Author Archive

Horizontal scrolling announcement Plugin

I am not a great fan of scrolling announcements and the like but my daughter has been nagging me for one on her site.So after a quick scan of what plugins are available I have decided to test this one out.

The Horizontal scrolling announcement is a simple to configure scroller with numerous options that even the most inexperienced WordPress user can set up.

I would like to see an easier option then having to edit the theme to display but on the whole pretty good.

You can see an example of  the Horizontal scrolling announcement Plugin in action in the footer of  www.ipod2go.co.uk .

Open in New Window Plugin

This is a nice little plugin for those people (like me) that always forget to set the target of external links to Open in New Window.

This plugin uses JavaScript to target external links to a new browser window, leaving your blog page open.

Certain links such as Google are not picked up by this plugin due to issues with Javascript but on the whole a must have plugin.

WordPress for BlackBerry V1.3

Just updated my Blackberry with V1.3 WordPress for BlackBerry.
Not had chance to try out the changes yet(bit awkward with the tram bouncing round)

Shall give it a proper test drive later .

Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

BuddyPress at iPod2Go

After deactivating BuddyPress on MyWordPress due to the performance issues it created . I have decided to revisit the capabilities of BuddyPress.

I have done a clean install on www.ipod2go.co.uk so I can test it out without messing up this site.

To be fair its pretty good easy to install and not a great deal of performance issues that I can tell.

Hopefully a few people will sign up so it can really be put to the test

Mingle Social Networking Plugin

Given the popularity of social networking I thought it was about time that I investigated what was available for WordPress.

Not to be disappointed I came across this plug-in  Mingle by Blair Williams .

I have set it up on www.wordpressworld.co.uk and it seems to work a treat though to be honest I could do with a few people signing up and drive some activity through it to truely be able to give it the thumbs up.

WordPress 3

WordPress 3 released

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ByREV Fix Missed Schedule Plugin

Managing scheduled posts have become a real pain recently.Since upgrading to WordPress 2.9.2 no matter what I try scheduled posts just do not publish.

So having trawled Wordpress .org I came across this plugin that will loop through your posts and force publish them if any are found that missed their scheduled publish time.

The plugin will check your posts every 10 minutes but the time interval is easy to change by modifying this line

Its not ideal but until this is fixed this plugin does the job. 

You can get it from http://blog.avirtualhome.com/wordpress-plugins .

Visitor Maps and Who’s Online

Giving the Visitor Maps and Who’s Online  plugin by Mike Challis a test drive.

This plugin will Displays Visitor Maps with location pins, city, and country. Includes a Who’s Online Sidebar to show how many users are online.

You can see the map output here hovering over the map dots will display country and town information.

Due to my server limitation I had to FTP the geo data file as it it would not install on plugin activation ,apart from that its pretty straight forward to set the plugin up.

There is also a page which you can use to focus in on the data in more detail .

Extreme SEO Plugin

One of the best ways to drive traffic to your site is geting other sites to link to your site that have relevant related content.

So I thought I would give this plugin a try that automates the linking process through their linking network.

This plugin provides inbound links to your site’s post pages from post pages on other unique domains within the Extreme SEO network that have content related to your content

So what happens?

You install and activate the plugin you should then see ‘Related Web Articles’ appear automatically at the bottom of each post.Pretty simple.

I am going to leave it up and running for a few days to monitor the quality of the inbound links and to see if any other problems become apparent.

In theory this plugin should help the ranking of this site .

Google Indexing

Over the last two weeks have noticed a significant down turn in the number items that have been indexed by Google.
This has occurred over a number of sites and I have no idea why.
I have checked any plugins that have recently been updated to see if this was the source of the problem to no avail.The worrying thing is the indexing as only dropped on more established sites.