Plugins
I’m always a bit wary of plugins – something about an independently designed application top work on someone else’s platform makes me nervous about things like universality and accessibility. That said, I decided to try out some WordPress plugins that are (hopefully) relatively innocuous.
New Plugins
All in One SEO Pack (Link)
I have a pretty bad habit of not optimizing my sites, professional and personal, for Search Engines. This doesn’t usually present a problem as I’ve been fortunate to have large enough professional projects that end up near the top of search engine anyway, and I don’t really care if anyone sees my personal sites. This DOES present a problem by way of it just being stupid NOT to optimize one’s site to search engines, so here we are.
In general, it’s a pretty simple plugin. It gives you a WYSIWYG way to add metadata to your page (which is easily accomplished by editing your page’s head section), and also sends information about individual posts (titles, categories, etc.) to the individual post’s head section. The latter part I really appreciate since I’ve implemented an identical system in the past, and it really does add a nice level of convenience.
One relatively annoying function is the Title Renaming option. I’ve turned it off (it’s on by default) – and I’m not going to bother figuring out what it actually does – but when on, it renames the titles of your posts to better conform to SEO. I don’t want a robot naming my posts, reduction in traffic or no.
I think I’ll end up using this for a while. Unless it ends up doing something I don’t like, I don’t see why I’d get rid of it since it makes my life easier, and my site easier to find.
Update: Uberdose was kind enough to leave a comment telling me what the Title Renaming does. I was wrong – it’s neither annoying, nor robotic.
That?s pretty simple. Your page title are your most precious thing on-page as far as search engines are concerned. The title of this post is ?Matthew Gruman >> Blog Archive >> Plugins?. Do you really want to rank well for ?blog archive?? I don?t think so. Just checking the box will rewrite it to ?Plugins | Matthew Gruman?, so the heart of your post comes out first. If you now give the post a title like ?wordpress plugins? you have a phrase you might want to rank for.
That’s pretty useful stuff – I’d never noticed that the titles of individual posts contained “Blog Archive”. I’ve gone ahead and edited the head information on my page manually (Stubborn? Me?), but this is definitely a very useful thing for people who don’t know how to do that. If/when I start actively promoting this site, I will definitely use the plugin to its full extent or replicate its functionality myself. Thanks, Uberdose!
WordPress.com Stats (Link)
This is just a statistics program – it essentially pimps out the stats already included on the Wrodpress Dashboard. I haven’t been running it long enough to actually collect stats, but I can’t see getting rid of something that gives me greater control over my work. A nice touch is that it doesn’t count administrator visits to the page – I do A LOT of page refreshing when working on applications so it’ll be nice to get rid of those traffic spikes on development days.
WP AJAX Edit Comments (Link)
I have to assume that this has the least chance of lasting more than a week. All it does is add some AJAX to the comments section so things can be done without page reloads. The one thing I really like is that it gives the user power over editing their own comments in case they make spelling mistakes, or sound like an idiot and want to make changes.
AJAX always makes me nervous. It can be pretty bad when it comes to accessibility, and the script used in this plugin isn’t making me too happy. When javascript is disabled, it simply disables the entire script – to the point where it removes the user’s ability to edit their post. Since editing isn’t available without the plugin, I’m not removing any functionality with this plugin, but I’d rather see some more responsible DOM techniques being used.
Already-used Plugins
Akismet (Link)
This comes included with the latest WordPress install and works very well. It compares any comments made to your blog against a database of known spammers/spam words and acts accordingly – non-spam is posted, spam is sent to moderation for human approval.
Audio Player (Link)
Customizable, embeddable mp3 player. Uses Flash and looks very slick.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
pb-embedFlash (Link)
This allows me to embed Flash content (i.e. all the Vimeo videos) with regular (X)HTML – it works great.
runPHP (Link)
The Mac Daddy of all the plugins I use – it lets me run PHP code on this page. That’s my main programming language, and I’m a bit useless without it. Using this plugin makes my To Do List, and the Vimeo Midgets on the upper right hand side, possible.
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Comments
> and I?m not going to bother figuring out what it actually does
That’s pretty simple. Your page title are your most precious thing on-page as far as search engines are concerned. The title of this post is “Matthew Gruman >> Blog Archive >> Plugins”. Do you really want to rank well for “blog archive”? I don’t think so. Just checking the box will rewrite it to “Plugins | Matthew Gruman”, so the heart of your post comes out first. If you now give the post a title like “wordpress plugins” you have a phrase you might want to rank for.
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