordPress community develops. Today I’m going to share 10 useful WordPress tools and tricks from my latest discoveries.
* Antivirus for Wordpress
This great tool will warn you of any possible attacks.
* E-Commerce Shopping Cart
You absolutely need this good looking and easy to maintain e-Commerce platform if you plan to launch an online shop on the base of your WordPress powered website.
* Broken Links Checker
Very good plugin that monitors your blog and looks for broken links.
* Random Posts from Category
You can display random posts from a category you choose. The plugin lets you choose the number of displayed posts. Plus you can tell it to show the excerpt or the full content in addition to title of the post.
* Dropdown Blogroll
This guide will teach you how to create a beautiful dropdown blogroll without javascript.
* Better Search Page
This great plugin will give you the complete control over the look of your WordPress search results page.
* Simple Post Thumbnails
This is a very easy to use plugin that will let you create thumbnails for your blog posts. There is no image editing required, the plugin will do everything for you.
* Vote Post Up/Down
Add some interaction with your visitors, let them vote and show how they liked your articles.
* Improve Page Load Time
This nice plugin will improve your page load time greatly. To do that it’ll combine and compress JS and CSS files.
* Spell, Style and Grammar Check
This smart plugin is a very handy tool that will find any writing errors at your blog entries and offer smart solutions.
Are there more new WordPress tricks and tools you use and would like to share with others?
Amaze Spammers with the Power of Your Anti Spam Plugin
August 12th, 2009
There are literally thousands of WordPress plugins out there. Hundreds of them are aimed to deal with spam comments on your blog entries. Still, the most popular plugin recommended by the majority of bloggers is Akismet. This popularity of Akismet is though not quite understandable as I keep on coming across the complains about it, its reliability and performance.
Well, I’ve found a great anti spam plugin for those who are unsatisfied with the Akismet plugin. Please welcome - AntiSpam Bee.
This is not a captcha or math queries plug-in, your visitors won’t suffer. 
It doesn’t require a database installation and template modification.
The operation principle of the AntiSpam Bee plugin is quite simple and actually ingenious - it hides your comment box and replaces it with a fake one, thus fulling the evil bots that spam your comments.
There is a great option - you can tell the plugin to mark the spam plugins without deleting it, thus you are able to monitor the work of the plugin.
Another pleasant thing about AntiSpam Bee is the ease of adding and maintenance. Everything you need to do is to download and activate it.
AntiSpam Bee can be used in tandem with Akismet or other anti spam plugin you use.
So, have you faced problems with your anti spam plugin performance?
Plugins to Monetize Your Blog
July 21st, 2009
It’s not a secret that most of us are blogging to earn some money. Thus I decided to make a list of plugins that can help you with this goal.
The most popular way of making money online is Google AdSense. There are hundreds of articles on how to make money with Google AdSense and a number of plugins that make the installation easier and faster:
* Adsense Deluxe WordPress Plugin
This plugin will add a screen to your options panel. From that screen you will be able to create AdSense ad units and manage them, decide what sizes ads should be and at what parts of your blog they should be placed.
The plugins named below will help you easily add AdSense to your blog:
* Adsense Injection
* MightyAdsense
* Google AdSense Widget
As most of the AdSense WordPress plugins require editing your theme you might find Shylock Adsense WordPress plugin to be the better choice for you as it allows to insert Adsense ads to your WordPress blog without modifying the theme.
* AdSense Manager is also a very good WordPress plugin that will help you manage your ads. It generates the code automatically.
* Google Ad Wrap
This fruitful plugin wraps posts and comments at your blog inside Section Targeting tags thus giving you better targeted ads.
And these plugins will help you track your AdSense earnings:
* AdSense Sharing Revenue and Earnings System WordPress Plugin
* Adsense Clicks Tracker
* Adsense Earnings WordPress Plugin
Another popular resource of money for bloggers is Amazon.com. There are several plugins that can help you add different Amazon ad types to your WordPress blog.
* Amazon Autoposter
This free and user friendly plugin automatically posts Amazon products on any keyword you specify, thus helping you earn money with Amazon affiliate program.
* Amazon Associate Filter
This plugin will automatically add your associate id to all Amazon links in the posts and comments at your blog.
What affiliate programs do you use to monetize your blogs?
Is Your Blog SEO Friendly?
July 14th, 2009
We’ve discussed the importance of search engine optimization here more than once. But I think one more time won’t be a waste.
So, let’s revise what exactly SEO means and how it works.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is a process of improving the volume and quality of your traffic received from search engines. To understand SEO better you should know how search engines work. This is pretty easy - such search engines as Google and Yahoo use a program called a “web spider”. These spiders crawl the web and collect info about the web pages (content, links etc.) and deposit this info to the search engine’s database. When you want to find something on the web and type your query in the search box the search engine has to do one simple thing - to find the most relevant info in it’s database. To make your blog more relevant to probable queries you should make it rank for the factors that form the search engine algorithm higher. This is where SEO will help you.
Here are things you should check and plugins you should add to make your blog SEO friendly:
* All in One SEO Pack
I already told you about this extremely useful plugin. It allows you to add meta tags, titles, descriptions and keywords to your blog posts.
* Google XML Sitemaps
If you want google spiders to crawl your weblog better you should help them - create a sitemap. This nice plugin will help you do the task easily and fast.
