Huzzer » WP Plugins

10 WordPress Plugins That Can Make a Huge Difference to Your Blog

huzzer — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 03:23:09 +0000

WordPress is the most popular blogging software in the world because of its open source capabilities. Anyone can program a plugin for WordPress, so there are thousands of options out there for any budding blogger. The list has been culled, and here are ten of the best WordPress plugins that can make a huge difference to your blog.

1. SEO Smart Links

This is a great solution to interlink your blog posts, getting the most out of your SEO. SEO Smart Links will automatically take the keywords and phrases on your blog and link them to the relevant categories and tags. Increasing the number of links within your blog has a chance to boost your page ranking and page views.

2. Subscribe to Comments

Keep your readers informed with a link to subscribe to comments on your posts. Readers are notified by email about further entries to a post, enticing them to return to your page and respond to the response. Commenters have plenty of options available to them: they can block the notifications, unsubscribe to posts, and even change the email address to which they are notified.

3. Top Commentators Widget

Top Commentators creates a widget in your sidebar to show who is commenting the most on your blog. There are options and customizations for this plugin that make it even easier to use.

4. Mingle WordPress

Mingle WordPress changes your WordPress blog into a social water water cooler. The plugin allows for Profile Pages, Friending, Friend Activity Pages and a Full Member Directory. Instead of having ‘just a blog,’ you can develop a full blown community with this plugin.

5. Headspace 2 SEO

With Headspace 2 SEO, you can integrate Google Analytics, Feedburner Stats and most of the other popular tracking applications into your WordPress blog. You can also apply SEO techniques to the configuration of meta data for your site on posts, pages and author pages.

6. Akismet

Akismet captures spam and allows you to review it in the ‘Comments’ area of your administration screen. This plugin is one of the best spam fighters that WordPress has to offer, capturing at least 90% of the spam that comes to your blog. The curious can get statistics on how many spammers have been thwarted.

7. Broken Link Checker

Broken links are a thing of the past with Broken Link Checker. This plugin will immediately scan posts that are made, reviewing them for missing links. Any broken links that are found go to your dashboard for correction or removal. Editing or unlinking of the links can be directly accomplished through the plugin’s page, eliminating the need for manual link editing.

8. Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps will automatically generate a sitemap of your blog for Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask to crawl. The plugin will automatically ping the search engines when you change your content, allowing the crawlers to see what you have to offer.

9. Polldaddy

Do you want to know what your readers think about the news? With Polldaddy, you can create polls and surveys for your readers to keep them engaged. Polldaddy allows ratings on your blog so that your readers can rate your content and elevate your thoughts to the stars. This plugin also allows you to let others see what the results of the poll are.

10. NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery lets you create sortable photo albums for any images that you want on your WordPress blog. You can edit your pictures using JavaScript Effect, creating popular effects like Lightbox, Highslide or Thickbox. Plenty of features are offered for this plugin and is definitely worth installing, especially if you plan on building a portfolio.

WordPress is a powerful blogging tool that allows you to transmit your thoughts to the world. Enhancing your blog with some great plugins can change the readers’ experience from being merely okay to absolutely awesome.

James Adams is a full time staff writer at Cartridge Save where he writes about and reviews items such as HP 351 ink.

6 Counter Button Plugins You Should Have in WordPress Blog

Admin — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:38:11 +0000

It can be pretty boring if we only put static social networking buttons. Your blog readers will get more excited to help you to promote your blog post if they can see that there are a lot of people have help you to promote your blog post.

Plus, for me personally, I prefer to click on a counter button as compared those static button.

So, for this post, I would like to share counter buttons that you can put in your blog post and brag to others about the numbers of people that you have get to help you promote your blog post.

TweetMeme

With more and more people join Twitter and start to get the feel of what Twitter is all about, you should have the TweetMeme button in your blog post. Let others to help you to promote your blog post.

For me,this the easiest way to promote a blog post for you and for those who want to help you.

Download the plugin

Facebook Share

I am sure that those who read your blog and who are interested with your article will have Facebook account. Why don’t you take the chance and make full use of it.

With this button, you can know how many times others have share your blog post in the Facebook. This WordPress plugin is superior than other plugins that do the same thing and even the official share button.

It is because it has Analytics page in your WordPress admin. In the page, it will give you the stats for share counts, like counts, comment counts and click counts.

Cool right?

Download the plugin

Digg Digg

With this plugin, it will help you to have various type of counter for first few websites which being set up for sole purpose of sharing news and blog post such as Digg, Reddit, Yahoo Buzz and Delicious.

