Tag: Google

8 WordPress Plugins for Feed Subscribers

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 9, 2008
13 Comments on 8 WordPress Plugins for Feed Subscribers

Today in our wordpress plugin series, we will explore plugins related to feeds. Feed is the reason, I love blogs over static websites.

If you are seriously into blogging, then one thing which matters most is feed readers. Many bloggers, including me, display their FeedBurner subscribers count proudly at prominent places on their site.

So here is list of plugins which will improve your feed count as well interaction with feed subscribers.

1. WWSGD Plugin

This plugin which uses name of one of the top web celebrity Seth Godin, allows you to display a subscription reminder message above or below blog post.

You can control position & content of message. Also you can customize if message is to be displayed always for only or few initial page views.

Link: What Would Seth Godin Do by Richard K Miller

2. FeedBurner FeedSmith Plugin

If you use FeedBurner and love its subscriber count chicklet, then this plugin is must for you.

WordPress have lots of feed formats and most probably you had burnt only one of them with FeedBurner. Now if a user access your wordpress feeds via other URLs then their subscription will not be counted towards FeedBurner count.

This plugin will take care of this. You just give it your FeedBurner URLs and it will redirect all wordpress custom feed requests to your FeedBurner feed.

Originally developed by Steve Smith, this plugin is now officially maintained by FeedBurner.

Link: FeedBurner FeedSmith Plugin by Steve Smith & FeedBurner

3. Full Text Feeds

There was a bug in wordpress which used to cut your feeds in the middle of the post. This behavior used to annoy blogger who like to publish full text feeds.

I am not sure if this bug is fixed in latest version of wordpress as I have modified wordpress core feed files completely when applying firefox full feed hack.

Anyway, if you see partial feeds even after choosing option to display full feeds, you can use this plugin to overcome wordpress bug.

Link: Full Text Feed Plugin by Ronald Heft, Jr.

4. URL Absolutifier WordPress Plugin

URL Absolutifier changes all relative URLs in posts to absolute URL, to make the entries work in feed readers that don’t work with relative URLs.

I used a relative URL trick for higher earnings from AdSense product referrals long time back. If you are not sure about your usage of relative URLs then I will strongly recommend you should activate this plugin and then just forget it. I really feel this should be default behavior of wordpress.

Link: URL Absolutifier WordPress Plugin by Scott Yang

5: Feed Footer Plugin

This plugin allow you to customize footer text of each post in feed completely. I use this to show referral ads in my feeds. Please do not try AdSense or any JavaScript code in Feed Footer. It will not work as feed readers ignores JavaScript.

This plugin is really basic, but I don’t mind taking some efforts for some extra bucks.

Link: Feed Footer Plugin by Sherief Mursyidi

6. Similar Posts for Feeds Plugin

Many time, by giving full text feeds, blogger feel they are loosing page-views as a reader may never check their blog.

I use backlinking to my old posts whenever possible to bring readers back to the blog. But often such links go unnoticed or you may not find old post to link back if you are writing on a new topic.

Then its always good idea to display few related posts at the bottom which often attracts clicks. Of course too many links may annoy your reader. So do not show something like 20 related post!

Link: Similar Posts by Rob Marsh

7. Feed Widget Plugin

This plugin will add a WordPress widget, which will display links to various relevant feeds for your WordPress blog. It will always at least display links to the two standard feeds: All Entries and All Comments. It will also display links to category feeds, post feeds or search feeds, depending on the current page being viewed.

I used this long time back. But now this blog have three top level feeds, so I guess using this plugin here will result in too many options. I will definitely add this plugin to my orkutfeeds blog.

Link: Feed Widget Plugin by Ketsugi

8. RSS Footer

This is very simple plugin. It allows you to insert any message including HTML code into the feeds. You can also choose if added message is to be displayed at top or bottom of the post.

You can use this plugin for advertising instead of above Feed footer plugin. Main difference is, RSS Footer adds same footer at the end of every post, while above Feed footer allows you to add different footer for each post.

One plus point with RSS footer is, it allows addition of link back to your original post, which is good SEO as explained by Daniel Scocco.

Link: RSS Footer Plugin by Joost de Valk

That’s it for the day! Tomorrow I will post more about plugins which will improve navigation of your wordpress blog.

