Initially I chose WordPress as a bloging platform as I found it to be a lot more polished for numerous purposes and allowed a precise fine tuning with various free plugins and themes. Perfect thing for a “for fun blogging“.

So for a while I wanted to share what kind of stuff I use and for what purposes. I listed them in chronological order as I was installing them.

First wave

So here are plugins I installed in first weeks.

AVH Extended Categories Widgets

I from the beginning wanted to have RSS feed icons to the right of the categories. for that purpose I installed this plugin/widget and it provided even more interesting options. Hiding some categories, showing post number in categories and sorting categories by post count. I found those all useful and informative :) Check page for other features.

FeedBurner FeedSmith

This one is a more rare plugin, back then did not found anything else that worked good. This one is not as good as I would like aether sadly but best I could find. What it does is that it allows you to redirect some of the RSS feeds your blog has to FeedBurner. FeedBurner allows you do reformat your RSS feed, get stats on its usage and subscribed users, add various features like sharing or even advertisements if you want to.

What FeedSmith allows you is to specify for each RSS a FeedBurner RSS redirect link. After that any link to that RSS on your site will be redirected to FeedBurner so users will not be able to register to your original RSS in any way. Seems to work for me.

Why I do not like it? Well reason is that adding each new category I need to go back and forth registering new category, taking its RSS feed, go to FeedBurner and register and configure it there, get new FeedBurner url and go back to FeedSmith to add it… Seems like a too complex thing. Sad FeedBurner does not have its official pluging for WordPress that would allow automatically register any feed to FeedBurner. For example there is possibility in WordPress to have a RSS feed of say 3 combined categories. Or say 4 combined tags. Now say with 10 categories or tags you would have n*(n-1)/2 or 45 feed variations. Now imagine if for big blog with hundreds of tags I would like to specifically subscribe to some 3-4 tags. And now imagine that with each new category or tag you would need to register n-1 new feeds by hand lol :) I would rally like some super efficient FeedBurner+WordPress solution to allow visitors to subscribe to portions of the site they like efficiently trough tags and categories, while blog owners can create new tags and categories and register them with FeedBurner efficiently and FeedBurner providing stats on how many users prefer what subsections of the site :) It is not so important for me as I have small blog that does not update much and does not have such a wide topics list + I decided because of those limitations not to use tags.  But still it would have been a killer combo :)

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved

Here is another thing I wanted from the start. Possibility to post well formatted programming code. My main languages of interests were PHP, AS3, HTML, JS, C# and C++ probably too. And it has in some form all of them + more. Before it had cool features like clipboard/print/view source icons but after recent update they switched to simpler version where copying from text works better(before lines numbers were copied too) and double click selects all. No more view source and print that looked cool… But now they have less sense so what ever.

Advanced RSS

This plugin is one of those I did not patriotically wanted or even known about but when discovered liked pretty much. What it allows is to pull RSS feeds in well formatted way from some sites. For me this was about DeviantArt related feed as I do have a profile there with various works. So to the right you can see my last 3 works on DA :)

And that was it for the first plugin wave :)

Second wave

Few months ago something weird started to happen with my trackbacks and pingbacks. Turned out to be a form of spam I was not anticipating. Before I was using CAPTCHA to stop bots spam in comments. But that thing would not work with trackbacks and pingbacks as they are legitimately sent by “bot” or rather a blogging software. Not a human… Sooo after looking for a bit I found Akismet

Akismet

Well this thing is one of those types background functionality of which I kind of love :) What it does? It collects information about your comments and sends it to centralized service. Then it analyzes info from all comments it gathers and tries to detect spam comments (including pingbacks and trackbacks) automatically and filters spam comments out. Then you can review them to see false positive or false negative detections and correct them. Information about mistakes then is sent back too so Akismet tries to use it to get better too :)

This is really cool on many levels :)

Firstly, idea of combining and organizing otherwise decentralized  blogosphere kind of making us all more connected and feeling as a community. Decentralized and independent but a community. And one in which bloggers can choose to participate or not. It is not like say Facebook, Deviantart or LiveJournal thing where users do not have real choice on how their blog/feed/wall works, evolves and changes.

Secondly this kind of reminds me of how Gmail filters spam.They too collect and reuse a collaborative effort of users spam filtering, analyze it and try to automate it and reuse that knowledge to help other users. It kind of allows its community to filter each spam once or may be little bit more then once and then help other users by removing that spam on their from emails. I just love that part :) Smells like communism or something :D From those who can to those who need and back :D

Then also this plugin allowed me to remove CAPTCHA which I dislike and find to be a necessary evil. Also Akismeth seems to work pretty well. You can see to the right that it filtered something like 230+comments so far out of which something like 5 were missed which makes it something like 98% precise for me :D

All in one SEO pack

Around same time I become little bit more interested about WordPress and SEO. Well this small and simple plugin allows a simple use of simplest SEO part. Blogpost metadata editing like title, description and keywoards which then you see in search engine results.

