Having tried out a few social networking plugins I have always found that they have slowed my sites down.

But not one to be put off I have installed the Sociable Plugin by Joost de Valk now so far I have not had issues and the number of options are quite impressive.

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I have just installed the RecentPost Plug-in designed by Rob Marsh on this site and www.ipod2go.co.uk.

This is so configurable I hardly no where to start.The basic idea is that it displays the most recent posts but added to this is the ability to show recent posts if the Tag matches or recent posts are in the same category,it also can make the recent posts display disappear if there are no match’s.

I really am not doing this plug-in justice nip over to the authors website for more details.

A clearer implementation of this plug-in can be seen on www.ipod2go.co.uk trying clicking the posts in tab widget and watch the Recents Posts change to reflect the category.

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Up until now the only costs I have incurred for this site have been for the hosting and the Shifter Theme.This is due mainly to the amount of free plugins and support that the Wordpress community offer.

I was looking for a way to import csv files into Wordpress and could not find anything without spending some cash so going against my usual philosophy I purchased Import CSV pro for $99 dollars (about £50).

Now I am sure that some one some where will have made this sort of script for free but I could not find anything like this without paying .

So what does it do.Basically it takes a comma delimited file and imports this as posts into Wordpress.It works pretty well though the documentation is a bit ropey and I had to experiment a bit to get it to work properly.

You can timestamp posts so they are published on a future date and make use of custom fields .Basically you can create thousands of posts and drip feed them onto your site so you have a constant stream of content.

The obvious use for this would be to take a affiliate merchant feed and load your site with a constant stream of products.

Be warned though all this does is create posts which are copies of the merchants sites so you still have to do some work on each post to create some uniqueness.

I am not sure how much use I will get form Import CSV Pro and I may regret spending the money time will tell.I am going to load one of my sites today using Import CSV Pro and if there is any interest I will give more detail on how I get on.

Got a Question

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WP-o-Matic enables administrators to create posts automatically from RSS/Atom feeds.I use this on another Shifter site of mine to drag the latest additions from iTunes.

Its not a bad plugin though I can not get to grips with the custom template option though I think this is more to do with my ability then any fault with the plugin.

One complaint I have is with the latest update.The author as included the following code that displays a message to switch to Firefox or Safari:

if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) && (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], ‘MSIE’) !== false))
die(’Please switch to Firefox / Safari’)

Ok its easy to fix (delete the piece of code out of wpomatic.php) its just really annoying .

Still a pretty good plugin (perhaps the above was a mistake?)

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I have just installed the uMapper plugin and I have to say I am pretty impressed.Absolutely easy to use and integrate into Wordpress .

So I thought I would set up a map so all you Wordpress users could get your sites on the map.

Here’s the link to the map

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I am currently testing out Bookmarkify on this Shifter Site to see if there are any issues when used with the Shifter Theme.

I have deactivated this plugin as it was doing some strange things to this Shifter site layout.I beleive this is more to do with the Shifter Theme then the plugin though.

Basically Bookmarkify is a simple way to put social bookmarks into your posts.This is another upload and activate install with very few settings to mess with.
There are some 50 odd bookmarks available accessible through the more link,though you can deactivate this if you want to restrict visitors to the bookmarks that you have activated.

This seems pretty good and I love the fade effect when the more button is selected.

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I have just removed this from the Shifter user 1 module.I have not noticed a appreciable increase in traffic and more to the point I have been getting some slow load times for the site.

Now it maybe that the UkBanners code has nothing to do with this but my Shifter site has started Shifting again since removing it. 

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Another great plugin from  Lester ‘GamerZ’ Chan .You can see the widget in action in the left hand sidebar.
I only installed this a couple of days ago , took about 10 seconds to install and I have not noticed any issues so far.

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