Between if you like this post subscribe to our RSS feed or email updates. 😉

Tags Adsense, Advertising, Bing, Blogging, Firefox, Google, Javascript, plugin, Plugins, Series, Wordpress, Wordpress Plugins

Reviews

4 WordPress Plugins for Better SEO and Permalink Structure

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 8, 2008
9 Comments on 4 WordPress Plugins for Better SEO and Permalink Structure

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is one of the hottest topic on web. There are thousands of spam sites/books dedicated on this topic to just mint your money. They do well because of one reason – everybody want traffic for their site, but nobody want to work hard for that!

So let me make this clear right now. Today I am posting about few wordpress plugins & tips, which will really improve your blogs search engine ranking but in most natural way. So do not expect any overnight burst in traffic.

1. ALL in One SEO Pack Plugin

This is best and only plugin enough to do search engine optimization for your blog. This automatically take care of three important things about a blog. Discussing each point in details is beyond the scope of this post. Options listed in bracket must be enabled to optimize that point.

Automatically optimizes post/page titles. (Rewrite Titles options)
Generates META tags automatically. (Use Categories for META keywords & Autogenerate Descriptions options)
Avoids duplicate content. (Use noindex for Categories/Archives/Tag options)

Link: All in One SEO Pack Plugin by hallsofmontezuma & uberdose

2. Google (XML) Sitemap Generator Plugin

This plugin is not actually optimizing anything directly. It creates a sitemap of your blog and submit to it search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc.

If you are hearing word sitemap for the first time, then think it as a protocol/language which websites use to communicate with search engines. Sitemaps tell search engine about your sites content structure, importance of each link, timestamp for each link among other info.

Two biggest advantages this plugin offers:

You can submit only post/”page” URLs as part of sitemap. This option help you avoid category/archive pages which potentially content duplicate contents.
It automatically pings search engine whenever you post a new article. This way search engine add recently posted articlea to their indices within few hours. Gone are the days when search engine index update used to happen once in a month! This is good as search engines prefer fresh content.

You can also link to your sitemap explicitly if you want to. Here is sitemap for Devils Workshop.

There are many options, this plugin provides. Go through them once, for forever.

Link: Google (XML) Sitemap Generator Plugin by Arne Brachhold

3. Permalink Migration Plugin

If your blog URLs have something like ?p=123 or post/123 in them, then its time to change your permalink structure. Not only above URL format is worst example of SEO practice but also is bad from user perspective. Wouldn’t it be nice if a URL gives hint about content in advance?

Permalink options can be found under settings section of wordpress Dashboard. Use a structure which makes use of post names in URLs.

Now thing plugin comes handy when you want to change your permalinks structure for your old blog. Any change in permalinks makes your old blog URLs inaccessible. Many user finds a better custom structure after they start blogging and fear of URL-breaking prevent them from making changes to it.

Link: Permalink Migration Plugin by Dean Lee

4. Redirection Plugin

This plugin allow you to create manual URL redirects within wordpress. This is good for merging many posts or redirecting users from a outdated post to new one.

WordPress allow you to edit permalinks for individual posts. You may like to do this to include a keyword which you may not be able to stuff into post titles. When any such changes happen to already published posts, this plugin automatically create a redirection entry for old post.

Moreover, if you use date-based URLs then changing a posts date will result in change in its URL. Again this plugin transparently adds a redirection rule automatically when something like this happens.

Personally I rely on this plugin a lot for post containing hacks & bugs. These kind of posts becomes outdated as bugs get fixed with time. But then again, when new bugs pops out, it help me redirect users from old outdated bug posts to fresh bug posts automatically.

Link: Redirection Plugin by John Godley

This is all wordpress plugins can do for SEO. I personally think SEO is not an overnight job. I published some posts on SEO in past in case you like to check them out.

After spending more than 2 years in blogging, all I can say that, DONT let SEO tactics affect your writing style. In the end, its your readers who will read your blog. I never mind sacrificing few keywords if they can improve my posts flow. 🙂

Rest, suggest via comments if I am missing something.

Also let me know if you like to read more about wordpress plugins in a particular category.

[Update: I mistakenly linked to a differnet plugin for #3 candidate. Please note the updated link. Sorry for inconvinience.]

Tags Blogging, Google, plugin, Plugins, Series, Wordpress, Wordpress Plugins

Editorial

Series Writing – A new blogging experiment! [Editorial]

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 4, 2008
7 Comments on Series Writing – A new blogging experiment! [Editorial]

Starting from this week, I am trying a new experiment – Series writing.

