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From the category archives:
If you’ve been working with Wordpress for any length of time, I’m sure you’ve come across the menacing white screen of death. Here’s how to fix it.
Recently I moved one of my blogs to a new server. Everything went smoothly, the server environment was the same, the database imported correctly and when the name servers propagated, everything seemed in order. Then the next day I typed up the url and hit enter just to check things out, and BAM! Nothing.
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It’s no secret that Wordpress is the best blogging platform and most widely used self-hosted blogging system available. With endless extendability options, you can pretty much make a standard Wordpress installation look anyway you want and use it for any kind of web site. Even popular CMS systems like Joomla and Drupal are shrinking in popularity at the ever growing capability of a simple Wordpress blog.
The team at Too Creative (the AlwaysWordpress parent company) has been blogging professionally for years and have used several plugins consistently during that time. These Wordpress plugins are must-haves. If you are a pro blogger, you can’t live without these 7 best Wordpress plugins. In no particular order:
If you have any number of visitors to your site, then you know it doesn’t take much for the spam comments to start flowing in. PcbDaily.com, one of our blogs about Panama City Beach, Florida sees around 20,000 to 25,000 visits per month (I know that’s small time, but we’re a small city!) and on average, we see around 500 to 900 spam comments per month, with spikes during July peaking at over 1,600 spam comments. Could you imagine managing that alone?
Some of the comments are tricky, disguising themselves as legitimate flattery or the like, but with shady looking link-backs. Akismet is smart in detecting this stuff, and I rarely have to go back and correct it. In fact, I don’t remember the last time I caught it slippin’.
All of the Wordpress self-hosted installations come with Akismet right out of the box, you just have to activate it. When you do activate it, you’ll have to provide an API key. Getting an API key is easy, all you have to do is create an account at Wordpress.com; I would use the domain name that you are using for your site, if it’s available (e.g. AlwaysWordpress’ is AlwaysWordpress.Wordpress.com). In order to set up a Wordpress.com account, you’ll need a valid email address. Once you’re all set up, just hover over the “My Account” drop down, and click on “Edit Profile”. Your API key will be at the top. Easy picken’s, as Cebo always likes to say. 
There may be others out there that do a great job, but I’ve found the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin to be the best at handling RSS subscription management. One of the cool things about the Wordpress blogging platform (and all the others, come to think of it!) is that they create and automatically update an xml file that RSS readers can source to keep your content fresh in their native RSS reader. The trouble in the past has been tracking how many people are subscribed to your feed. Insert Feedburner.
Feedburner Feedsmith was created by a regular guy like you and I that grew into something great enough to entice the folks at Feedburner to let go of some of their cash and take over the ongoing updating and development of the plugin. Shortly after Google acquired Feedburner and resumed updating the plugin.
So, what’s the point of the plugin anyway? Well, you can go to Feedburner.com (which redirects to feedburner.google.com) and “burn” a feed, but in order for your Wordpress self-hosted installation to recognize that connection, you need the plugin. The plugin used to be easy to find, but it is not available in the “Add New” link under the Plugin menu in your Wordpress control panel’s sidebar. When Googleling it, it doesn’t come up, but we’ve provided the link to it here. If something happens in the future and this link dies, drop us a comment and we’ll get it updated.
Update: I tried to download and use the plugin provided in the link in the title of the Feedsmith section and the plugin was giving me an error that the “header” was not valid. So, here is a link to the plugin that I had updated from another installation of Wordpress that works just fine. Download Feedburner Feedsmith Wordpress plugin.
Quote from the Flickr Tag plugin page:
“When I started using WordPress for my blog, I had a hard time finding a Flickr plugin that didn’t download all the photos onto my server, have them appear in a separate gallery out of context from my post, or otherwise look totally horrible. I just wanted something simple. . . and Flickr Tag was born.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. I’ve never needed anything super fancy, I just wanted to use Flickr from the social perspective in having my images with optimized titles and tags. In addition, I wanted a way to display those neatly in my blog. I’ve used this plugin for years with the only bug coming in when I use the Lightbox effect. If creates a huge black box over the top half of my site that prevents the reader from reading – never figured that one out, but not everyone has that problem. I think it’s a server issue, but I digress.
The one thing that I love about the Flickr Tag plugin is that it easily allows me to insert a Flickr “Set” into my post, and keep the images stored on the Flickr server, not on my own. So, when people go to Flickr and search for photos using words that mine are optimized for, they could land on my site. If my site is relevant to them, them I’ve just earned a new regular visitor. Plus, Flickr provides stats on the image views so I can track everything. The only downside is that Flickr requires a premium upgrade to host unlimited “Sets”, but that’s only $20/year.
This is a no-brainer for any blog owner. How do you make sure that Google has the most updated version of your sitemap? Furthermore, how do you be sure you have a Google-compliant sitemap built and updated everytime you change the content on your blog? This plugin does it all.
Everytime you add a new post, edit an already published post or add a page, your sitemap is rebuilt by the plugin and google is notified of the new sitemap. The more Google sees your site is updated, the more regularly it will index your site. The more your site is indexed, the more relevant your content is perceived by Google for those searching using the keywords you use in your site. I think you can connect the dots from here.
I have had mixed success with Wordpress’ standard WYSIWYG editor, depending on which remote host I’m with. I can’t explain it, but I’ve seen it enough to know it’s an issue. For those of you smarter than I (plenty of you, I can assure you), it’s probably something to do with php versions, etc. The standard “insert image” functionality 
never seemed to work quite as expected, but with TinyMCE, I get all the functionality I need as it adds the standard “insert image” button 
.
Some of that functionality includes the ability to correctly align images where the result looks the same in all browsers, and the ability to add horizontal and vertical space to add margin between text and the image.
With the exception of a few Premium Wordpress Themes, the All in One SEO Pack plugin is an absolute necessity for bloggers. The first thing the search bots see when they come to a page is the title tag, and unless your theme has the built in capability to change this specific to your post, you are missing out on one of the most important aspects of SEO. Guys, it’s 2009, if you’re not optimizing your site, you’re not going to succeed. In addition to changing the title tag, this plugin allows you to enter keywords and a description specific to each post.
As part of the All in One SEO Pack control panel, you can modify the site’s main title tag, and embed all your keywords and description to be planted in the code of the main page of your blog. Everything is placed near the top in the code.
The thing I love about this plugin, in contrast to watching my analytics through Google Analytics is that it provides an easy-to-look-at break down of the traffic to the site, specifically as it relates to each post. I have found some discrepancies in the data with regards to actual numbers, when compared to Google Analytics, but it provides a good picture of where we are at and helps determine trends, keywords people are using to land on the site and referring sites pointing to our blogs.
The Stats page provides a flash graphic that is dynamic and repopulated each time you visit the page. The traffic peaks are clickable and take you to the traffic counts, sorted by post for the specific day you click on. The traffic stats are close to real time, too, which is cool.
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