Hands down my favorite part of WordPress is how easily expandable it is through plugins. The big open source community creates all sorts of useful plugins to help expand WordPress from the great blogging software that it is into something incredible.

I use all sorts of plugins on Xatal, and since I’ve been blogging, I’ve steadily found certain plugins to be especially useful for a variety of different tasks. Here are 30 of the best WordPress plugins and how I’ve put them to work:

Additional features for you and for readers:

1. Popularity Contest – One of my favorite plugins, this displays lists of the most popular posts on your website. You can assign different weight to different kinds of hits. You can display a list of the most popular posts by category and by time period as well. The list of the most popular posts in the middle bar is generated with this plugin.
2. WordPress Related Posts – This plugin adds a list of posts at the end of each post. The list is based on the tags given to each post and is highly customizable. I used this plugin to create the list of similar posts at the bottom of this article.
3. Sociable – Sociable adds small icons to the end of each post for submitting the site to common social bookmarking sites, such as Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and StumbleUpon. Sociable has a lot of websites you can choose to add and is highly customizable. The small icons at the bottom of this page come from Sociable.
4. Clean Archives Reloaded – When used, creates a list of your WordPress blog’s archive. This list is collapsible by month, allowing for a quick glance through a website’s old posts. I use this plugin on my Archives page.
5. Contact Form 7 – Creates forms that can alert you via e-mail. This is a great way to create a Contact page (and I used this plugin for mine) and is highly customizable, giving you full control over each field. This is one of the best contact plugins.
6. WP-PageNavi – Makes navigation far simpler for pages. Instead of the basic “Previous” and “Next” links, WP-PageNavi enables pagination to allow for more intuitive and quicker navigation through categories, tags, and archives. WP-PageNavi can be seen in use at the bottom of most pages that list posts on Xatal.
7. WP-Polls – A poll manager for WordPress! Allows you to create functional polls with a variety of options and embed them into posts or sidebars. WP-Polls uses AJAX to load the results without requiring a page refresh and prevents vote spamming. I use WP-Polls on my sidebar, and tit’s a great way to encourage reader interaction.
8. WP-PostRatings – Uses AJAX to create a simple post rating feature for readers. You can easily view detailed overviews of which posts are popular. I’m trying this one out now, and so far so good!

WordPress SEO

1. All in One SEO Pack – A great plugin for quickly optimizing your WordPress blog. This plugin optimizes titles and allows you to insert meta keywords and descriptions into your posts and pages. All in One SEO Pack is used on every page of Xatal.
2. Robots Meta – Gives more control over the robots.txt file that search engines use when crawling your website. You can use this plugin to prevent search engines from crawling irrelevant pages.
3. WordPress Duplicate Content Cure – Similar to Robots Meta, this plugin prevents search engines from crawling erroneous pages.
4. Nice Search – Makes search result pages look better — instead of “?s=mysearch” in the URL, your URL will look like, “/search/mysearch”.

Handling Comments

1. NoFollow Free – Takes off the default “nofollow” on links in comments as a way to encourage readers to comment and to give something back. You can set this plugin to remove the nofollow after so many comments have been made. Xatal is NoFollow Free. Other plugins will remove the nofollow, but I liked this the best.
2. Subscribe to Comments – Allows commentators to subscribe to new comments. Whenever a new comment is posted, an e-mail is sent informing them of the new comment. That e-mail also gives them the option to unsubscribe, if they’re no longer interested. This WordPress plugin is a great way to keep commentators involved in the discussion.
3. CommentLuv – Creates a link in each comment to the commentator’s most recent blog post. CommentLuv encourages more people to comment because the links will grab the attention of readers, potentially bringing more traffic. Another way to give back to your readers.
4. KeywordLuv – If you’re tired of people sending comments using just keywords, KeywordLuv allows you to keep things personal yet still give them their keywords. KeywordLuv allows commentators to specify keywords that are used when linking to their site while still providing a name. See here for a lengthier description.
5. Top Commentators Widget – Installs a widget that displays the readers who have commented the most in the last time period (such as a month, week, etc). You can choose to give links back to their website and to make those links nofollow free as well.

Stats & Blog Traffic

1. Google Analyticator – Inserts the code for Google Analytics into your website. Google Analytics is an essential stat tool that provides a wealth of information.
2. WassUp – A WordPress stats plugin that provides real-time results using AJAX. You can view your stats in a variety of timeframes, from the last 6 hours to all-time. WassUp also displays referrers and separates different types of users (including spam). WassUp is my favorite way to monitor blog traffic during the day.
3. WordPress.com Stats – Another stats plugin that provides quick graphs on your stats by the day. Also displays the most popular posts, the most common keywords, and the most popular outgoing links. When combined with the above two plugins, you’ll have a solid set of blog traffic stats to look at.

