As an update to WordPress anti-spam plugins, I highly recommend Spam Karma 2. For a time, it seems to be the ultimate protection. I turned off all the other anti-spam plugins (including Aksimet), and everything’s just perfect! SK2 gathers up to a thousand spam comments/trackbacks during a single week on this blog, and I never had a complaint from blog visitors on their inability to add a comment (though some did have to fill in captcha to post a comment with links).

And SK2 still works under WP 2.5! (SK 2.3 was released to support WP 2.1)

Kudos to Dave!

It would be a pity if this excellent plugin is abandoned and stops functioning in one of the upcoming WP releases.

Update: SpamKarma is now GPL (at google code).

Get it here.

It adds Referrer of the person who’s leaving comment on your WP blog. May help to take the right action for seemingly legit, but really spam comments (e.g. if someone was just searching for blogs with enabled commenting to leave a comment with name linked to their biz-website).

Today I moved my blog and gallery into MySQL5 databases from an elderly MySQL4. Also, both WP and gallery are now updated to the latest versions. Soon I’ll change the WP and G2 themes - for the lighter, less cluttered - and will remove some ads… and will also add some others instead

Update generally went well, except for the message I got on the main page:

Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.

It was quite easy to figure out that new WP conflicts with an elderly “Sideblog” plugin - so I had to deactivate that one, and will have to update all the active plugins to avoid some other less evident problems… (actually, just completed updating all the plugins… quite a time-eater, that was.)

Also, there will be a slight change to what and how I write. No other details for now - but stay tuned! All the changes with no exceptions are planned for the good of readers, and for the users’ benefits!

You may discover, that as your blog gets more visitors and pageviews, your are getting more spam in comments to your posts. They originate as actually comments, pings, and trackbacks.
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More and more often I came across “snap previews” appearing on the links in other blogs. So I decided to try it on my blog as well…

The Snap Preview Anywhere is a WordPress Plugin to display those previews. The actual service, providing the previews, is snap.com. They also offer the FireFox Snap search engine (top-right in FF), though I don’t quite get it’s intended purpose…

The plugin page has all the necessary instructions (and even more), so won’t copy-paste here.

The only unanswered question is “Does my blog really needs this?”.
I’ll let it be for the time being… if it gets too annoying, will remove. Please comment if you think that snap previews do help somehow, and if you think that “useless” is not about snap previews.

Update: snap preview anywhere is annoying, if used on all the links. So I decided to leave SPA on for external links only, and (thanks to the new version 1.2) now the preview appears only when hovering the tiny image to the right from the link itself. This is now much less annoying, but still allows to see the preview of the linked page, if you desire to do so.

When you search something on the Internet, it is always convenient to have your search terms highlighted in every page you find. Often you need to use "Cached page" to see your terms - which is not quite convenient and comfortable.

Did you think about the convenience of those of your visitors who came to your blog from, say, Google? If not - it is the time to. With the Seacrh Hilite WP plugin you can highlight search terms in your page, if your visitor comes from Google, Yahoo, Lycos or Baidu, or even your own blog's search.

This plugin is installed and activated as usual.

I'd recommend to: go to Options > Search Hilite, set the "take CSS Style from my Stylesheet" checkbox, cut the sample CSS code from the box just below the checkbox, and paste it into your theme's style.css file (without the lines "< style type='text/css' >" at the beginning and "< /style >" at the end). This decreases generated HTML page size, and is a proper way to handle styles.

Update:
Another tip is to edit the wp-content/plugins/search-hilite/search-hilite.php file and add the following line at the and of the file, just after other similar add_filter lines:

This will enable highlighting in the post titles, not only content. However, is the search term to be highlighted occurs within the "title" of a link, it's display will be broken. I contacted plugin author, asking what can be done about it. As soon as there is an answer - I'll add it here.

This might be the simplest thing to do in your blog - put the post title in front of the blog name. And the plugin to do so is simple - but still appreciated for the effort. Get it and enjoy.

P.S. If you read the WP Codex, especially the paragraph on reversing page title display - please see the comments at "optimal title" home for explanations why the plugin is better.

I stumbled upon a good tiny widget which allows to "rotate" chunks of HTML code in your sidebar (using wordpress widgets plugin).
You may set up a couple of this rotators for different content types (e.g., text links, banners, google ads), and within each block put a number of alternatives, separated with a standard < --!more-- > tag (with no spaces, of course). Now each time when your page is shown, each instance of AdRotator will show one of the alternatives you put into it. Pretty simple and useful!