With this plugin, the process of having counter buttons of those sites will be easier and faster.

Download the plugin

I Like This

The ‘like’ feature in Facebook is pretty sleek right? What do you think if that kind of feature is in your blog post?

With this plugin,you will able to put such feature in your blog post for your readers to click if they love your post. I am sure everybody will be get excited with just us when we first found out about the ‘like’ feature in Facebook.

Download the plugin

Thank You Counter

The way how this plugin works is almost the same with ‘I Like This’ plugin. However, besides using ‘Thank You’ instead of ‘Like’ , the difference is this plugin offers more flexibility.

You can change the ‘Thank You’ caption to other words such ‘I Live You’, change the font and color of the caption and change default button with your own image which you should. The default button design is terribly ugly, unfortunately.

Download the plugin

Reactions Button

You are confident with the quality of your article and would love to get criticism about your blog post? If the answer is yes, you definitely want to get this plugin for your WordPress blog.

With this plugin, your readers can easily give feedback about your blog post without have to go through the hassle of leaving comments.

With this this plugin, it will be simple, straightforward for your readers to leave their feedback and for you to have the feedback and know what kind of feelings that you readers have with your blog post.

Download the plugin

Do you have any suggestion?

Do you know any other counter button plugin that I have missed? Feel free to share it in the comment section. And if you have used any of the above counter buttons, what do you think about? Is there any better option that WordPress bloggers can use?

Hope to hear from you soon!

WpVote – Digg Site for WordPress Fanatics

Admin — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 07:03:05 +0000

For most of us, it is for sure that we have used a lot of news aggregation website out there to promote our blog post as it can bring massive incoming traffics. Some of the sites are focusing on general audience while some of them are strictly focusing on smaller market and in more specific area.

The problem is…

The problem that most of WordPress bloggers are facing are when they submit their blog post especially the beginners is the post have to compete for vote with other post from websites that have a really huge follower and fans that will push the votes for post from those websites up and into the front page.

In the end, only the same websites will be appear in the front page and get massive votes while blogs that are pretty new and have less followers will still get less attention and votes although the post that have submitted can have better quality than the popular sites.

WpVote – Digg Alternative for WordPress bloggers

However, realizing that there is huge demand for news aggregation site that can cater WordPress bloggers, Jean-Baptiste Jung from WPRecipes.com has developed a news aggregation site,WpVote that is strictly for WordPress related articles. Initially, this site gained a lot of attention and however, after a few months, the buzz started to fade.

It is because previously, WpVote was using Pligg, a CMS that help to develop site that is similar to Digg. This CMS wasn’t easy to modify and had some annoying bugs which makes WpVote harder to maintain. To make things worse, the site was constantly being spammed.

However, a new version of WpVote has just being launched under a new owner, Ben Gillbanks who bought WpVote from the previous owner in December 2009.

Why you should use WpVote?

WordPress bloggers should use the WpVote as it can provide the exposure that your blog post should get for the quality which it has as this site is strictly about WordPress. So, there will be less ‘noise’ in the site which can affect the attention of any visitors who visits WpVote. They will know what to expect from WpVote.

Here are few details on how WpVote works and the rules which you should.

How it works

WpVote works just like any other social bookmarking site:

User creates her free account
User submit stories about WordPress
If other users enjoy the story, they vote for it
If the story has 5 votes or more, it is promoted to the homepage as a featured article

Rules

Only stories related to WordPress can be published on WpVote
No affiliate links
No spam.
Only stories in ENGLISH are allowed.

If you break theses rules, your story and your account will be deleted.

Unfortunately, it does not come with button which we can embed into our blog post which I think a crucial element for the success of news aggregation site. Besides it makes it easy for bloggers to promote their posts, it can also be a marketing tool for WpVote.

Have you used it?

Have you use WpVote? What do you think about it and how well your post performs in WpVote? It would be great to know more about WpVote and your opinions are definitely much needed.

CU3ER – Free Flash 3D Image Slider for WordPress blog

Admin — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:33:35 +0000

There are a lot of WordPress plugins that let us put image slider into our WordPress blog especially if we are using magazine WordPress theme. For most of the time, those plugins will be used to highlight our blog posts in the feature section of our WordPress themes.

Need 3d slider for WordPress blog?

Recently, a new site called CU3Er has just launched a new tool for any kind of website including WordPress blog. With this tool, instead of just having simple image slider in our WordPress blog, you can now make your image slider to be more gorgeous with the 3D element with the help of CU3ER.

