To Plugin Or Not To Plugin, That Is The Question…
Since this blog went ‘on air’ so to speak, I’ve added a few plugins over time! Now some can be of use and others a total waste of time, if you know what I mean. But what do I have here at Mark-McWilliams.com headquarters? While I’m not going to list them all here, I thought about recommending a few that you should have!
(Click their name to be taken to the relevant page!)
- What Would Seth Godin Do - I really like this plugin and find it very useful. You see, if your new (or just cleared your cookies) and you visit any part of my blog, then it allows me to display a custom message to them. At the moment, I try to encourage the visitors to subscribe to my RSS feed. You can, if you wish, edit the message and put whatever you like in.I really like this plugin, and it has to be one of the best ones out there.
- Akismet - As this blog grows and grows (you’ve got to think big eh?) it will more or less receive quite a few comments on the posts that I make. This plugin assists, along with comment moderation, in filtering out all the SPAM that comes through (mainly from bots!) – Hence, it saves me quite some time when I’m approving and attending to my blog. You do need to signup at Wordpress.com were you’ll receive an API that the plugin requires to work. (It’s FREE! – Signup Now!)
- Related Posts - Whenever a visitor finds your website through a search engine (for example) they often only see that single post at first. They are also here because they want to find out about a topic that interests them! With Related Posts plugin, it makes life 10 times easier for your visitors by showing them other posts you happen to have written on the subject. I would hope that they stuck around and looked at even more content because of this.
- Google Sitemaps - Don’t want the hassle of creating one yourself? Then this plugin is for you! It will automatically create a Google compliant sitemap of your Wordpress blog. This will ensure that all your pages are, and get indexed in Google. You really don’t want to be without this plugin when Google crawls your site!
- Well that’s for YOU to decide! – It can be whatever plugin you like. There has to be hundreds of them going around and I bet I’ve missed half of them. Are you able to fill me and my readers in with another part of the jigsaw? Well, I hope so! Just leave a comment below, and I’ll sum them all up in a new post later on next week!
That rounds up the main plugins for today. I happen to use all 4 of them on this blog, and am have no problems! So go ahead and install some yourself!
And as always, I’m looking forward to what you’ve got to add! We’re all here to help eachother!…
It is amazing just how many features you can add to a blog and most at the reasonable price of $0. I like the sound of the “related posts” plug-in.
It is advertised as a WPv2.3 plug-in yet you say that you use it so it must be fine with WPv2.5
I have put the Google site map plug-in on a number of sites and have found it to be very effective.
Thanks for the tips.
Geoff
Glad you liked the post Geoff! And yeah, I’ve had no problems with the ‘related posts’ plugin after switching to WP 2.5!
Thanks
Mark
Hey Mark…
Thought I better come visit from SSP and make a comment on your site
Just a quick note about plugins… A lot of people go overboard with loading all sorts of plugins into their WordPress install… However, sometimes you DON’T need a plugin to achieve the same result.
For example, with Adsense – why not simply hard code the Google Adsense code directly into the sidebar or page/post template where you want it? It makes better sense to do it that way than to cause php to make 1, 2 or even 3 extra calls to a plugin to achieve the same result. And it reduces the load on your server and speeds up the loading of your page a little.
Just something to think about before loading up yet another plugin…
However, I would really recommend that you install Subscribe To Comments which allows people who do comment to be notified about any new comments added to that post.
Cheers
Stephen Spry
Thanks for those usefull tips Stephen, and your absolutely right whith what you say. Unless you really don’t know what your doing with regards to ‘hard-coding’ then yes, maybe go with a plugin or use the widgets area for the sidebar.
I’ll take a look at that plugin, and see about implementing it here! Thanks once again…
Thanks
Mark