Recent WordPress Plugins

Since my redesign, I’ve been experimenting with a few new plugins here, and thought I’d share a few of my findings and fun. Some of the plugins, you won’t even notice because they work in the background controlling things like spam and spammy visitors to this site. Others are put in place to make my life a little easier and your experience a little more fun! Here are some of the WordPress plugins I’ve recently installed on this site:

• U Comment, I Follow: this plugin is by Randa Clay and it destroys the “nofollow” attribute assigned to links left in comments – fully allowing Google to follow the links and give inlinking credit to commenters who leave their links on this blog. The ‘nofollow’ attribute was supposed to reduce the amount of spam left in comments. ‘nofollow’ told the Google and other search engines “Do not follow (or count) this link” – in an attempt to de-motivate comment and trackback spammers. If the spammers know their link is not going to be counted, why would they persist? Ahhh – but persist, they do and the ‘nofollow’ stuck. The ‘nofollow’ still does exist on this blog – however, if you are a regular commenter here.. your link will be followed after you’ve left a specified number of comments. Everyone deserves link lurve! Thanks, Randa!
• Automattic Stats – the ever popular WordPress.Com-type Dashboard stats are now available for single-user, self-hosted WordPress users. I’ve had it installed for the past two days and it’s really cool. You DO need a WordPress.Com account and an API key. If you are using Akismet for comment spam protection, you can use the very same API key for Automattic Stats. Thanks WordPress guys!
• http:BL – by Jano allows you to verify IP addresses of clients connecting to your blog against the Project Honey Pot database. Thanks to http:BL API you can quickly check whether your visitor is an email harvester, a comment spammer or any other malicious creature. Communication with verification server is done via DNS request mechanism, which makes the query and response even quicker. Now, thanks to http:BL WordPress Plugin any potentially harmful clients are denied from accessing your blog and therefore abusing it. You DO need to grab a free account from Project Honey Pot in order to get an access key.
• Show Top Commentators – over on my sidebar you’ll see the “This Weeks top commenters – thanks!” and it lists out the weeks Top 20 commenters.. and keeps track of how many comments each person has left. The more comments you leave, the better the chances are for you to have your name in lights… well ok – not lights really, but at least your name listed with the link back to your site (assuming you’ve left your link in my comments)… which is a nice perk because it gives you an incoming link from my PR6 front page! Just my way of saying “Hey! Thanks!” The plugin resets itself every Monday.
• Viper’s Video Quicktags – by Viper007Bond, provides an easy way of embedding videos in your blog posts – – from YouTube, Google Video, IFilm, Metacafe, MySpace, Vimeo or your own videos in these formats: MOV, API, MPEG, WMV, or FLV (Flash).. among others. Just simply click one of the new buttons that this plugin adds to the write screen (rich editor included) and then paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box — easy as that. You can fully configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, alignment on the page) and much more. Best of all, it won’t break your page’s (X)HTML validation. (that last bit was the clincher for me… I like to post videos sometimes, but the embed code always breaks validation).

That does it – my WordPress plugin fun for this week! Big thanks go out to the plugin developers who have created these wonderful bits and bytes for public consumption. If you are a WordPress user and are taking advantage of these, or any other great plugins, please consider dropping them a line and saying “Thanks for the GREAT work!” . . or better yet, if they happen to have a donation button on their site, take a moment and drop them a buck! These folks make WordPress blogging fun!