To give you rough idea how cool is this tool, you can check out 3D flash image slider the website of my latest project – Kissing Crust besides the CU3ER website.

Below are the screenshots from the main page of CU3Er website:

What kind of effect the CU3ER can offer?

Instead of just simply 3D effect, we can have various effects of 3D, slides, transitions and timing. This flexibility that CU3ER gives to its users really has made it among the front runner of the provider of image slider tool.

If you want to know more about what CU3Er can offer for your WordPress blog, list below may impress you.

3D Image Transitions:

real 3D Transitions

flat & phong shading

horizontal or vertical cubing

transition direction – left, right, up, down

duration & delay

z-multiplier

cube color

automatic forward-backward transition direction manager

to override global settings for each transition …

Set unique UI within seconds with:

rounded corner(s) for navigation & description box

set coordinates, dimensions, orientation, color & alpha information

custom twining for all UI elements

10 navigation symbols to choose from

linear & pie customizable templates for preloader & slideshow indicator

use your favorite font

user defined text properties – size, color, align, margin, leading & letter spacing adjustments

unlimited combinations & possibilities

Choose what to play with:

auto play

description box

debug mode – monitor framerate & memory usage

any number .jpg, .png or .gif images

3D transitions – global and/or custom for each slide

tweening

linking

embedded fonts

Want to know more about CU3ER?

CU3ER looks cool right? In case you are interested of having CU3ER in your WordPress blog and want to know more about it, you may find below links handy.

Main Web Site | About| Overview

What is your opinion?

What do you think about CU3ER? Does it look great and cool? Do you think it will go far and gain a lot of attention from theme developers especially, to incorporate CU3ER in their future WordPress themes?

I think it will. How about you?

simpleCart(js) 2.0 – Simple Free Online Store WordPress Theme

Admin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:57:15 +0000

Sometimes, it is a huge waste for those who are investing so much in online store system but do not have much items to be sold to match the cost that they have incurred. At the end, most of them will incur losses

The alternative for expensive online store system

However, in recent months, communities around WordPress especially the developers has start to focus their attention in creating WordPress themes to ‘convert’ a simple blogging platform to an online store software which can be offered at cheaper price.

Although before this there are few online store WordPress themes have been developed, the design and structure has started to look similar with the expensive online store system for the past few months back.

simpleCart (js) – One page online store WordPress theme

simpleCart (js) 2.0 is a very light one page online store WordPress theme. It is simple javascript shopping cart in under 20kb that you can setup in minutes. What you need is just simple html and programming knowledge.

It comes with shopping cart, GoogleCheckout along with Paypal, easy currency settings, tax, shipping, and a new method for adding items to your cart that requires no javascript, and allows for different inputs and options.

Here are few screenshots of the free online store WordPress theme.

Personally, I think this theme definitely suitable for those who are planning to bring their small and medium size business online as the cost (plus cost of failure) is definitely low as the only cost that they will incur is web hosting.

However, this theme will only be effective tool if the products that are going to be put into this online store are limited as it would be frustrating for the customers if they have to keep scrolling the mouse and eyes to view one by one the products that we are selling.

For me, the maximum number of products should be only 12.

What do you think?

What do you think about this free online store WordPress theme? What is the maximum number of products should be in the page?

Feel free to share your opinions and thoughts. It is great to have it over here.

WordPress Freelancer: Get Hourly Rate Using FreelanceSwitch Calculator

Admin — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 05:09:37 +0000

Rather just being only WordPress blogger, some of us have gone further up by becoming freelancer after gathering enough skills and knowledge on the topic that they are blogging about.

They are also WordPress bloggers who take WordPress project as they are have familiar enough with WordPress and believe that they have enough knowledge to take up simple WordPress project at early stage.

What is the best pricing approach?

However, it is crucial for us to know what is the hourly rate that we should charge on any project that we are going to take. It is because we must balance up between profits that we decide to earn and the customer’s bargaining power as there are probably a lot of people out there that offers same service at cheaper price.

We should think what is the reason customer will choose us as compared to others and priced our service accordingly.

Freelance Swith Calculator – Simple tool for freelancer

FreelanceSwitch is a site that is specifically being set up for freelancers which has blog, forum, job board and freelancing resources. Among the freelancing sources that it has is tool that can give freelancer rough estimate on hourly rate that freelancer should charge.

The tool is called FreelanceSwitch Hourly Rate Calculator.

This is the quote from the tool page:

We have developed this hourly rate calculator to give you a guide based on your costs, number of billable hours and desired profit. It is a simple tool for you to play with.