Spam Prevention

1. Akismet – This plugin comes with WordPress for a reason. Akismet does a pretty good job of sorting out spam comments from real comments. Akismet has blocked 900 spam comments so far. For comparison, I only have 700 ‘approved’ comments that aren’t spam.
2. WP-Spam Free – I recommend this plugin too. It also does a solid job of preventing spam comments, and in fact they’ll never even reach your spam inbox. WP-Spam Free has blocked 500 spam comments in the last month or so. Between these two plugins, I don’t end up with much spam and readers don’t have to jump through hoops to post comments.
3. Simple Trackback Validation – If you receive a lot of trackbacks on your blog, this plugin will be helpful. It quickly checks to see which trackbacks are spam and which aren’t to save you the trouble of checking each website out yourself.

Backend Functions

1. WordPress Automatic Upgrade – An essential plugin for keeping your WordPress blog up-to-date. WordPress Automatic Upgrade takes you through a step-by-step process whenever a new WordPress version comes out, preventing a lot of unnecessary hassle of upgrading.
2. WP-Super Cache – If you receive heavy traffic on your blog, WP-Super Cache is a must. This plugin caches files, preventing WordPress from needing to load full versions of every post. This saves a lot of server load and can help pages load faster for your users. If you expect a lot of traffic from sites like Digg, you’ll want this plugin.
3. WordPress Database Backup – Even though it’s nice to hope that our data is safe, you’ll still want to make backups. WordPress Database Backup can e-mail backups of your WordPress database to you as often as every hour to make sure you don’t lose anything important. I all but forgot about this plugin, but if I look in my e-mail inbox, I see neat backups created every week for the last 10 months. I’ve restored my blog once with a backup, and it worked great. This is hands down the best of the database plugins out there.
4. WP-Security Scan – This plugin looks over your WordPress blog for any glaring security holes and informs you how to fix them. A must-have plugin to help prevent any hacking of your blog.
5. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer – Optimizes WordPress’s pinging feature by preventing ping spamming.
6. Maintenance Mode – Creates a temporary page informing readers that your blog is down for maintenance. This is useful in preventing readers from seeing an ugly and unfinished blog.
7. Theme Test Drive – Allows administrators to test a new theme out without the visitors having to view it. Essential for working out those last few kinks out of a theme or for simply trying one out to see if you like it before switching.

Technorati Tags: blogging, wordpress, plugins

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RateMyProfessors is a quick way to guess what to expect

When it comes time to pick your college classes, RateMyProfessors becomes a famous name on college campuses as students frantically look up professors, reading reviews and checking ratings. www.RateMyProfessors.com has become a quick way to find out what to expect from a professor you have never heard of before.

But is the information accurate? Is RateMyProfessors.com a reliable way to evaluate a professor beforehand?

From my experiences yes, but you need to know what to look for.

What to look at on a professor’s profile:

Take a look at the summary of scores. Pay special attention to easiness and helpfulness. These two are the most important. Consider how relevant both of them are — if you’re taking advanced biology, of course the professor isn’t going to be easy. If you’re taking a giant lecture, helpfulness won’t be nearly as important as in a small seminar course. Granted, higher numbers are still better than lower numbers.

Pay attention to how many people have rated the professor. If only a small handful have, you should definitely give less weight to these numbers, but if you see that thirty or forty students have rated the professor, that gives a lot more truth to these ratings.

How to interpret the reviews

The reviews at the bottom of the profile are incredibly helpful, but you need to know how to properly read them. Look for specific comments. Comments that say “this professor gave a lot of homework that was hard to complete” are a lot more useful than “this class was hard”. Find why students liked or disliked the professor rather than just what they felt.

Don’t worry too much about outlying opinions — find a general trend amongst comments. No matter how good a professor is, there’s always going to be one disgruntled student upset about something (and that something might be the student’s fault). Of course, this goes the other way as well: if most opinions are negative, then a single positive opinion shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

Pay attention to what class they had the professor for. An intro-level course and a graduate class are completely different. Pay more attention to reviews written for the class you’re about to take.

www.RateMyProfessors.com is an extremely useful tool if used properly.

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A lot of searches are pretty reasonable, but in most batches, there’s that one weird one that just makes you think, “who the hell searches for that?!”:

It’s really surprising to see the things people actually search for, but believe it or not, these are real. I spent some time typing in different common phrases to see just what Google searches were suggested. The results were pretty entertaining…

* These might be a bit offensive on a variety of levels, you’ve been warned.

