One of the great things about self-hosted WordPress blogging is the amount of plugins available to help you make your blog just the way you want it.

For anyone not on WordPress, plugins are additional solutions that you can install to your site’s admin area, and they then offer extra functionality to your blog and how your readers interact with it.

These can range from social sharing options, design tools, subscription options, e-commerce solutions and much more.

In my last post, I spoke about the process that went into the redesign here, and Ken Mueller (an awesome part of anyone’s blog community) suggested sharing the plugins I use on here.

So, here they are.

1. afterRead

If you look to the bottom of my posts, you’ll see a simple reminder to subscribe to the blog. This is created using afterRead, a great little plugin to offer a call-to-action to your readers after they’ve read your content.

2. Akismet

One of the most-used anti-spam plugins around, Akismet is one of these plugins that’s pretty much a given on any WordPress site or blog. As well as blocking its idea of spam, it’s also pretty effective at learning from your manual filters to improve its anti-spam filters.

3. Align RSS Images

This one is more cosmetic, as it’s a plugin that works on your RSS feed (this is where subscribers can read your blog). What I like about Align RSS Images is that it keeps the image formatting used on your blog post in the RSS feed, as opposed to losing the alignment like normal RSS feeds.

4. BackupBuddy

Probably one of my favourites, and definitely one that any blogger serious about their content needs, BackUpBuddy saves your content, widgets and themes in case your site crashes. It also makes migration to a new host or server super easy. It’s a premium purchase, but highly recommended.

5. Clicky for WordPress

For any site owner, analytics are key to monitor reader behaviour and where your traffic is coming from. Clicky is an awesome alternative to Google Analytics, and less scary for the average blogger. My friend Brankica wrote a great overview of Clicky – check it out.

6. Clicky Popular Posts Widget

While not a standalone plugin per se, the Clicky Popular Posts Widget is a nice addition from developer Konstantin Obenland that monitors your analytics and shows the most popular posts based on visitor interaction, as opposed to social sharing or page visits. Which, for me, is more useful.

7. Fix RSS Feeds

One of the possible dangers of changing designs or web hosts is it can mess up your blog’s RSS feed, and your subscribers aren’t aware of new posts. Fix RSS Feeds does exactly what it says on the tin, and fixes any errors caused by a migration or design change.

8. Genesis Responsive Slider

Officially my favourite WordPress framework, Genesis (affiliate link) offers a rock-solid theme platform with great plugins. Like the Genesis Responsive Slider, which offers a cool slider gallery for images which also resizes itself based on the browser you visit on (including mobile). A very cool plugin, and used on this blog’s home page.

9. Genesis Simple Edits

While I did the redesign of this blog myself, I’m no coder, so plugins like Genesis Simple Edits are hugely useful. It allows you to edit your footer code, as well as post meta and byline without messing around with the style CSS. So, perfect for coding idiots like me.

10. Genesis Simple Hooks

Again, perfect for non-coders (although more experienced WordPress users will make this plugin sing), Genesis Simple Hooks gives you a ton of control over various aspects of your blog, and singles out the area you want to change then lets you insert code without touching your main CSS.

11. Google XML Sitemaps

While your blog might be full of awesome content, if the search engines don’t know how to read it properly, you’re screwed. Google XML Sitemaps makes it easy for search engines to index your blog and point people to the content they want to find.

12. Gravity Forms

Along with BackupBuddy and Livefyre, Gravity Forms is one of my favourites. Much more than a simple form builder, this plugin lets you create contact forms, add pricing options, create feedback questionnaires and much more. Incredibly flexible and worth the purchase price.

13. Livefyre Realtime Comments

One of the best parts of any blog is the comments section, and Livefyre is the best comments platform bar none. Realtime updates, social network comment integration, friend tagging on Twitter and Facebook, commenter moderation and way more besides. Oh, and the new Livefyre 3 is due imminently and plain out rocks (sneak peek below)!

14. Login Lockdown

Like any popular product or platform, WordPress attracts its fair share of hackers. To help prevent your site being compromised, Login Lockdown disables sign-in attempts if the wrong user and password details are entered more than the amount of times you set. Very useful.

15. Premise

For any bloggers looking to monetize their blog (or simply grow traffic), Premise (affiliate link) is perfect. From the guys behind Genesis, this plugin lets you create landing sales pages, membership site solutions, social sharing for extra content options, and much more. Very comprehensive, highly recommended.