The way how it calculates the hourly rate is consisted of four elements which is business cost, personal cost, number of hours we can actually bill and amount of profit we would like to have.

What you should know about this tool is you will only you the benchmark i.e. rough idea on hourly rate that you should charge your client. The rate should be adjusted accordingly depends on market demand and complexity of the project for example.

Personally I think this is a great tool as rather just take only business cost into account, it also takes into consideration the personal cost that we incur which we should considered before taken any freelanced project. I also love for the fact that it will give us two final hourly rate figures which are ideal hourly rate and hourly rate to breakeven i.e. cost equal to revenue.

Few screenshots of the tool:

What do you think?

Have you used this tool before? What d you think about it? Does it help you to get rough idea on the hourly rate that you charge your client? I am eager to know more about it.

Cheers!

Analyse WordPress Blog’s Traffic Further With Clicks Heat Map

Admin — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 20:43:28 +0000

By having and just simply looking at our WordPress blog’s traffic statistics will not bring any value to us. The things after having and looking at the statistics are the one that are important. If not, it is simply a waste of our time which we can use for better purposes.

Where Are Your Traffics Heading?

Rather just knowing from where your visitors come from and to where there heading to, it is crucial to know what area of your WordPress blog that most of traffics are attracted to. By knowing this, you can restructure your blog so that the area that has low exposure can get enough exposure that it deserves.

This can be done by installing script that will inform you in graphics which area has more traffic as compared to others. The area that has more traffic will be in red as it will be blue if it has low traffics.

What are the tools that you can use?

There are two tools that you can use for your WordPress blog – free and paid tools.

For the free clicks heat map tool, you can use ClickHeat. This tool is an open source tool and launched under GPL licence.

With ClickHeat, there is option that you can choose from that let you view the clicks heat map base on your needs and interests.

However, if you want better tools that have more features and better interface, you can give a try on Crazy Egg.

Due to the fact that it provides more advanced features, Crazy Egg will charge you on monthly basis. The cheapest plan is at $9/month that entitle you to track up to 10000 visits per month. The rate will get higher base on the visits that you get for you WordPress blog.

Which one suits you?

Personally, I think the free tool is good enough for WordPress bloggers who so not heavily monetize their blog. It is because it still can give you the rough image on the area that most of your traffics focus on.

However, if you have WordPress blog that mainly focus on selling products and want to convert most of your leads to customers, Crazy Egg is a great tool and the money spent will definitely give positive returns.

What do you think?

What do you think? Will clicks heat map help us to improve our WordPress blog? It would be great if you can share your thoughts and experience if you have tried one of these tools.

Cheers!

Appreciate Your Commentators With Comment Redirect

Admin — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 23:46:06 +0000

Comment is definitely an important element that will determine success of WordPress blog. Interactions between blog authors and readers are essential as this is what blog is all about. If not, it will simply a normal website.

Appreciate your commentators

Without our commentators, we will definitely feel that the time we have spent on our WordPress blog is a waste and start to feel demotivate to keep blogging. Therefore, it would be great idea to at least say ‘Thank You’ to our commentators after they left their comments for our WordPress blog post.

By saying ‘Thank You’, I am sure that we will not lose anything but will get more loyal readers and followers. It is because if I’m the commentators, I will definitely feel happy and being appreciated by the blog authors for the comment that I have left if the author says ‘Thank You’ to me.

Comment Redirect is the answer

There is plugin that let you to redirect your commentators after they hit the “Submit” button in the comment section. With this plugin, you can redirect your commentators to any page of your choice.

With this feature, you can use the plugin to redirect your commentators to your own ‘Thank You’ page. Therefore, rather losing them right after they leave the comments, you can use the “Thank You” page to show your appreciation to them and use the chance to convert them from one time visitors to loyal blog readers.

Creativity is the key

Besides thanking them, you can also use the “Thank You” page to promote other posts by categorizing them under “Most Popular Post”, “Related Post” or “Most Recent Post”. With this, you can ensure them to stick longer and give exposure to other blog post especially the good one.

For me, this method will work well and better as compared to the plugin that will send “Thank You” email to your commentators as through this method, you can show your appreciation straight away and use it as a tool to retain and let the commentators enjoy your WordPress longer.

What you should do now?

If you are interested with this plugin, you may find below links to be handy:

Details | Download

After you have downloaded and activated the plugin, you have to its setting page. From there, you can select the redirect page you want to use from the list of pages that you have created before. Then, you are good to go.

What do you think?

Appreciating your commentators is definitely a good way to convert one time visitors to loyal blog readers. So, what do you think about this plugin? Will it works great for our WordPress blog?