Series writing is proven effective for many top bloggers. It demands much more consistency than normal blogging but I have more reasons to try this. In last few weeks, I have noticed that I blog about too many topics here. As a consequence, I waste a lot of time deciding what topic to write on.

Personally, I am into many things like blogging, web design, wordpress development, site administration, computer security, SEO, freelancing, etc. So it was always harder for me to choose a niche. So I have decided to take one topic at a time exclusively to blog about.

Of course, I will keep you updated on Orkut, iPhone and other my favorite topics which I closely monitor over the Internet. Series writing doesn’t mean you just blog on one topic. It just means you blog more on a particular topic.

This week I will be posting more on WordPress plugins. This series is intended to help new wordpress bloggers gain most from from countless wordpress plugins.

In my first series, I will post about plugin usability, my favorite wordpress plugins and similar things which can help you as a wordpress user.

If all goes well, I will also write a wordpress plugin series for developers. Yes, I am into commercial wordpress development and I just got paid $300 for my first private wordpress plugin. (project link)

Next I have really great series almost complete on Google Adsense but I will put it live in September once AdSense for product referral retires. I am also planning to cover series on online money-making, SEO, security, etc.

Please let me know if you like to read more about a particular topic. I hope you will enjoy this new experiment.

First post will be live in few hours. Thank you all… 🙂

Tags Adsense, Bing, Blogging, Editorial, Google, plugin, Wordpress

Tips

Performancing Ad Network – New way to make money!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 1, 2008
2 Comments on Performancing Ad Network – New way to make money!

Performancing Ad Network, is a new ad network recently launched. Unlike many ad-networks which took forever to perform, this network is really performing well for this blog. It seems that it will replace Kontera, my second largest source of revenue soon.

Performancing Ad Network seems promising as they are specifically targeting 125 X 125 pixel image ads, popular with blogs sidebar section. Also those who have doubt, this can be used along with Google Adsense without any policy issues.

Here’s how it works…

First sign up as a publisher for Performancing Ad Network.
You submit your site, region on your site, number of 125×125 image ad spots, price for each spot among other details.
After that they give you codes to put on your site. If you are a wordpress blogger, then just install their plugin for easy integration.
Once your site is ready, they put it in marketplace for advertisers.
Advertisers choose to buy one or more ad-spot on you site, in terms of weeks. You can cancel an ad if you find it inappropriate for your site.
Payments are sent each in first weeks of each months via paypal. You get minimum of 60% revenue share.
They also have a nice affiliate program. If you join early, it may work well for you as most of your site visitors are yet to join Performancing Ad Network.

For advertisers…

Performancing Ad Network is looking for new advertisers and are offering $25 off on your first ad purchase of $100 or more.

Link: Join Performancing Ad Network as Publisher | Advertiser

Tags Adsense, Google, Make Money Online, plugin, Wordpress

Tips

Custom SMTP server – a solution for better Feedburner email service?

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date July 29, 2008
9 Comments on Custom SMTP server – a solution for better Feedburner email service?

Last month I posted about updates from FeedBurner email service being delayed almost by one month. Then I posted how to leave FeedBurner without loosing your existing subscribers in case one want to switch to a new service.

But like many bloggers, I don’t want to leave FeedBurner. It would be great if they just improve their email delivery system. Now thinking (seriously) about solution, I reached to a new conclusion.

Technically, one thing that may be seriously affecting FeedBurner email delivery, is high load on their SMTP servers. Of course this is hard to belive as Google fuels FeedBurner.

Now there are many forums, blogging software which allow you to specify custom SMTP server settings. If specified, third party SMTP server is used, instead of webhosts default mail function.

Coming back to FeedBurner, if they give similar option to publisher, one can use SMTP servers they find fast and trustworthy. Also publishers with custom SMTP server can be allowed to send one mail per post as they are not eating up FeedBurners’ mailing resources.

Or FeedBurner can start a new paid service where publishers who are ready to pay extra will get timely email delivery as well as mail per post kind of option.

There is one more hidden good side to this approach. Such paid service will be highly appreciated by top bloggers who makes most money and most traffic as well. So if these biggies shift their load to custom SMTP servers or paid plans, overall quality of service will automatically improve for small blogger! 😉

What do you think about it?