* Sociable
This is a great plugin I’ve already mentioned at this blog, it allows your visitors to bookmark your posts at 99 social bookmarking sites. Find more WordPress plugins meant to help you increase traffic. http://www.wpdaddy.com/blog/2009/03/increase-traffic-with-wordpress-plugins/
Things to check:
* Add Titles and ALT tags to the images you use in your blog entries
* Make sure your meta descriptions are unique and do not repeat your content
* Make sure your theme uses header tags correctly:
- Your blog title (your main keyword) should be placed in an h1 tag.
- Your post titles should be placed in h2 tags.
These are very basic SEO tips for beginners, if you have more simple tips feel free to share them in the comments below.
Curious WordPress Plugins
June 30th, 2009
I bet you’ve seen hundreds if not thousands of lists of the “best”, “useful”, “must have” etc. WordPress plugins. But have you ever come across strange, odd, even funny plugins? I have, and thus decided to share these findings with you. Some of the plugins described below might be actually fruitful and some are completely useless, but all of them are rather curious.
W-P
This nice plugin has one goal - to check your posts and change all “worpdress”, “WordPres”, “worldpress” etc. to a proper “WordPress”. If you have a problem of misspelling this is a great helper. You can also add your own commonly misspelled words and use the plugin to change the abbreviations to the full words.
CA-Weekday WordPress Plugin
Nice little thing that will change the boring day names like Monday and Tuesday to funny names like Rest Day, Back to Work Day, Still Back to Work Day and so on.
The TimeZoneCalculator WordPress Plugin
This plugin might actually be useful for a travelling blogger as it calculates and displays dates and time across different time zones.
Give a Beer
This is the widget that lets your visitors to give you a virtual beer. Funny little thing for beer lovers.
Fun Facts
I find this plugin to very interesting and entertaining. It adds a sidebar widget that displays interesting, weird and curious random fun facts.
My Worst Posts
Everyone shows their best posts that are most commented, this widget on the contrary shows the less commented posts. Who knows, maybe someone would like to comment? 
I’ve come across a number of strange translating plugins. They might be useful if you’d like to make your reader decrypt your posts or if you want to target the post to someone who knows the language or just have some fun with your content.
Pig Latin
Translates all your messages into Pig Latin.
Fun Filters hack
Translates posts and comments into Elmer Fudd, Pig Latin or any other silly language.
Text Filter Suite WordPress Plugin
If you are a fan of pirates, pirate stories and everything connected to them you’ll love this plugin. It converts your posts into “pirate talk”.
Well, do you have some strange or funny WordPress plugins to share?
WordPess plugins for Your Blog Security
June 23rd, 2009
We already discussed the protection of your WordPress based websites, but precautions can never be excessive, thus here are some good working plugins for you to secure your blog.
* WP Security Scan
Very good plugin, it scans your weblog backwards and forward for security issues, carefully checks passwords, database security, admin protection, file permissions.
* WP AntiVirus
This little helper carefully checks your WP theme for malicious code. If someone inserts anything malicious to your code you’ll be alerted. I recommend to enable a daily scan.
* Secure Files
With this plugin you are able to upload/download files from outside of the web document root, thus your blog will be more protected. You can restrict file downloads to logged in users.
* AskApache Password Protect
This powerful plugin will secure your WP Admin with htaccess password protection. No unwanted bot will be able to enter your website.
* Secure WordPress
Good working plugin that will hide your WP version info from non-administrators and your plugin directory from the visitors.
* Sabre
No bots will be able to register at your weblog with this plugin. Among other measures it adds image verification or math test to the registration process.
* WordPress Exploit Scanner
Searches your blog inside out for anything suspicious. Not only it checks your files, comments, posts and database, but also examines the list of your plugins for unusual file names
* WordPress Firewall
This cool plugin easily identifies and stops most obvious attacks. It detects suspicious parameters and responds with a 404 error page or a home page redirect.
Do share WordPress security tips you know at the comments below.
Best mp3 Plugins for Your WordPress Blog
May 15th, 2009
Remember one of my previous posts where I showed you some awesome Music WP Themes? Well, today I’m going to extend the topic of music in blogs and show you few plugins main goal of which is to give you the way to add any .mp3 files to your posts and pages. Note that if you add these plugins your weblog loading might become a little bit slower. Well, here they are:
* Tune Library
Very good plugin that imports an XML iTunes music library file into your blog database. You can display your whole music collection at your WordPress powered blog or website.
* Flash MP3 Player
This is a sidebar widget that displays your mp3 player at the sidebar of your blog. The playlist is customized at your Admin panel.
* Zina
A graphical interface to the mp3 collection of yours.
* fmTuner
This nice plugin pulls the info from your Last.fm account. Your top tracks, recent tracks and loved tracks can be ordered and displayed the way you want. Just use the easy to operate built-in options and tags.
* Streampad Audio Player
All the mp3 files you link to from your WordPress blog are displayed in the audio player at the bottom of your web page.
* Audio Player Wordpress plugin
This small plugin allows you to add mp3 files to your posts and pages. Very good tool for a podcasting blog.
These were only the few of hundreds of music plugins you can find, if you know more and would like to recommend feel free to do so at the comments below.
