Posts belonging to Category 'Tools'

One more note on video blogging

I’ve talked a lot recently about negative reactions to video blogging. This post is more neutral, and addresses a couple of distinctions my other posts didn’t make.
Reaching new visitors
Will video blogging introduce new visitors to your site? It sure can! If you post the videos in the right place for the audience you’re seeking, and [...]

Lighter Admin Menus just got even better

NOTE: if you’re sticking with Wordpress 2.3.3, do not upgrade Lighter Admin Menus! Stick with version 2.3 of the plugin.
If you are moving up to Wordpress 2.5 and using patches to fix where it took a few steps backward (but so many steps forward), say hello to Lighter Admin Menus version 2.5.8. This is a [...]

The problem with MaxBlogPress plugins

MaxBlogPress writes some great plugins. I use Different Posts Per Page to control how many posts my visitors see on various types of pages (10 for archives, 4 or 5 for home page, etc.). I use the Ping Optimizer because to this day no one at Wordpress will confirm whether or not future posts ping [...]

Permalinks Migration plugin for Wordpress

I recently decided to change the permalink structure on one of my blogs. The Permalinks Migration Plugin promises to do that seamlessly for you by giving 301 redirects from the old links to the new, so the search engines update (just like they would if you carefully went through and made htaccess redirects for every [...]

StumbleUpon really should let us see who’s linking to us

There’s only one thing I don’t like about StumbleUpon: when someone Stumbles your site and you start getting lots of traffic, there is no way in hell you can see who Stumbled you. Because the page that winds up in your referrer stats just takes you to a landing page urging you to launch an [...]

Learning GIMP

I’ve never been great with graphics. My usual banner consists of an image I’ve bought from someone else and some neat-o text I’ve applied. I can do drop-shadows, too, woohoo! My logos were always rectangular and separated from the site. Never any flow.
Yesterday I sat down to make a new template for one of my [...]

Show Your Ad Here opens

Mark’s ShowYourAdHere has opened (yeah, I’m a couple days late to break that news). This is a third-party service to let you set up your own ad zones and sell ad space to customers. Mark is only taking a 25% cut, which I feel is quite fair considering (a) how much the other guys take [...]

Awesome anti-spam filter to help Akismet

TanTan’s Simple Spam Filter plugin for Wordpress works with Akismet to stop comment spam before it gets into your Akismet moderation queue. I’ve been getting hit with tons of comment spams a day on a couple of sites, so I installed this to try it. It reported that it had caught 191 spam comments on [...]

How to change a database table name

One of my Wordpress plugins stopped working when I upgraded. I figured out it was because the database tables had the version number for the plugin in them, so the new version was looking for the new version number. I could’ve done a fresh install and lost all my info… or I could just change [...]

Switching to Akismet?

I’m switching from SK2 to Akismet on some of my Wordpress sites. Anything I should know about it?
On some of my sites, I wanted the ability to force first time commenters to go through moderation, and SK2 overrides this function in Wordpress. Akismet doesn’t, and as far as I can tell it’s working very well [...]