16. RSS Cloud

Because not everyone knows what an RSS feed is, the RSS Cloud plugin is a great way to make it easy for readers to subscribe. It points RSS Readers to the right format and content, makes the subscription process easier, and also updates servers when a new post goes live.

17. RSS Footer

There’s nothing worse than writing great content, then seeing an automated feed scrape pull your content and used on another blog. RSS Footer offers some protection by inserting a link and copyright at the end of each post, and linking scraped content back to your original source.

18. SEO Data Transporter

One of the biggest pains in changing WordPress themes is that you can lose all your SEO settings you so carefully cultivated. Thanks to SEO Data Transporter, this allows you to migrate all your SEO settings from plugins like Yoast SEO to a new theme with SEO built in, like Genesis. All the major platforms are supported and makes this plugin essential for any blogger.

19. Simple Lightbox

Ever been on a blog, clicked an image and it expands to full size? That’s a lightbox effect, and Simple Lightbox does exactly what the name of the plugin suggests – offers a pain-free way to have an elegant lightbox image gallery on your blog. (After a comment from Jon Loomer, I checked Simple Lightbox load times, and it was close to a second each time, which is a lot of load. Therefore, i deactivated the plugin and am removing its recommendation here).

20. Simple Social Icons

With the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and others showing the benefits of using social networks to build your audience, making it easy to follow you is important. Simple Social Icons allows a clean and customizable selection of the top networks to display, so your readers can find you on your chosen networks.

21. Simple Trackback Validation

One of the ways spammers attack your blog (if they can’t bypass your comment filter) is by linking to your blog with their crappy content, which affects your standing in search engines if you’re linked with questionable content. Simple Trackback Validation checks the IP with the URL of the link and confirms it’s valid before approving.

22. SocialBox

Similar to Simple Social Icons, SocialBox is a smarter way to display your chosen networks, with follower and subscriber count on show too – always a great way to highlight your social currency when looking to attract advertisers to your blog (or even new subscribers – a high subscriber number usually equates to consistent quality).

23. Social Sharing Toolkit

You write great content – you want it shared, right? Social Sharing Toolkit does this and much more. As well as offering a host of the most popular sharing networks to allow your readers to share your content, it also has enhanced features like auto-linking Twitter names and hashtags, and offering more following options for your readers to connect with. A great social plugin.

24. Timthumb Vulnerability Scanner

Earlier last year, there was a major hack on WordPress sites using the code used to display thumbnails next to blog post excerpts. This caused huge headaches for a lot of bloggers, so the Timthumb Vulnerability Scanner plugin was released. This scans your database, highlight potential risks, and cleans these files for you. A must-have for any blogger that uses images.

25. Ultimate Maintenance Mode

If you want to make changes to your blog, or redesign it, but you don’t want to build offline and then transfer the data, Ultimate Maintenance Mode lets you create a maintenance message for your readers, and overlays it on top of a faded screenshot of your blog (or an image you upload). It’s one of the sleekest maintenance options out there, and I love it.

26. Viper’s Video Quicktags

If your blog is one that has a lot of videos on it, it can be a pain in the ass to grab the embed code, insert in your post, format and make sure it’s mobile-friendly too. Viper’s Video Quicktags does all this for you, and even inserts a little message with a direct link in your feed to say the post contains a video, in case it’s not displayed properly via email subscription.

27. W3 Total Cache

There’s nothing worse for a reader than visiting a blog and waiting for it to load. And waiting. And waiting. If your blog is taking too long to load, then you not only risk losing readers, but being punished by search engines too. W3 Total Cache is one of the most comprehensive options out there for scrunching your blog into less memory chunks, thus making it load faster.

Your Turn

And there you have it – my preferred plugins, some of which are always on, some of which are used when necessary.

There are other plugins that I haven’t mentioned here – WordPress SEO by Yoast, for instance, is great for getting you found on search engines. Since Genesis has a rock-solid SEO component built in, I don’t need to use any SEO plugins here.

Most of the above plugins will be great options for you to check out, some less so – for example, the Genesis plugins (with the exception of Simple Social Icons) are made for the Genesis framework only.

One thing to keep in mind – the more plugins you use, the more chance of impacting your site speed, so be careful with how many you use at any given time.

How about you – do you use any of these or, if not, which plugins are a must for your blog? Share away in the comments!