What funny searches have you seen pop up in Google?

Technorati Tags: funny, internet, google

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Twitter receives a lot of buzz

In the techno-world, it’s hard to go a day without hearing Twitter mentioned in some way — how revolutionary it is, a company’s twitter name, and so forth.

I’m taking a college class about Web 2.0, and recently a guest speaker spoke about Twitter, which spawned a large discussion about the site. We came to agree on four points:

It hasn’t caught on with the younger generation.

Most college students still stick mainly to Facebook. Those who do use Twitter use it in addition to Facebook or as a separate means of networking. Twitter is not a big thing with students, and few really mention it. A lot of the media overestimates its appeal to the younger generation, and instead adults are more caught up with tweeting.

Signing up for Twitter is simple.

Twitter may have caught on with adults more is because of the simplicity of it. It’s quick to sign up for, the concept is simple, and the interface works well. Most other social networking sites are pretty involved when you get started — you have to add details, find friends, upload pictures, and so forth.

Twitter offers a way to follow important people.

Unlike Facebook and MySpace where befriending anybody famous is likely to lead to rejection, Twitter allows you to follow these people easily. You can follow Shaq, you can follow a Harvard professor.

Twitter is most widely-adopted in the tech world.

Although all sorts of people have Twitter, the demographic where Twitter has hit hardest is in the tech world. Companies and bloggers create a Twitter to have an online presence that extends beyond their website.

What do you think about Twitter?

Technorati Tags: twitter

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Does monitoring statistics cause us to blog for the wrong reasons?

The problem is, so many bloggers make traffic their entire focus. All over the Internet, there are tons of posts detailing good techniques to increase the number of people who read your blog. As Ben at Frogstr points out, when bloggers decide to change their style and focus just to receive more page views, a lot of the originality of a blog is lost in the process. Even though the blog will cater more to a general audience, the niche audience the author may have originally started out trying to attract may drift away and lose interest.

After thinking about it for a while, I’ve realized that the secret to maintaining your originality is to simply stop monitoring statistics.

Hear me out.

This is an odd approach I’m sure, and it’s definitely easier said than done. But if blogs are structured so much on the outcomes of our statistics, what would happen if we just… turned them off? If we did our best to stop monitoring hits, referrals, keywords, etc?

I can’t imagine not having a general idea of how read my blog is — I’m a bit of a math guy, and I like to assign numbers to just about everything. But, in theory, if you ignored all statistics, the only way you could even guess at the popularity of your blog would be the number of comments a post receives. Of course, comments aren’t always indicative of how viewed a post is, so you could never really accurately guess at your traffic.

Without any stats to look about, worries about your traffic would go away, leaving only the desire to write.

Abandon stats completely? Are you mad?

Of course, this isn’t for everyone. Some people rely on blogs as a major source of income, and in those cases traffic is most definitely important. For other people, receiving traffic is such a large part of blogging that removing it would take out a lot of the enjoyment.

But if you feel jaded with the focus on traffic, hits, PageRank, and all that jazz, shunning stats from your web life could be relieving and even a bit inspiring — a return to the basics: just writing posts for people to read.

What do you think? Am I off my rocker?

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Sure, you’ve done all you can up to this point, and it’s just a waiting game, but there’s always going to be that nervousness of if you got into your schools or if (God forbid) everything went haywire.

I’ve been looking around online to try to find websites to help answer that very same question for my girlfriend. I’ve found two very helpful sites:

I’ve mentioned College Board before. In addition to being the website where you sign up for SATs, College Board provides a lot of information about both careers and colleges. When it comes to making a guess about whether or not you’ll get into a school, I recommend looking through “How do I stack up?”. Simply search for a college, and on the main page for that college, you should see a box with that title in the bottom. Just fill in the information and see how you compare to everybody else.

A new website I’ve discovered is MyChances.net. Here, you can fill out a profile about yourself and receive your chances as a percentage. The profile on this site is more extensive than College Board’s — it also asks about many other aspects of your life, including the estimated quality of your essays to hardships in your life.

How accurate are either of these sites? I can’t say, and I’m not sure if anybody can. Both sites use real data from colleges to give you the best information they can, but factors will vary from year to year. Whatever the websites show, take it with a grain of sand. Just use them to get a more realistic idea of what to expect in the next month.

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Back home, we only use wireless Internet, and I’ve grown very fond of moving my laptop from room to room, rather than limiting me to one desk in the house. Using wireless Internet is great.

However, I’ve found that there are some trade-offs when I choose wireless over Ethernet:

Ethernet Internet is superior here, but it limits you to your desk.