Tags Blogging, Google, Internet

News

Bug in Google Talk’s Invisible Status Feature

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date July 20, 2008
83 Comments on Bug in Google Talk’s Invisible Status Feature

Our reader, Anirudh Mehta, discovered a bug in Google Talk’s invisible status feature available in its Gmail Chat version. If use smartly, you can figure out if the girl next door is really invisible or avoiding you. 😛

Here are steps:

Set the chat as off the record with target user (how?). This can be done only when the other user is online. (need help?)
Now try sending chat to that user when he is invisible or offline.
If he is invisible, then he will receive chat.
But if he Is offline, then you will receive error “<username> did not receive your chat”.

Explanation:

Point 1: When a chat is set off the record, it will no longer get stored in your Gmail account.

Point 2: When you send a chat message to offline or invisible user, it gets delivered by default. At receiving end if user is online, a chat screen pops up showing him your message. If he is offline, your chat message will go to inbox as a mail.

Now if you put together above points then you will notice that, when you set chat off the record it can’t be delivered to inbox as mail, so it will be delivered only if user is online (no matter if he is invisible).

Now the only tricky part is finding a user online for once to set chat off the records. This doesn’t seem hard as invisible status is still limited to Gmail version of Google Talk and you may be in luck if your friend uses Google Talk desktop clients/gadgets or third party IM client to chat.

Tags Gmail, Google, GoogleTalk, Tips & Hacks

Tips

Google Talk tricks and keyboard shortcuts

Post author By sauravjit
Post date July 16, 2008
11 Comments on Google Talk tricks and keyboard shortcuts

Google Talk Tricks:

Change the font size – While holding the control key, move the scroll wheel on your mouse either up or down. This trick works while being focused in either the read or write area.
Insert line breaks – If you want to have a message that spans multiple paragraphs, just hold shift and hit enter. You can add as many new lines as you want to create.
Bold Text – To write something bold, you can use an asterisk before and after the word, like *this* .
Italic Text – To use italics, use an underscore before an after the word, like _this_ .
Switch windows – Hitting tab will cycle through open windows. It will select minimized conversations, to expand them just hit enter. If you just want to cycle through IM’s and don’t care about the buddy list, control-tab will do that and will automatically expand a minimized conversation if you settle on one.
Invitation Tips – You don’t need to say Yes or No when someone wants to add you as a friend; you can simply ignore it, the request will go away. (On the other hand, someone with whom you chat often will automatically turn to be your friend, unless you disable this in the options).

Keyboard Shortcuts:

Ctrl + F4 – It closes the current window.
Alt + F4 – It closes the current window.
Alt + Esc – It Minimize all the windows.
Windows + Esc – Open Google Talk (if it’s minimized, or in the tray)
F9 – Open Gmail to send an email to the current contact.
F11 – It initiates a telephonic call with your friend.
F12 – It cancels a telephonic call.
Esc – It closes the current window.

[Editor Note: This is first post by new author Sauravjit. He blogs about mobile & gadgets at glamac. If you like to join Devils Workshop as an author, you can join here.]

Tags Blogger, Google, GoogleTalk, Tips & Hacks, Windows

Tips

Speed Up WordPress 2.6 with Google Gears

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date July 16, 2008
6 Comments on Speed Up WordPress 2.6 with Google Gears

Yesterday I spend lots of time playing with new WordPress 2.6 and one feature I liked most is support for Google Gears which really speeds up admin panel tasks.

I feel everyone must use this feature which once enabled transparently speed up your wordpress dashboard, so here are step-by-step instructions…

1. Log into wordpress admin panel. Click on Turbo link in top right corner.

2. If you have no Google Gears preinstalled on your machine, you will be asked to install it first. Just go through simple and quick Google gear download & install process. At the end you need to restart your browser and again repeat step 1, which will bring this time “Enable Gears” option.

3. Clicking on Enable will show a confirmation pop-up box. Just mark the checkbox and select Allow option.

4. Now wordpress will start downloading some files. It may take few minutes if you have slow Internet connection but this is one-time process only.

5. Once please wait message disappears, click on close button. Thats it!

If you have fast internet connection you may not feel much difference but users will slow internet option will immediately notice speed improvement while performing admin panel tasks. Please note that this will not at all improve your blogs performance at front-end.

As of now this works only with Firefox 2 & 3 and Internet Explorer 6 & 7. Support for Safari 3 is not yet available.

Google Gears works with browsers so if you use Firefox and Internet Explorer on same machine, you have to Enable Gears separately for both browsers. Also if you use two or more machines for daily blogging tasks you have to Enable Gears separately on them.

Link: Download Google Gears

Tags Blogging, Firefox, Google, Wordpress