27 Highly Recommended WordPress PlugIns As Used on Here originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.

For any self-hosted WordPress blogger, the SEO Data Transporter plug-in from StudioPress could be one of the most useful plug-ins around.

Compatible with some of the most popular premium WordPress themes as well as SEO plug-ins, the SEO Data Transporter does exactly what it says on the tin – transports SEO data.

Not only that, but it’s incredibly easy to install, set-up and use – what more could you want?

In this video, I give you a quick overview of the SEO Data Transporter plug-in and its benefits.

You can either download the plug-in directly from the StudioPress website, or install from the WordPress dashboard using the Add New Plug-In option and searching for SEO Data Transporter.

Overview of SEO Data Transporter from StudioPress originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.

It’s a multi-platform blog resource, and offers a mix of free resources and some great upcoming offers to help your blogging be the best it can be. We’d love to see you over there, so come on by and say hi. Cheers!

With the introduction of WordPress 3.0, bloggers can create a host of different menus for use either on the blog template or as a sidebar widget.

This allows you to create child pages, sub-categories, navigation tabs with external links and much more.

Here, we show you how simple it is to create and get a custom menu up and running in a matter of clicks.

This post contains a video. If you can’t see it in your feed, click here to view it directly.

How to Create a Custom Menu in WordPress originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.

About a couple of months ago, I noticed that my site was having loading issues. I ran it through a load time analyzer and was shocked at how long it could take to load.

Especially with it being reported that Google would look less favourably on slow-loading sites.

My host at the time was Hostgator, and while they’re a great host, my concern was that by sharing bandwidth with other sites, mine would eventually suffer. Step up the search for a new web host.

One of the blogs I read a lot is that of Mark Jaquith, and he had a post about WordPress and how certain hosts weren’t really set up for it (and I’m not saying this is the case with Hostgator, just to be clear).

In the comments of that post, Ronald Huereca mentioned a host called BlogOnCloud9. What caught my eye was the mention that they use Rackspace, who I’d been looking at, and how they seemed perfect for WordPress and were very security-conscious. So I decided to look into BlogOnCloud9. And was very pleasantly surprised.

The guys at BlogOnCloud9 set the service up because they were also WordPress lovers frustrated at how the platform wasn’t always taken seriously by web hosts. They have a rich history with WordPress, with their involvement with ContentRobot, and so decided to set up their own dedicated service just for WordPress blogs.

Reading up some more on them, I contacted the BlogOnCloud9 guys with some questions about moving servers, their service, and just general questions on hosting, etc. They replied the same day, with a great personal touch (something that continues today), and really made me feel like their most important customer. Something that every business should do.

So I decided to go ahead with it and the move was smooth as marble. There was no downtime; the guys had me up on a dummy site to ensure I was happy with everything; and the transfer from Hostgator to BlogOnCloud9 was completed with no drama at all.

Since then, the performance and support continues to convince me I made the right move, and it’s the reason I recommend BlogOnCloud9 for any WordPress blog or site, and for clients that are overhauling their web presence.

Should you check out BlogOnCloud9? Well, here are some features if you’re interested:

• Custom installation tailored to your needs.
• Configuration and plug-in installation for security, SEO, performance and analytics.
• One-to-one support and forum support for all WordPress questions (not just your blog).
• Nightly back-ups emailed to you in case your blog goes down for any reason (using the awesome Back-Up Buddy plug-in).
• Easy upgrade options to different plans, depending on your growth/new domains.

Because I have a few domains, I chose the Expert Plan that also gives me five development areas. This is where I can essentially create a clone of my blog to redesign, mess with template, try new features, etc, without damaging my live blog. Then I just flip the switch to set live.

If this post comes across as a bit promotional for BlogOnCloud9, I make no apologies for that. Just like you, I believe in sharing great products and service, and BlogOnCloud9 falls into both these categories and then some.

And like I said at the start, none of the links here are affiliate links (though BlogOnCloud9 does offer that if you’re interested) so I’m not even posting just to make a fast buck…

Anyhoo… this is why I’m loving BlogOnCloud9 and if you’re serious about WordPress and blogging/site host, you could do a lot worse than check them out.

Cheers!

Why I’m Loving BlogOnCloud9 originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.

Currently I have an account at Posterous, which I use for short and punchy thoughts. They’re mainly ideas and views that I always refer to as too little for blogging and too much for Twitter. They also helped provide the content for my free marketing ebook, Why Simple Works.

