Category: Reviews

5 Essential WordPress Comment Plugins

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 6, 2008
7 Comments on 5 Essential WordPress Comment Plugins

After going through wordpress plugin basics and plugins which help you uploading/managing other plugins, its time to move to something really important. I don’t know what is your priority but as a blogger I care most about my readers. Its more important than SEO or other traffic tactics to me which I will discuss in subsequent posts in the series.

So here I am listing plugins which will take your wordpress blogs’ commenting system to the next level, and thus will make it easy for you and your visitors to collaborate.

1. Subscribe to comments plugin

This plugin will add a subscription option to comment form on your blog posts. When a user checks this option, he will be automatically informed via email whenever you or someone else post a reply or other comments on that post.

Also that email sent will contain option to unsubscribe as well as manage subscription for your blog posts.

May not sound important to a blogger this plugin attracts visitor as they don’t have to monitor you blog posts manually. As a reader, when I visit a blog, if I find this subscription option there, I most likely to comment on that blog.

This plugin is in fact so great that next wordpress version is most likely to incorporate in it.

Link: Subscribe to Comments by Mark Jaquith

2. Comment Editing Feature Plugin

This plugin allow your users to edit comment post by them. Many times, readers of this blog requested this feature here and so I am adding it today.

You can control time period till editing option will be open. I think this is really nice plugins which can help comments to be more meaningful.

Link: WP Ajax Edit Comments by Ronald Huereca

3. WordPress Threaded Comments

This plugins is good for posts which invites lots of comments. This let your visitors reply to a particular comment like it happens on forums.

I used this plugin in past but I don’t use it anymore because sometimes it makes it hard to find recent comment on a post which have hundreds of comments.

Link: WordPress Threaded Comments by ????

4. Better comment manager

If you really care about answering comments on your blog, then this will make this task easy.

It will add a tab “Better comment manager” to your blogs dashboard which allow you to replay to all your comments on different posts from a single page. It will also add option for threaded reply in case you are using Threaded Comments plugins as described above.

Link: Better comment manager by Keith Dsouza

5. Paged Comments

This plugin is good for posts which attracts hundreds of comments. Those comment make your post page so long that if you have something important in footer, visitor needs to scroll a lot for that.

Link: Paged Comments by Keyvan Minoukadeh

Apart form these there are softwares which notifies you whenever a comment is posted on your blog, But they all are so primitive and make use of some sort of hacks or polling techniques which increases load on your blog. So I am waiting for WordPress 2.7 which will have comments API. With comments API one can really expect some nice desktop softwares to mange comments.

Thats all for the day! Tomorrow I will post about visitor centric plugins tomorrow. 🙂

Tags plugin, Plugins, Series, Wordpress, Wordpress Plugins

Reviews

2 WordPress Plugins to Make FTP Clients Obsolete

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 5, 2008
5 Comments on 2 WordPress Plugins to Make FTP Clients Obsolete

As I promised yesterday, in today’s post I will explore few wordpress plugins which will make uploading/managing other plugins/themes easier. Using these plugins will make FTP clients useless as far as wordpress is concerned.

Again as with all popular demand, there are many plugins which can do this FTP thing for you but I like only two of them as listed below.

1. OneClick Installer Updater:

This plugin has simplest interface with minimum options. I guess best for new wordpress users. I like following features most…

It allows you to upload plugins/themes directly in compressed zip format.
It allow you to upgrade all plugins at once.
Firefox integration allows you to directly add plugins/themes using context-menu command from any webpage.
You can delete unwanted themes directly from Design page at dashboard.

Link: OneClick Installer Plugin by Anirudh Sanjeev & Janis Elsts

2. WP Easy Uploade

This is designed exclusively for uploading on to wordpress. It provides more options but when I tried to use it, I noticed I always ended up selecting what OneClick installer does automatically, like option to uncompress and delete a zip file uploading. Things I like about this plugin…

Allows you to upload anything to wordpress. Good if you often upload files like videos, etc via FTP to your wordpress upload folders.
You can completely control location of uploads by specifying any path under wordpress root directory. Manual paths are automatically created if they don’t exist.
This plugin is available in many languages. Currently, Turkish, Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Indonesian, and Spanish translations are available.
Interface looks much cleaner and attractive despite more number of options.

This plugin adds an Upload Files option under Mange tab.

This plugin can be better if it can remember options last time selected or allow a user to set default options.

Link: WP Easy Uploader by Chris Jean

There may be more plugins like this but these two are really good. Also those who always sticks with new wordpress version may not need these as wordpress 2.7 may have thse features builtin.

I strongly recommend using one of the above plugins since you will be encountering many new plugins in coming days here. 🙂

Tags Firefox, plugin, Plugins, Series, Wordpress, Wordpress Plugins

Reviews

Lifestream.fm – Stream Your Life on One Page!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date July 14, 2008
5 Comments on Lifestream.fm – Stream Your Life on One Page!

Lifestream is a new aggregator service from social bookmarking service mister-wong.

As of now there are 57 services are available to add into your account which includes famous services like Facebook, Digg, del.icio.us, Flickr, Google Reader, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, LastFM.

