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!

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

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.