Thankfully, folks seem to appreciate the short posts as much as the long form that you find here, which is really nice.

I also enjoy the freedom that Posterous gives me, inasmuch I can just throw some thoughts out there that don’t necessarily need to be formulated into a longer post and discussion with definitive answers.

Now, though, I’m curious as to whether the format would work right here? While Posterous is fantastic for such short posts, I’m also trying to integrate my outposts better and make sure I’m giving you the very best of my time and resources. So having another third-party option for you to go to makes me wonder if it’s the right approach?

So, once again, I defer to your wisdom. Which would you prefer – a separate Posterous account as it currently is, or have it all under one roof here (perhaps even in a dedicated section of its own)?

Love to hear your thoughts. Cheers!

Quick Question on Posterous originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.

The fact that the system was being used on more blogs, and also had social media integration with its Reactions feature that pulled stats from anywhere else your blog was being discussed, seemed pretty cool.

Yet, lately, DISQUS seems to have had some continued issues.

One is that the Reactions (the comments from Twitter, Digg, etc, that show up as trackbacks) seem to be stop-start as to whether they show or not. Another issue (and far more serious) is that DISQUS doesn’t seem to be set up for commenting when viewing a blog on a mobile or smartphone.

At first, I thought it may just be me, but then Ari Herzog pointed it out as well. Considering that more people use their smartphones for browsing now, this is a bit of an issue.

So, time to swap back to the good old WordPress standard comments option. I can also switch CommentLuv back on, which for community is one of the best WordPress plug-ins ever (CommentLuv shows your last blog post and is great for finding new bloggers).

I will say this for DISQUS – their customer support is usually pretty top-notch. If they can get the mobile aspect sorted, and also stabilize the features like Reactions (which means stopping the unrelated porn links that can appear), I’d be more than happy to try again.

In the meantime, I kinda like the new stripped down approach. How about you?

photo credit: David Reece

Goodbye DISQUS, Hello WordPress originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.

Woopra was one of the tools I mentioned (and it’s one I use on this blog), for the way it offers a host of great and incredibly useful information. Yesterday the company released the beta version of Woopra 1.3.1 and man does it rock (I even used the phrase “Holy monkeys!” at the time).

There are two versions of Woopra – a desktop client version and a WordPress plugin that allows you to see your reports through your WordPress dashboard. Both share similar features, although obviously the desktop version has a few more (a little like the differences between Seesmic Desktop and Seesmic Web for Twitter).

So, what are the funky new features?

Woopra 1.3.1 Desktop Client

The immediate difference when you open the updated version is the graphical overhaul. This may not sound like much, but now the information is dissected into easy-to-use blocks that offers a clear visual stream. When you start looking at this information, that’s where the fun begins.

One of the biggest improvements is in the Woopra Segmentation feature. This breaks your analytics down into the most minute details. You can track traffic on a certain page, keyword, what site it came from, how a social media campaign using the likes of Twitter and Facebook is doing, and much more.

Knowing where your traffic is coming from lets you tailor your blog or website for the most important people – the visitors. One of the first things I noticed, for example, is that a lot of people go from a post to my About page – so it may be that I need to boost that with some more info.

For businesses, this function obviously allows you to see if a sales landing page is doing its job. Did you guide them to “the sweet spot”? Did they click past your pop-up message or get annoyed by it and close their browsing? Using this information helps you improve the functionality of your site.

Some of the other new or improved features include:

• Log-in control that lets you open just the information you need.
• Woopra Live Map that supports multiple monitor use.
• Unique Mac OS X feature to track visitors via Dock Badge.
• Custom visitor data to set up custom tags, events, visitors and more.
• Live chat to have a conversation with anyone currently on your blog or site (instant feedback possibilities).

These features and others (webmaster tools for Alexa info and Google page rank, and open API for third-party add-ons for example) make the desktop client version of Woopra 1.3.1 an incredibly robust and intensive package. So how does the WordPress plugin compare?

Woopra 1.3.1 WordPress Plugin

While it doesn’t share some of the more in-depth features of its desktop brother, the Woopra WordPress plugin is still an impressive piece of kit. After you upload the plugin and activate it, a new option appears in your dashboard section. Once you’ve configured the settings, you have access to the likes of:

• Live visitor tracking and web stats.
• Real-time analytics as they happen.
• Multi-blog or website cross functionality.
• Real-time notifications of tagged visitor or event.
• Chat function.

