Better Than Crabs

Okay so I’m starting to get into blog optimization. Yes I know. It’s been a year and I haven’t done much on the blog front but now I’m making the change.

The past couple of days I started researching some plugins for use on the blog either to get more readers or to create a better experience etc. Even though this is just my general blog I’m using it as a test bed for a couple of new ones I plan on starting very shortly.

Currently the plugins I have installed and using (even if I have no clue on how to use them yet) are:

Akismet - a spam blocker for the blog. Basically it checks against known blacklists and will move any comments thought to be spam into an Akismet Spam tab under the Manage menu. Currently it has caught 869 spam messages for me with 0 false positives. I like it a lot (and it’s cleared up my inbox from all the “awaiting moderation” spam I was getting before activating it). Some spam still sneaks it’s way through but nowhere near as much

Lazy Gallery - acts as a simple photo gallery for use with WordPress. I just needed to set up a gallery folder and define that in the setup file and I was ready to go. To create new gallery sections simply upload a new folder into the gallery folder and a section for a gallery is ready to go. I’ve been using this for my galleries since late December. With a blog update I might switch to something more customized but will probably keep this as well.

Feed Burner Feed Replacement - I just installed this last night. I decided to take my blog more seriously and try to track how many people are reading through feeds etc. I’m still not sure if I have this set up properly but it’s supposed to take all my current feed subscribers and switch them over to the Feedburner feed which I also just set up. Heck I have no clue if anyone is reading this on a feed anyway so maybe it is working.

SH-Autolink - takes predefined words in posts and comments are automatically parses them as links. I’ve been using this for about a week now and it’s saved me tonnes of linking that I usually do in my posts. One problem I’ve ran into however is that when I tried to link two similar predefined words to the same site I’d get crossed up results. For example I wanted to link to Craig West’s blog, but when I had Craig and Craig West set up in the options for SH-Autolink it would find the instances of Craig and link those but would leave West unlinked as it simply recognized Craig as needing the link and stopped at that. If anyone has some advice on how to remedy this it’d be awesome.

Ultimate Tag Warrior - I just installed this plugin and this post is the first test for it. I still don’t know how it fully works but time will tell. Basically the plugin will create tags for my posts and help them get better listed in Technorati and the like. It’s good for SEO as well and more of a test plugin for the new blog.

If anyone has any other suggestion for useful plugins please let me know. I’m always curious on how others operate their blogs and what secrets they use for traffic etc. One other plugin I’m current looking at installing is Subscribe-to-Comments but I’m not sure if it’s necessary for here or not — once again it might be a good plugin for the new blog as it’s a more “niche” blog.

Possible Related Posts:

• Kill Fifty Birds With One Stone
• Just Installed: WordPress 2.1
• A Lists of Lists That Were Written For Listing

Both comments and pings are currently closed.