And have you used it before? It would be great if you can share your experience with us.

Cheers!

13 Must-Have Twitter Plugins and Tools for WordPress Blogs

Admin — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 15:29:55 +0000

Alongside Facebook, Twitter has become increasingly and ridiculously popular and gains a lot of users. This is definitely good news for us as WordPress bloggers as we do not have to rely only Google to gain massive incoming traffics.

Social networking sites V Google?

We can now rely more on social networking sites as we can easily gather friends and fans that have same interest and would love to keep supporting us. Rather just reading our blog post, I am definitely sure that they would not mind to help us to promote our post if the post deserves to be shared with others.

Through this, we can diversify our source of traffics and reduce the risk that we have to face by relying too much on Google for example to be too focussed on SEO and improving pagerank at the expense of, for example the quality of our WordPress blog contents.

Here are your bullets…

Realising the importance of Twitter in the success of WordPress blog, I would love to share must-have Twitter Plugins and Tools for WordPress blog.

With these tool and plugins, hopefully they will help you to effectively integrate Twitter with your WordPress blog, improve your interactions with your fans and followers and make use at the fullest the potential that Twitter has for your WordPress blog.

Twitter Plugins

Tweetmeme

Tweetmeme is a digg-like site which let you to share your blog post and for others to retweet it. The site will record how many ‘digg’ your blog post get.

Tweetmeme also provides you plugin that let you to place retweet button i.e. Tweetmeme in your WordPress blog.

Tweetable Twitter

Tweetable Twitter let you to update and manage your Twitter profile from your WordPress blog’s dashboard. Rather tjust let you to only tweet your latest blog post and update your Twitter, you can also display your latest tweets and number of followers in the sidebar.

TwitterLink Comments

With this plugin, it let you to add another extra field in your comment form for the commentators to enter in their Twitter ID. This plugin is actually an improved version of WP Twitip ID plus the WordPress plugin no longer supported by its developer.

TweetBacks

Sometimes interactions related to our blog post do not only happen in our comment section. It can be also happened in Twitter. Therefore, this plugin will help you to bring the interactions in Twitter right back to your comment section as it brings tweets about your post as comments.

TweetStats

This plugin has been developed to compliment the TweetBacks plugin. With this plugin, it will add two new widgets to your WordPress blog – “Most Tweeted Post” and “Recently Tweeted Post”.

However, to let this plugin works, you have to install the TweetBacks plugin first.

@ Reply

This plugin let you to add Twitter-like reply icon for your readers to reply on any comments on your comments section. Their replied comments will then, have @user id – exactly the same with Twitter.

Twitter Avatars in Comments

This plugin integrates Twitter avatars in the comment section of your WordPress blog. Rather just only use Gravatar, this plugin let your commentators to use their Twitter profile picture in the comment section.

This plugin will definitely help you to promote your readers involvement in Twitter with you.

Twitter Tools

Friend or Follow

This tool let you to know who are the persons that you have followed but not following back and user that have followed you but you are not following back. You can also check out the growth of Twitter users and couples of interesting statistics.

WeFollow

With this Twitter tool, it can help you to find others in Twitter within your niche and industry as WeFollow groups out Twitter users into different categories base on their interests. The informations about the interest are being gathered during registration – therefore the categorization can be considered accurate.

Twitterless

Twitterless tells you who stops following you and graphs your follower history over time, making this info available in a variety of useful views. You can also filter your followers by keywords in their description, sort them by a variety of attributes, and search for terms in their tweet history.

Qwitter

With Qwitter, it will inform you if there are Twitter users that have stopped following you. With this tool, you can then look to the matter in depth especially the reason why they have stopped follow you.

Nearby Tweets

Nearby Tweets let you keep up to date with the latest tweets that have been sent by Twitter users around your area by integrating Google Maps and Twitter.

Therefore, rather just focussing on online networking, you can get more serious in building your network through the conventional networking such as through meet up with Nearby Tweets’ help.

Twitoria

Sometimes, Twitter users that we are following not exactly a Twitter user as after using after a while, couple of users will abandon their account and will hardly use Twitter. Therefore, to keep us update with the actual status of our friends, Twitoria can help us to check who are the Twitter users have never tweeted or hardly tweeted.

Then, we can take necessary action from there.

How about you?

Do you have any WordPress Twitter plugins or tools that you would like to add? In case you have tried any of the plugins and tools that I have mentioned above, it would be great you can share your experience and opinions.

And you can keep up to date with what is going on with Huzzer Magazine through Twitter. Follow Us.