While it’s not as deep as the desktop client, for any blogger that just wants to know a bit more about where their audience is coming from the WordPress plugin offers a better overview than the standard WordPress analytics.

Woopra also has a web-based analytics option, so if you’re not at your desktop you can log-in to Woopra and access your information from your members area.

If there’s any downside to Woopra, it’s that it doesn’t offer historical data – so you can only monitor information from after you install the Woopra code or plugin on your site. It’d be nice to hook up with Google Analytics or similar to gauge your complete info – maybe next update?

While Woopra is in beta, using the service is free to any blogs or sites with less than 10,000 daily page views. There will be a premium version available when Woopra officially launches, though they’ll continue to offer a free version as well.

photo credit: adria.richards

Woopra 1.3.1 Beta Launches originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.

This is a guest post from my wife Jacki. I thought it’d be interesting to get the views of someone who has no real interest in social media and let them explain why. And one thing I love about Jacki is her no-nonsense approach to everything. To learn more or connect with Jacki, please visit her blog Just Kickin’ It.

I was recently asked my views on social media and all the glorious tools therein. Truthfully, my mind went blank. I couldn’t tell you the difference between Twitter and Stumbleupon.

I understand Google as a search engine, so when someone says “She found me on Google” – well, that makes sense. But what the heck does “She sent me a tweet” mean?

This is a hypothetical question, don’t answer it – I don’t care and will likely forget what it means anyways. If I need to find something I Google it. If I’ve read something I liked and am able to comment I will, if not, well my opinion doesn’t mean a whole lot anyways. I’m not overly devastated if I don’t get to share it.

I recently started a new blog. I still don’t fully understand what that even means. What I do is I write a virtual journal, I rant about the latest current affairs, I discuss in great detail all of the things that irritate me and what the world could do to improve. Mostly it’s social etiquette and common sense.

When I’m bored and feeling creative, I might tell a story or two, involving a little bit of research on my part. I assume since it’s on the Web, anyone can read it. Great, go for it. I just learned what it meant to “tag”, something which makes sense, but I still don’t know how to do it. So if you can’t find me, well I guess that’s my fault too.

For this I use Blogger. I tried to post a couple of pictures on my recent blog and what a pain that was. I think I’ll stick to journal format from now on in. It’s a personal blog, not professional. It doesn’t have any business purpose, so I’m not trying to draw in any clientele.

My other blog, I run with a couple of other ladies. This is a virtual book club. It’s a bit different than the regular book clubs but it suits its purpose. We use WordPress for this. I can honestly say that after playing with it a bit, it’s far more user-friendly than Blogger. And I’ve mastered the art of adding pictures. I think that deserves a pat on the back right there.

Facebook is a given. But someone listed a bunch of other nonsense:

• Twitter
• Stumbleupon
• Digg
• Friendfeed
• LinkedIn
• Delicious
• Reddit
• Google Alerts
• Google Reader
• Monitter
• Technorati

What is all of this? It’s a foreign language to me. If you want me to read something, send me a link. I really couldn’t care less what you use to spread the word, or what format you put things in. I’m glad it works for you, really I am. But are all these things really necessary?

Take Stumbleupon for example. There was probably about a month where my husband went nuts with sending me a bunch of things he stumbled upon. One day I watched him send out an email. He had to cut here, paste there, click a few buttons and voila! Seems simple, right? Why the heck couldn’t he just paste the link in a normal email and send that out? Why go through Stumbleupon at all?

And Twitter? This one I can’t get over because it’s all the new rage amongst Social Media Experts and PR Gurus. I guess I don’t understand the Internet world, and what is the point of learning it when it changes on a daily basis?

I use Blogger, WordPress and Facebook. But really, if I want to write something and share it, is there any difference if I use Microsoft Word or Notepad? Couldn’t I just use that and send it off to whomever I want to read it?

If I want it to go public, then using some domain might be an idea, but does it really matter one way or the other what the heck I put it in? Can you tell the difference between Blogger and WordPress, as a reader? Maybe one is more appealing to the eye than the other but it’s more of the same.

So go on and speak your language. But in plain English, you could just tell me, “Here… read”.

Thanks for listening.

Social Media is a Language of Its Own originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.