Monthly Archives: January 2006

11 Essential WordPress Plugins

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WordPress is a great tool for blogging — it’s easy to setup, the interface makes it easy to use, and there are tons of plugins you can download to add new features. Unfortunately when you’re just getting started with WordPress, the sheer number of plugins can make it hard to know which ones to start with.

After more than a little trial and error and a lot of looking at discussions of other people’s favourite plugins, I’ve found 11 that seem to stand above the rest. Here are my suggestions for the 11 plugins you should consider adding to your blog.

# “Adsense-Deluxe”:http://www.acmetech.com/blog/adsense-deluxe/
Place Google AdSense ads in your posts, or as part of your template. This plugin ensures you do not have more than 3 ads displayed at once — part of Google’s terms of use.
# “del.icio.us – Bookmark this!”:http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/delicious-bookmark-this-wordpress-plugin
This plugin lets you easily add a “Bookmark this page on del.icio.us” link to your blog or individual articles. Del.icio.us is a personal favourite, and a great way to save, organize and _find_ new links.
# “Digg This”:http://www.aviransplace.com/index.php/digg-this-wordpress-plugin/
Detects if one of your articles has been linked on digg.com and adds a link to the entry. This might not be as useful for blogs that are unlikely to ever be bookmarked there — but for me it’s a nice find.
# “Google Sitemaps”:http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final
This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. Having a Google sitemap can help keep your site as up-to-date in Google’s indexes as possible.
# “Feedburner Feed Replacement”:http://www.orderedlist.com/articles/wordpress_feedburner_plugin/
Forwards all feed traffic to “Feedburner.com”:http://www.feedburner.com so you can make use of their various advanced features for feed presentation and subscriber analysis.
# “Gravatar”:http://www.gravatar.com/implement.php#section_2_2
Show the custom icons associated with the email addresses of users commenting on your entries. This is a great service more people should sign up for.
# “Head META Description”:http://guff.szub.net/head-meta-description/
Some search engines display the Description meta data for a page in search results. Since WordPress normally uses the same meta data for all the pages on your site, this is a problem. This plugin builds a dynamic Description meta tag for each entriy based on the page content itself.
# “Optimal Title”:http://elasticdog.com/2004/09/optimal-title/
Moves the position of the ‘separator’ to after the title rather than before, letting you put the title of your post before your blogs name in the _title_ tag for an entry.
# “Related Posts”:http://www.w-a-s-a-b-i.com/
Displays a list of related entries based on keyword matches. This is a good way to encourage visitors to read more of the content on your blog.
# “WP-Amazon”:http://manalang.com/wp-amazon
WP-Amazon adds the ability to search and include items from Amazon to your entries. Great if you’re an Amazon affiliate, but also a good way to add some extra images to your blog entries.
# “WP-ContactForm”:http://ryanduff.net/projects/wp-contactform/
This plugin creates a drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post.

Cat Can Cook . Com

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This past weekend I helped Catherine setup her new blog at CatCanCook.Com. She’s planning on writing about cooking, crafts, creative projects, and the trials and triumphs of motherhood.

Yesterday she posted her Awesome Banana Muffin Recipe which is both very easy and very delicious. While I might have thought to register StuartCan’tCook.com — this is a recipe even I could follow, and they really are awesome. Catherine is going to be posting a lot of different recipes, so I’m sure there will be ones for all levels of cooking ability.

If you’re looking for recipes, craft ideas, or resources for parenting, be sure to add Catherine’s Blog to your bookmarks.

New Firefox Extension: X-Ray

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One of my “New Year’s resolutions”:http://www.designmeme.com/2005/12/30/new-years-resolutions-for-2006/ was to create an “interesting script, plugin, extension, or widget.” I didn’t think I’d write a Firefox Extension only six days into 2006, but after writing about using the CSS :before and :after pseudo elements to create “CSS Curly Quotes”:http://www.designmeme.com/articles/csscurlyquotes/, it got me thinking about other uses for that technique. I thought that wrapping the elements on a page with the actual tags from the sourcecode might be a good tool for learning and debugging, but wasn’t sure how to go about creating an extension. Fortunately, I found “a great tutorial at roachfiend.com”:http://roachfiend.com/archives/2004/12/08/how-to-create-firefox-extensions/ and with a little trial and error, I’ve finished my first extension.

The “X-Ray Firefox Extension”:http://www.designmeme.com/xray/ let’s you see the tags on a page without viewing the sourcecode.

Install Extension Install X-Ray Extension for Firefox

One installed the X-Ray command is available by right-clicking as well as in the Tools menu. When applied to a page it can help you see how the document was constructed without having to go back and forth between the sourcecode and the page in your browser. Is that list made of li dd or p elements? Is that an h3 tag or just some bolded text? X-Ray shows you what’s beneath the surface of the page.

While I create webpages all the time, there’s something about writing a piece of code you have to _install_ that’s very satisfying. Even better was finding that it was actually something I’d find helpful myself.

For version 0.5 the current list of supported tags is: h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, ol, ul, li, dt, dd, font, div, span, blockquote, pre, a, b, i, strong, em. If some other people find this extension useful, I’ll probably add support for more tags, and possibly experiment with adding some other enhancements as well.

Update

By request from the nice folk at digg.com here’s a screenshot of the extension in use:

Screenshot of X-Ray Firefox Extension in use

Donations to The X-Ray Tip Jar are greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your support!

New Tutorial: CSS Curly Quotes

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It’s been a while since I posted a CSS tutorial here, so this feels like a good way to be starting the New Year.

Simon Collison recently explained how to create Swooshy Curly Quotes Without Images using CSS. It’s a nice technique that works cross-browser, but you have to add span tags to your markup for it to work.

I’ve written a short article outlining an alternate method for creating CSS Curly Quotes that requires no changes to your markup, and works in modern CSS2 compatible browsers like Firefox. Simon’s technique is cross browser, while my approach gives your cleaner markup. I can think of reasons to use both.

Read the article