Not alot of blogging going on today, I had a CSS class from 9am to 5pm. While durring breaks I helped fellow blogger Scott Janz get his blog back up. (since it was part my fault it went down…. mental note always believe warning messages when they pop up..)
I learned alot to help me in the future to create my own template for WordPress and also PostNuke. As you can see I changed my theme yesterday, the black was cool but not that pleasing to the eye.
But like I said not mush blogging today but I will look through my RSS and see whats happening in the world (other than Atlanta FREAKIN out cuz we’re gonna get ice tonight)

My Top Task WordPress Plugins – Part 2 of 3

Last Friday I posted Part 1 of this series, My Top Visual WordPress Plugins in todays post I’m going to cover the top Task plugins. These are the plugins that I use behind the scenes that help me on a day to day basis to get the story out, know my audience and keep spam away.

If you missed the previous post, read My Top Visual WordPress Plugins – Part 1 of 3

Akismet – On Curbob.com this plugin hasn’t been used that often, but here on Tek-Works, Akismet has already in 1 month blocked over 1000 pieces of spam. Yes, Spam, every WordPress blog has this plugin auto installed, the user only needs to register and get an API key to use it. Akismet saves bloggers from over 4 million spam comments a day. If you haven’t enabled this plugin, do it today, you’ll thank me later.

MyBlogLog, the widget that is taking over the blogging world has just added a small but useful update. Less than a month since Yahoo bought MyBlogLog, they’ve incorperated another one of their web buys with it. Now if you check out the profile page of a visitor, under their name is a link to their Flickr photos. They owner must first allow Flickr and MBL to talk to each other but this is just a matter of a few clicks and logging into Flickr.

For those that would like to have an online Photoshop, Fuxto has come out with a image editor completely online. After testing it out for a bit, I enjoyed it. It has layers and many tools like PS and allows you to save on your own HD (soon to have online storage with sharing). Being a Photoshop user I kept trying to hit shortcut keys but if I was on someone else’s PC this would be great for a quick edit. Also not everyone has a copy of Adobe.
This is still in major beta but it is one of the things I’ve been looking for. This is part of my list of all daily applications I use that should be ported over to web2.0. I guess I need to post that list one of these days

My Top Visual WordPress Plugins – Part 1 of 3

Over the next couple days I’m going to write about the WordPress Plugins that I use. The reasons I use them, their exact use and where to get them.

Part 1 - Visual WordPress Plugins. This list will be the plugins that I use for the look and style of the blog. How they contribute to the look and feel and how they make your visit a bit more pleasant.

Part 2 - Task WordPress Plugins. A list of all the plugins that I use behind the scenes that help me on a day to day basis to get the story out, know my audience and keep spam away.

Part 3 - Marketing WordPress Plugins. Tool and plugins used to help with pagerank, getting my blog listed on Goggle and other search engines. Why they are important and just what do they do for my site.

Ultimate Tag Warrior – UTW is the King (or Queen) of Tagging. If you need any tagging done this is the plugin for you. Ultimate Tag Warrior allows the creation of tags for: Technorati, Flickr, Delicious, Wikipedia and others, including your own tags page for easy searching. By using tags, not only will searches be easier but UTW also can create a tag cloud. With many choices for the cloud, from font size to colors, check ours out on the right sidebar. Another feature of UTW is to be able to list related post as per the tags, keeping the interest of visitors is always a good thing. Check in Part 3 on how UTW helps with backlinks and getting your blog known.

While checking that my site was W3C compliant I noticed that the MyBlogLog code was showing up about 10 times in different places. A quick search found the answer.

As per The Real Estate Blog Lab when you see an & add amp; right after it.. check out their site it will explain it all.

So after fixing that I’m glad to say my site now “Is Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional!”

• Video: More Environmental Hysteria Bullshit
• Survey, why do you blog? This will help Darren give a talk at Northern Voice in February and you could win cash

• Lightbox 2.3 plugin for Wordpress
  This page is the home of my implementation of the brilliant Lightbox 2.2 javascript,
  (tags: wordpress plugins)
• Slickr Gallery (AJAX Flickr plugin for Wordpress)
  Slickr Gallery is a bandwidth-friendly AJAX photo gallery plugin for Wordpress. It allows you to pull your Flickr-hosted photos into a gallery section of your blog
  (tags: blog plugin wordpress)
• Media Pirate
  Media Pirate helps you to download videos from the following websites:

  blip.tv break.com dailymotion.com ifilm.com media.putfile.com metacafe.com myvideo.de video.google.com vidilife.com youtube.com zippyvideos.com

  (tags: firefox plugin)
• Blogg-Buzz / Popular Posts
  (tags: blogging community digg)
• Quantcast - Open Internet Ratings Service
  Quantcast is the world’s first open internet ratings service
  (tags: blog marketing traffic)
• Clicky Web Statistics, for blogs
  (tags: blogging statistics)
• Be Anonymous Again For Now
  Late last week, the Superior Court of Arizona in Maricopa County ruled against a Massachusetts-based real estate developer’s petition to unmask the identity of an anonymous website operator, who set up a site dedicated to exposing the developer’s business
  (tags: news EFF)
• Group Formed to Support Linux
  the Linux Foundation, which is being announced today. And the mission of the new organization is help Linux, the leading example of the open-source model of software development, to compete more effectively against Microsoft, the world’s largest softwar
  (tags: linux)

Here are a few quickies about Google that happened while I was out of town:

• BBC and Google Video are in deep discussions to work together. Under this agreement, Google will make some of BBC’s content available through Google Video and possibly, Google’s You Tube. Link
• Google is in talks to acquire in-game advertising firm AdScape Media. Link
• Google and some of the world’s top publishers are collaborating on a system to allow book downloads onto PCs in a format that would make the books available to read on screen or on a mobile device. Link
• TechCrunch i s reporting that Googles anti-phising blacklist contained confidential usernames and passwords of individuals, including logins for bank accounts. Link

Many bloggers that use Wordpress have found the power of widgets. The sidebar widget plugin allows you to add many other plugins to your sidebar just by dragging them to where you want and changing the options, no changing code involved. But not all plugins have been converted to widgets yet. Some will work if you add their code to a text or php widget but still many will not.
What I’ve done on some of my other sites and helped friends on theirs is add the wanted plugin above or below the sidebar widget. This may not be the best way, but it works
To add anything before the sidebar widget look in your sidebar code (usually sidebar.php) and find:

php if ( !function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar() ) :

add anything you want before that code. For adding plugins after the sidebar widget, in the same file search for:

php endif;

(usually toward the bottom of the page) add anything after this bit of code.
Each day new widgets come out so search through the list of them, Also try adding code to a text widget, which comes with the main plugin. But if all else fails try the above. To make the entire sidebar look correct you will have to try li and ul tags. (see how things are structured between the to bits of code that were looked up, tril and error also works)