Sadly I can’t say it is perfect thing. Firstly it  duplicates what you have in main post like title. Then you do all it yourself without any info/feedback on what you entered. What do I mean? Imagine that some plugin could analyze your blog content and based on it try to provide ranked keywords using info like this google search terms popularity service provides. It actually would have been kind of fun if google had a service that would give recommendation on how better to optimize your page to rank higher in google search :) It probably is a good idea for Google and site owners as it would allow Google Search to become more relevant while site owners pages would become more searched if they are relevant… Hmm, need to research how hard it is to do something like that myself :)

Disqus Comment System

I seen this comment system at some blogs before I started this one. Never payed really much attention to it but it was best looking one and probably best working one. It allows various types of login to make comment including a guest login, allows subscriptions, tracks comments and reputation across blogosphere that uses it. So one more plugin of the type I like as it kind of aggregates combined knowledge of decentralized and unmanaged community.

I already mentioned that it has reputation but what they also do as I read is that they optimize this comment system to be relevant. For example they fine tune it to demotivate trolls :) As far as I understand idea is to make it cheap to filter trolls(cheaper then trolling) while not feeding, more like motivating to ignore them. I guess it is far from being full proof but still it is a good comment system.

And that was it. For few months I was not adding or changing anything.

Third Wave

Few weeks ago my hosting provider added Attracta tools offering or rather a teaser. Out of curiosity I checked it out. In the end it represents a project of an interesting kind. A SEO  adviser :) They analyze your page and rate it on how well it is optimized for SEO, how well it uses social media like twitter and facebook etc + it makes site map of your site and sends it to number of search engines. Aldo offering was to use it once to have a taste. Found some interesting advices there but overall was satisfied with my ranks. Not bad SEO, almost 0 social networks coverage :D and no submitted site maps. Well here they surprised me. They build site maps and sent them without asking… Kind of offended me as well it was made without my approval and they may have indexed pages I was not interested to be indexed…

Anyways reading stuff in their advices and checking some of the features I become curious. WordPress is a treasure trove of plugins. Don’t they have some free ones that would cover some of the features I liked? More specifically site maps automatic generation and sending to search engines?

Google XML Sitemaps

And here it is :) Generates new site map and submits to Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com each time you write a new post :) Not much to say more.

Ouh except that my post on Molehill 3D is on first page of google search for that term :D I don’t know, may be theme is not that well covered at the moment but I find it hard to believe :D

Social media

Before I was using ShareThis widget under my blog posts to allow people to share my posts if they would like on various sites and services supported by this plugin. But over the year I kind of found that I never really use it or many alternatives. Instead I grew accustomed to using Facebook “like” and sometimes “share”. Also Twitter value is starting to grow on but I still am not using it. Also associated plugins seem to create a more meaningful message and sense of involvement so I decided to remove ShareThis button and add only mentioned buttons using Simple Facebook Connect and WP-Twitter Retweet Button plugins.

BuzzGrowl

Also at bit-101 blog I noticed something interesting at bottom right corner. Something like a rotator of Twitter and Facebook posts that linked to that blog posts. Seems like a nice things. It also allows to share on those sites trough it. And it is only a two line JS that can be put anywhere allowing to add that feature to all pages of any site in just those two lines :) Seems like a great thing to have :)

P.S: More things to wish for

There are some more things I thought about and want but aether haven’t tried to search yet or tried but did not found.

Related content list

Something I looked for but did not found yet. I seen something like that on some blogs sometimes. Idea is to have list of say 5 most relevant blog posts from decentralized blogosphere on same topic under your post. Would allow quickly and with easy for you and your visitors to dig further in to the topic or check alternative points of view. Some say it is a bad idea as it drives visitors away from your site and if alternative content is better they will not return. Honestly seems like a paranoia and 20 century mentality to me. If others blog is better it is a reason for you to get better or leave the competition. It is not a reason to try to limit your visitors(and yourself) experience and possibilities.

Anyways I was looking for something like that but did not found yet. There is google blog search though. I wonder if it is possible and if yes then how easy it is to show result of blog search with same keywords as current post to be shown in an iframe under each post to tackle this issue.

Twitter/Facebook blog mirror

That is something I thought about but but did not look for yet. For what I know plugins I use already may provide such feature and I just did not dig in to them enough. Idea is that various visitors may like stuff I write about and would like to subscribe/follow my blog. And standard way to do so would be subscribing to RSS feed. But that may not suite everyone. Some may like following Facebook page or twitter posts instead. So I was thinking if it is possible to make get plugins that would work similar to All In One SEO plugin I mentioned above. Idea is to have a twitter account and facebook page connected to the blog and each time I make a new post its title is posted to twitter with a link back and title + description is published on blog facebook page. And all tat automatically without the need to even open those sites. I guess it is possible and not that hard but could be very useful making it easier for more people to follow and raising blog visibility.

SEO post analyzer

This idea came to my mind while I was writing this. More precisely about All In One SEO. Some tool that would analyze a post and based on something like Google Insight and provide recommendations on what are better words to be used in title and keywords of your post :) No I can of course go and try to do it myself each time but it would take considerable amount of time and in modern world of real time media where no amount of time is enough to keep up with things and each minute is valuable this seems like too much of an investment. At least for a “for fun” blog.