Plugin for Wordpress - A Better Tag Cloud

I've just come across a plug in for wordpress called "A Better Tag Cloud" and it does exactly what it says on the side of the tin. It offers you a fair bit of customization on the Tag cloud front. I've updated my my Smokeback and The Dead Adventurers Club sites with it, so you can see it in action.

I also have this post here, which includes a few more useful wordpress plugins that I use

How to add a Retweet button to Blogger, and My top ten posts - so far....

As you can now see, there is a shiny retweet button at the bottom of my posts. This is courtersy of Tweetmeme

I did find the instructions on their site, here, a bit crap and instead followed the instructions over here at Blogger Resources

One thing I would add, is make sure, you add <br> in edit html to the natural end of your posts, so it displays correctly. I am not going to go back and do this for all ninety posts on this blog, but I thought I would make sure, my ten most popular pages were formatted correctly.

[EDIT]
 Check the comments for some advice on how to place this in the date/comment section


Add the following line

tweetmeme_source = 'tweetmeme';

Replacing tweetmeme with your twitter username, so the posts come up @yourusername when tweeted.

Out of interest, here is the countdown to my top ten posts - handy if you are after some hang over sunday reading.

10	Leeds Victoria Hunslet Mill
9	The Bhagavad Gita
8	Mazz in Leeds New Logo
7	Round House Leeds - Anyone Chuck any light on this ?
6	Shout out to my Fellow Brit FridayFlash'rs
5	A Bit of a Waffle on Twitter Followers Part II
4	The Grammar W'nker
3	A Bit of a Waffle on Flash Fiction
2.	A bit of a Waffle on Twitter Followers Part I
1.	How to Write the How to How to

Bit.ly - a few features you may not know...

This post isn't a review about bit.ly, but if it was, then I would sum it up with two words; "Its great".  For those of you not familiar with bit.ly, all it does is shorten url's, which is most handy when using services such as twitter. Eg. (can you start a sentence with eg? -Ed)  the link to this weeks story from the DAC is

http://thedeadadventurersclub.com/2010/01/the-complexing-conundrum/

Through the power of bit.ly it now becomes

http://bit.ly/8luHLO

May we all dance a thousand dances in awe of this magic. I think one of the things that stand out about bit.ly is, that the interface is clean, concise and easy to use - so much so, I've never really poked around, what else bit.ly can do, until now.

Did you know you can have more than one twitter account associated ?

You can associate accounts by clicking on the account link in the top right corner. When you associate more than one account, when you shorten a URL, you get the choice of which account to tweet it from.

Did you also know, there is a plugin that allows you to shorten URL's form your browser toolbar ?

 You can find this under tools, as well as a tool for tweetdeck and twitterfeed.

You can also share which links you have shorten, if you have the make link history public option switched on (its under account options)

There are two ways in which you can share this information, firstly via a url which you can find under your account settings.

http://bit.ly/user/recent/chance1234

Or, by a RSS Feed, which again you can find, under your account settings

http://bit.ly/user/recent_rss/chance1234

Finally, and most interesting, you can reverse search a bit.ly link. There is the option to search twitter for a specific bit.ly link. You can find this under tools and it will show you, who has tweeted the link and associated traffic.

Much easier than using the search tool, is to add the word 'info' to a shorten url eg.

http://bit.ly/info/70owk3

WARNING! This can be used for good and evil

PlugIn for 301 Redirections for WordPress

As mentioned previously in this blog, where I moved my smokeback.com site from blogger to wordpress, I had a ton of crap left over .  This plugin was exactly what I needed back then, it allows you to redirect wrong URL's . I would say this is a must have for anyone moving form blogger to wordpress on the same domain.

Plugin website

PlugIn for Posting Code on a WordPress Blog

Firstly a rant. 


IF YOU WANT TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY AS A PROGRAMMER THEN;


Make sure you keep all your historic projects in check. Whether that be, making it clearly marked that it is abandoned, removing all instances of it from the web, or updating documentation/websites and pointing past users to newer versions. 


rant over. 


I have been helping out on setting up this wordpress blog for a Leeds based IT contractor who is posting up code samples amongst other things.  It has been a real pain finding a plugin that works (see above rant) and in the end, the blog is using Syntax Highlighter Evolved. I honestly couldn't tell you whether it was the best, because I gave up going through them, when I found the first one that worked. 

Handy Widget For Blogger - Related Posts

Not quite perfect, but just discovered LinkWithin , a 'widget' for blogger, which show  related posts at the bottom.  On my wordpress sites I use Effective Related posts, which is pretty accurate in terms of its selections, which is where Linkwithin looses some points.

Still, I do find that people do tend to click on related posts and have been looking for something like this for blogger for a while.

WordPress PlugIns that I actually use

The following is a list of plugins that I use on either my drawing , writing blogs, or blogs I have set up for other people.

updated  05/04/2010

Efficient Related Posts
This inserts at the end of your post, links to other posts on your site that are similar in content to the current one. Its not to bad at all, I would like a bit more customisation options but, out of all the ones I have tried, this seems to be the best.

Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin generates a XML sitemap and submits it to search engines. It has a wide range of options and does exactly what it says on the side of the tin. Handy to use in conjunction with google webmaster tools.

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam

I only have this activated on my drawing site at the moment as that has been hit a few times by spam comment attacks. Again, It does what it says on the side of the tin, I have not had any spam comments since.

Redirection

This allows you to set up 301 redirects on your site with ease, most recommended if you are planning to move from blogger to wordpress on the same domain.

Syntax Highlighter

Allows you to post code snippets within your blog. Handles a wide arrange of programming languages and seems to work well.

Easy Contact

Allows you, very easily to set up a contact form on either a page or post on a wordpress blog. A good few options of customisation

A Better Tag Cloud

Does exactly what it says. Offers a better tag cloud than the default one installed and offers a wide range of options.

Best thing about all of the above, is they will cost you nowt.

Icerocket

I came across this week, a site called icerocket which is a real time blog search engine. The nice thing about it, is you can also search the web,  twitter, myspace, newsources and images. It is also nicely laid out.

It also has a blog tracker tool, which I have added both of my blogs to and one of the pieces of information it gives you is your blog rank. I thought I would take a look at what was above and below my sites in the rankings.

First of all my Smokeback site has a ranking of #1645.

Above that is Mikes Money Making Blog  which looks like one of those sights that just scrapes how to make money articles - I can't even be arsed to read it.

Below my site is The Best PTC  which is a site just listing Pay to Click sites banners.

Moving onto  The Dead Adventurers Club  ,this has a rank of #4655

Above that is Tanto 84 , which I have no idea what it is about , looks like its in some sort of nordic language - though I am most likely wrong,

Below it is Chad and Tammys Adventures  Which is a blog from a couple of Triathletes from Victoria ,British Columbia

So what I have learnt from looking at my rankings ? absolutely sweet FA, I also notice that my Dead Adventurers Club site has jumped 647 positions in a day and my smokeback site, a mere 30. Well I do have a pretty looking graph.