This is a small widgets-enabled plugin which allows to show your posts in the sidebar. For each instance of Sideblog, you select the category to display in it, the number of posts, and whether to exclude this categorie's posts from your feeds. After that just go to Presentation->Sidebar Widgets, and drag-and-drop Sideblog to the position you want.

Plugin can be found here (and here), or you can just download it.

P.S. Initially I found this plugin description here (uk).

Probably you already know and use it - but I started using it just today.
As expected, this plugin is amazing!

It's main concept is to allow WordPress administrator to use GUI in the admin panel to place new plugins in the arbitrary locations in sidebars (and not only sidebars, but that requires a bit more work), so you don't have to modify your sidebar.php with each new plugin installed.

The actual power of Sidebar Widgets (aka WordPress widgets) is not restrained by the sidebar - the "readme" file of the plugin distribution archive provides hints and ideas on how this plugin could be used. I suspect that Widgets might become the base for the further development of many other plugins and WordPress core as well.

So hurry to the WordPress Widgets homepage, grab one, and install as usual. You might need to modify your theme, if it doesn't support Widgets, but this process is well documented in the "readme" and should be fast and easy to complete.

You will surely enjoy this new experience, if you hadn't yet!

This plugin is expected to increase the coverage of your blog by Google. You will have to register for the google sitemaps tool (which is free), that will be easy if you gmail account. In short, sitemaps let google know which pages your blog/website has, so that it can crawl everything (read more).

This plugin automatically generates blog sitemap each time you create/update a post or a page. This is a must-have plugin, especially if you're crazy about SEO

Sooner or later, you will be interested in how many sites link back to yours, be it a blog or a web-site.

To know for myself, I first used Technorati's code, which displayed Technorati logo with a 'Blogs that link here' link, which opened Technorati search for backlinks. Drawbacks of this solution: you need to leave the blog to see the backlinks count, only backlinking blogs are taken into account, the JavaScript used by Technorati is no good for the blog page loading speed, you have no easily accessible history of backlinks.

All of these problems are solved in the backlinks WordPress plugin. Installation is easy, just a bit complicated by the need to get 'application ID' from MSN's developer site.

Update: some time ago the backlinks plugin ceased functioning, and the plugin's author seems to have abandoned development and support. Thus I disabled this plugin.

Citing RyanConnect: "WP-ContactForm is a simple drop in way for users to get in touch with
you. Its easy for any WordPress user to add this functionality to their
site. Just upload two files and change a few options in your admin
panel and you’re set."

I can only prove the citation. So now you can contact me, too :).

This is the plugin you may find useful if you want to keep visitors to your blog for more than just one-post-reading-time. This plugin will provide to the user entries, which have some common/similar words in the post/page title.

Installation is as always easy. Most probably you will want to put these 'related entries' into yours 'sidebar.php' or 'right-sidebar.php' (if you have one), and your code may well look like this (I assume that in 'Plugins'->'Related Posts Options' you set the pre/post tags to '<li>' and '</li>'):


<?php if ( is_single() || is_page() ) { ?>
<ul>
<li><h2>Related entries</h2></li>
<?php related_posts(); ?>
</ul>
<?php } ?>

The block of PHP code above the actual insert determines whether blog visitor is on the post page or blog page - this way 'related entries' will not be shown in listing pages. If you want, you can leave only is_single() in place, for related entries to appear only in posts, and not in pages.

Finally, plugin home is: http://www.w-a-s-a-b-i.com/archives/2006/02/02/wordpress-related-entries-20/

If you want your visitors, arriving from the wrong or just outdated links to find what they might be looking for, it will be a good idea to check Related posts for your 404. That plugin adds an extra function related_posts_404(), which you should put into your '404.php' template file. Now, when someone gets to your 404 page, they might as well get a list of close hits from your blog, and stay longer.

After installing WordPress, the first thing I was looking for was improving my personal WordPress experience with plugins - for extended functionality, usability, and pleasure of use .

Here I will present (and regularly update) the list of plugins I looked at and installed.

The first plugin I installed is WordPress Database Backup - we all know, how painful can the data loss be. Installation is easy (copy-activate), and on-demand database backup is immediately available in Manage -> Backup menu. Plugin automatically pre-selects all default database tables, and allows you to select any other tables you happen to have in your database - these can be, for example, tables of your WordPress plugins. I would recommend saving all the database tables, except if you know that there are tables not related to your blog (you can tell this usually by the table prefix - which is 'wp_' by default).

After you are done with the selection of plugins, you can choose to download the backup, email it, or to store it on the server in a backup folder (plugin handles the creation of the backup folder for you).

After pressing 'Backup', you will see a nice progress bar, and if you had chosen to download the backup, you will get gzipped backup file.

Updates on other useful plugins coming soon... stay tuned