WordPress 6 - MickMel

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I’ve had a number of people ask which WordPress plug-ins I use on my blogs. Not every blog uses the exact same set of plug-ins, but they’re all pretty similar. If I find a plug-in that I like, I tend to use it on most of my sites. Here is what I have running on this one:

Akismet — It comes with WordPress. Use it. Love it.

All in One SEO Pack — It has some nice features to help with the SEO of the blog.

Enhanced WP-ContactForm — An easy way to build the form on the contact page.

Fancy Zoom — Adds a nice effect to embedded images. Click the WordPress logo at the top of this post to see what I mean.

FeedBurner FeedSmith — I use FeedBurner to handle all of my RSS feeds, and this plug-in redirects your normal feed over to your FeedBurner feed so that there is no confusion.

Google XML Sitemaps — Creates a sitemap of your posts and pages, which can then be uploaded to the various webmaster tools.

Highlight Author Comments — If I leave a comment to one of my own posts, it shows up in yellow to help it stand out from the others and show that it’s more of an official reply.

Show Top Commentators — The users with the most comments show up in the sidebar, along with a link to their site. This can be a good way to attract more comments.

Sociable — Adds popular social bookmarking links to the end of each post.

Subscribe to Comments — This adds “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” below the comments on each post. I hate when a site doesn’t have that, and it usually reduces the chances of me leaving a comment there.

Twitter Tools — A variety of tools to link the blog to my twitter account (follow me and I’ll follow you).

WordPress.com Stats — I use Google Analytics as well, but this plug-in gives me a different look at the stats and they’re presented very well.

That’s about it. I’m always on the lookout for other useful plug-ins, so what do you use?

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With all of the talk about Movable Type’s new licensing scheme, there’s been a lot of talk about other blogging options. After reading a lengthy thread on SlashDot, I decided to give WordPress a try. The main reasons for that was because it was rather highly recommended by a number of people, and it’s in PHP. Being in PHP, it’ll be easier for me to apply hacks and upgrades to the system.

I’ve already installed two hacks (sort of combined into one) that help a great deal. It’s taken a bit of work to get them to play together nicely. I took the WYSI-WordPress hack (which makes the blog editing tool a WYSIWYG editor – instead of using bold and italic “tags”, I can just make things bold and italic, like in MS Word). However, I’ve used htmlArea before (which is what powers that hack), and I know it has a cool image upload hack itself. So, I downloaded the ImageManager hack for htmlArea and spent about an hour trying to get those to work together. Now I can upload (and edit) images while typing a post and they show up right along with the text. It’s great!

Now that I’ve got it all (well, mostly) worked out on my site, I’ll likely move Lee Ann over to it shortly. It should make life better for her as well. We’ll see…

WordPress Plug-ins that I use

I’ve changed to WordPress – and I love it!