When you start adding services at Lifestream, it gets all past content as well so creating sort of your biography over one page. One can look at Lifestream as twitter for your entire digital life.

If you are blogger then you can show this steam on your blog as well using Lifestream badge.

For easier access, the service already have desktop interface ready via an Adobe Air app. This means all Windows, Mac, Linux users can enjoy this service from their desktop.

I hope to see support for more services, specially my favorite Orkut soon at Lifestream.

As of now the service is in beta but their country manager Fabian Posada arranged few invitation codes for our readers. Thanks Fabian. 🙂

Invitation Codes for Lifestream:

63f6a6a6
33b93d53
ec4281f1
66186574
b9997de1
5bf212dc
e60d016f
0eb5403e
3753e15f

While signing up for Lifestream use any of invitation code above. Note that each of above code can be used only once. So hurry up! 😉

Link: Lifestream

Tags Bing, Google, Internet, Windows, YouTube

Reviews

mChek on Airtel – Mobile Based Payment System in India [m-commerce]

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date July 11, 2008
81 Comments on mChek on Airtel – Mobile Based Payment System in India [m-commerce]

Update: We are unable to help you with your technical queries regarding mCheck. Please contact their official support: support@mchek.com. Thanks Pralhad. 🙂

mChek is a new payment system that link your debit/credit card or SBI bank account to your mobile phone, allowing you to make payments from your mobile phone. Once registered you can pay your phone bills, transfer talktime to your friends accounts, book tickets for flights, movies etc from mobile via simple instructions.

They have tie-up with Airtel which allows Airtel subscribers to download mChek application which provides simple graphic interface to use mChek. There are no charges for downloading as well as using mChek as of now. I tested it and its working really nice.

Download instructions:

SMS AIRTEL to 543219
You will get a reply containing a link to download mChek.
Don’t worry about downloading charges. Its free!

Links: mChek – FAQ | Airtel – Demo

(Tip by: Dr. Rahul Talale)

Tags Bing, Blogger, Internet

Reviews

Save Background Images Easily in Firefox with Backgroundimage Saver Addon

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date July 9, 2008
10 Comments on Save Background Images Easily in Firefox with Backgroundimage Saver Addon

In Firefox, it is always easy to save images. All you have to do is right-click on an image, and select “Save Image As” option. But many time it happens that when you right-click on an image, this option does not appear. Even worse a small transparent image is saved like in case of Orkut profiles. Sauravjit had similar problem while saving a pic from fashion website.

This happens because, image you are viewing is set as background using a CSS trick. Technically you can just open source code and find image path without much trouble, but many people would like to make it simple.

Backgroundimage Saver is a simple firefox extension that provides help in such cases. When installed, it automatically detects such background images when you click on them and shows “Save Background Image As” option, as highlighted in screenshot below.

Link: Backgroundimage Saver (for Firefox 3) | Firefox

[Update: Added missing download link for firefox 3. Thanks to Mini’s comment.]

Tags Bing, Chrome Extensions, Firefox

Reviews

Tweetmarks – Organize Twitter Links and Share them on Del.icio.us Automatically!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date July 8, 2008
2 Comments on Tweetmarks – Organize Twitter Links and Share them on Del.icio.us Automatically!

Tweetmarks is a service to easily organize links you share on Twitter. This service is from same guys who created TweetBeep, a Google Alert like service for Twitter.

Like their earlier service, this also provides you with plenty of options. Most interesting is one where Tweetmarks add your links to del.icio.us account automatically.

Tweetmarks is like del.icio.us for twitter. On their homepage you can see links shared over twitter. You can tweetmark links that interests you. This is same like people save other bookmark on del.icio.us. There is a separate Popular Tweetmarks section where you can see what links are popular with Twitter users. There is also a search engine to search tweetmarks!

If you are wondering about links you already shared on twitter then tweetmarks can add all of your links back through April 2008.

Link: Tweetmarks

<p></p>    <p></p>    <p></p>    <p></p>    <p></p>    <p></p>    <p></p>    <p></p>    <p><strong>Related: </strong><a href="https://devilsworkshop.rsites.dev6.rt.gw/2008/06/21/tweetbeep-google-alerts-for-twitter/">TweetBeep – Google Alerts for Twitter</a></p>

Tags Firefox, Google, Social Bookmarking, Social Media, Twitter

Reviews

Find .COM Domains easily using Ixquick’s Domain Name Finder

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date July 7, 2008

Finding a nice domain name is toughest part while starting a website or blog. Earlier we used Xona’s domain hack tool to find domains like del.icio.us or ma.tt. Today I am posting about Ixquick’s Domain Name Finder which makes finding a .COM job easy.

This can be used in two-ways.

First say if you have long list of keywords to search, then you can put entire list in First Words box there and click Search. It will output available domains from list in few seconds.

Next say if you are looking for hybrid domain like InsideOrkut, OrkutPlus or OrkutFeeds then you are sure about half part. Now create two with prefix in one list and suffix in one list.

Example:

List 1: Orkut, Facebook, MySpace, …
List 2: Times, Daily, Feeds, Plus, …

Now you can put List 1 in First Words box and List 2 in Second Word box and when you click search all combination from lists are checked. Following image taken from Ixquick’s page demonstrate whole thing graphically…