Wordpress Plugins and all that
Grandad June 8th, 2008
I have been playing with my plugins.
I have been assured that I won’t go blind, or grow hair on the palms of my hands. My psychiatrist says it is perfectly normal.
Basically, my plugins fall into two categories – those that make the site do things I want it to do, such as spam trappers and audio players, and those that make life easier or more fun for you lot – the readers.
This latter group is important, and it’s one that a lot of site owners ignore.
Two plugins I use, and I wish everyone would use them, are Ajax Edit Comments and Subscribe to Comments. The first one allows you to edit your comment after you have posted it and clear out those little typos that always seem to creep in. The second one allows you to get notification when another comment appears on that post. I don’t know how many times I have submitted a comment on someone’s site and then accidentally forgotten about it. It is amazing how few blogs have these two installed, and it irritates the hell out of me.
One that I have installed just for amusement is Firestats. It does give interesting statistics, though I generally use the like of Google Analytics, and it takes up a fair chunk of database, but it does give those neat little flags that say where people are posting from. I could also tell you what operating system you use, but I presume you know that already?
Recently I installed one that listed the latest comments. I have taken that out again, because people tend to comment on the latest post anyway so it was a bit pointless. I have replaced it with my “Hall of Infamy”. This shows the top ten contributors on the site for the last while. I have set it for 30 days, but I will probably play around with that a bit. This is a great plugin for me as I get to see who my real friends are and can cross the rest of you off my reader and my blog roll. That should save me a bit of time in the mornings.
Two that I installed for my own amusement are Donncha’s Theme Tester [nice one, Donncha!], and TD Word Count. The Theme Tester allows me to install new themes, and only I can see them. I can then play around with them and see exactly how my site looks before consigning them to the rubbish bin. The Word Count lets me know just how much crap I have written. This will be my 804th post and I have written well over a quarter of a million words. Sad.
There are quite a few others in there, but they are boring things.
So off you go now, and install those two comments plugins.
I’ll go back to playing with myself.
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