Smart Blog TipsWordpress Plugins

Write Connected Posts using Series WordPress Plugin

Jayant — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:37:29 +0000

If you want to write Connected Posts, like a large multipost review, a series of post on a topic, then this WordPress plugin by Justin Tadlock will help you.

Justin Tadlock is a well known personality in the WordPress Arena. He is the developer of the Hybrid Theme Framework. In his spare time he keeps creating awesome Wordpres plugins. WordPress Series Plugin is developed for users to easily link posts together. This is great help if you are writing several post spanning the a similiar topic.

Features:

List your Series Post via Widget
A content specific list of post in the Widget
Template tags for use anywhere in your Theme
Short codes for Post Editor

Links:

Remember that this plug in is only for WordPress 2.8. Upgrade and use it. Have a nice day..!!

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4 Essential Plugins for WordPress Image SEO

Jayant — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 10:17:11 +0000

4 very essential plugins for Image Search Engins Optimization in WordPress. This will help search engine understand the images on your blog better and help you get more rankings.

Image optimization is always neglected. Either images are totally writtern off or some other ways are found to do away with less of the images. Search Engines does not have images. It is just that we as blogger tend to over do things by stuffing our blogs with loads and loads of images, some of which can easily be done without. The point to not ehere is that, since images take up more bandwidth, use them judiciously.

Another aspect of Image optimization is that everything is concentrated with Image Size. Image size is not the only attribute which the Search Engiens go after. Using an image when appropriate with proper optimization including proper description goes a long way to increase the SEO factor on your blog. Here we present WordPress Plugins which help optimizing Images from SEO point of view.

WP Smush It..!!

WP Smush It..!! is a cool plugin which uses the Smush It API from Yahoo and process all your images in the background and optimizes them. The conversion process is loseless, meaning the image quality is not sacrificed during the process. Most importantly, it does all this without interfering the blog posting in any way. It also have the ability to optimize your existing images from the Media Library Tab in the Admin Panel.

Link:

SEO Friendly Images

Its a common practice to forget updating the Title tag for images as we are much focussed towards our Content. SEO Friendly Images provides a very simple way to auto update the tags for the Images. It does so based on the Image File name and the Post Title. You can do the selection from its settings page.

Link:

Cleaner Gallery

Developed by the popular author of Hybrid Theme, Cleaner Gallery takes care of any invalid XHTML code that WordPress generated when using the short code. Apart from that, it also integrates many Lightbox type scripts and adds loads of extra features.

Link:

cSprites

cSprites combines all images in your content into one single images and display only part of it in the post content as needed. It in short apply the CSS Sprites formula to the WordPress Post Content. Doing this will reduce the HTTP request, make your pages load faster and make copying your iamge files a bit difficult. Moreover it also automatically generates ALT and TITLE tag based on your Post categories, image names, post title etc.

Link:

Plugin Download Page

Plugin Description Page

These are only a handful of plugins used by me at som point of the other. Do share via comments any more plugins which you find useful. Have a nice Day..!!

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How to create Google News Sitemap for WordPress Blog

Jayant — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 07:10:59 +0000

News Site based on wordpress have a challenge to create a Sitemap which is compatible with Google News. Learn how this can be quickly overcome using a simple plugin.

Requirements for Google News Sitemap

Google News aggregates data from all news based sites and displays on its News Search Results. For aggregating data from by Google, it requires News based sites to generate a Sitemap crafted specially for Google News and other News based Search Engines.

Here are the requirements for a proper Sitemap accepted by Google News:

The site must be verified in Google Webmasters
Permalinks shoud not have any Session Ids in them
Sitemap should have URLs from last 3 days
Each URL should have a timestamp / article publication date
Maximum links allowed in Sitemap is 1000. For large sites, the sitemap should be broken into multiple ones and managed via a Sitemap Index File.

Google News Sitemap Generator Plugin

This requirement seems very difficult to generate manually. However there is a nice WordPress Plugin called Google News Sitemap Generator which takes care of the whole Sitemap generation process with just a button click.

Install the plugin Google News Sitemap Generator and activate it.
Move the file google-news-sitemap.xml to teh root directory of your site. Make sure the sitemap file is writable (CHMOD to 777)
Now everytime you Save/Edit/Publish a post, the sitemap gets rebuild.
Submit your Site to Google News

Links:

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Moderate WordPress Comments from your Desktop

Jayant — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 05:17:46 +0000

Moderator is an Adobe AIR runtime based application that lets you moderate your WordPress Comments from your Desktop itself.

If you like me are addicted to WordPress and Blogging, and keep checking your Blog few times a day just to find if someone has left a new comment or send some feedback, then This application would be a bliss for you.

Moderator is an Adobe AIR Desktop Client, which lets you moderate your WordPress Comments right from your Desktop in real time. You don’t even need a Web Browser.

How to install Moderator:

Download Adobe AIR Runtime 1.1
Install the Moderator WordPress Plugin found here and activate it from your Admin Panel.
Now you have to download the Moderator Desktop Client. You can do this from the Moderator Plugin Settings Page or you can get it from here.
You are done. Start the Client and fill in your WordPress Login Credentials. It then opens a screen as shown below. You can now delete, accept or spam your comments right from your Desktop.

Links:

Remember to backup your WordPress before you try this plugin. Have a nice Day..!!

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How to remove Category Base from WordPress Permalinks

Jayant — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 10:03:44 +0000

Having good Permalink Structure is very important for your Blog with respect to SEO. WordPress does nice by providing a Permalinks Section from the Settings Page in the Admin Panel.

But sometimes some bloggers do not want to have any category base in their Permalinks structure. WordPress does not allows you to do it. Here is how you can get it done.

WP No Category Base Plug-in

If you are using WordPress 2.7, Go to Plug-ins –> Add New –> Search for “WP No Category Base”, install it and activate it.

If you are using previous version of WordPress, Upload the “no-category-base.php” to the “/wp-content/plugins/”, and Activate it from the Plug-ins Menu

This plug-in does not have any Settings Page. Just activate it to use and de-activate when you don’t need it.

Precautions

Remember to have no Post Slug equal to your Category Slug. In case you have same slug for both then the page will get the priority and the category page will never show up.