• Slower speeds. After testing my connection on SpeedTest, I’ve learned that Ethernet has a speed of about 5800kbs down and 2429 up. The wireless network reaches about 4500 down and 2000 up. Although this difference isn’t significant, the speeds of the wireless network vary a lot more widely. During peak usage hours, the speed dwindles. Typical browsing is fine, but downloading large files over the wireless is very inefficient.
• No Steam. “Steam” is the software used to play many games online. Many other games and programs that require open ports — such as Halo, uTorrent, and SoulSeek — also will not function while on the wireless network.
  
• No local Apache server. I run an Apache server on my computer. I don’t have any large projects there, but I do use it as a quick way to send files to other people and as a way to develop anything for Xatal. On the wireless network, I can only access the server via localhost.
• Frequent disconnections. The wireless Internet will occasionally disconnect for seemingly no reason at all. This can be a bit frustrating and annoying, depending on what you were doing online when you were disconnected. The Ethernet connection has thus far been surprisingly reliable, more reliable even than the Comcast Internet we have back home.

Because both have their perks, I’ve reached a pretty solid balance between the two. The majority of the time, I’m using my computer at my desk, and therefore I use the Ethernet. But when I want to browse anywhere else, such as my bed, the library, outside, or in class, I change over to wireless Internet. Switching between the two is fast, taking only about 20 seconds. I’m pretty happy to have good signal at most places on campus.

Which do you prefer at your college or home?

Technorati Tags: wireless, ethernet, wifi, internet

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The famous Control level is playable in multiplayer now

For fans of the classic N64 first-person shooter GoldenEye, a modern version of it has been released!

If you have any games using Valve’s “Source” engine, then you can play GoldenEye Source, a modern version of it.

For the main page of the game, check here. You can see more screenshots and other info about the game there.

The online play is pretty fun, although a bit frustrating. I’m used to games with crosshairs in the middle of the screen, so trying to aim without any crosshairs can be a bit tough. However, it’s easy enough to hold a button to aim your gun.

A lot of the original GoldenEye maps aren’t meant for that many people, but they hold up pretty well. The game plans to feature all of the original one-player levels as maps. The online play is definitely more fast-paced than the N64 counterpart, and with the added advantage that you don’t have to worry about screenwatchers.

Seeing as the game is basically free — provided you have a Source game — it’s definitely worth at least trying out. I doubt it will ever catch on as the next big thing,  but it’s great for the nostalgia.

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Everything I found seemed to have a little bit more or less than what I wanted — I just couldn’t find something that seemed to work right.

A sample Google Reader interface

So after searching thoroughly, I realized that the best solution came from the same company that seems to do most everything right — yes, I’m talking about Google.

Google Reader can combine all of your RSS subscriptions in a nice, easy-to-read interface, and the FireFox extension Google Reader Watcher can display your unread items in the  status bar, popping up notifications upon new posts. The addon is pretty simple but very customizable, giving you a good amount of control over how your feeds are handled.

Google Reader Watcher and Gmail Notifier side by side in the status bar

Finally, all my woes are solved! I can now keep much better track of what I have (or haven’t) read, and now I can be updated when new posts are made.

Before I was occasionally missing out on posts by blogs I like to read, and I was getting pretty frustrated finding ones that I’d missed.

This may be helpful to a few of you who might be looking for a good way to integrate RSS into your browser. If you use any other method, please tell me!

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Web design galleries are the best sources for inspiration

Whenever I’m in the mood for inspiration for web design, I always immediately flock to web design galleries to try to get some ideas. Since these sites feature the up and coming best designs on the Internet, there’s no better source for ideas and inspiration out there than a quality design gallery.

However, there are countless CSS galleries on the Internet, and finding the best ones can actually be pretty tough. After hunting around for a while, I’ve come up with a list of my favorite 35.

If you’ve come up with a design that you would like to submit, many of these sites will allow you to submit your website to them, although some have requirements that must be met.

And, without further ado, here’s the list. All links open in a new window.

1. Beautifully Web Design
2. Best CSS Gallery
3. Creative-Pakistan
4. CSS Beauty
5. CSS Drive (only accepts submissions of other design galleries)
6. CSS Flavor
7. CSS Hazard
8. CSS Import
9. CSS Mania
10. CSS Reboot (read the About page)
11. CSS Remix
12. CSS Website
13. CSS Zen Garden (submissions are stylesheets for the CSS Zen Garden site)
14. CSSBloom
15. CSSclip
16. CSSelite
17. CssGlance
18. DrupalSites.net (Only accepts sites using Drupal)
19. Favorite Website Awards
20. Inspiration King
21. Light on Dark (sites with dark backgrounds only)
22. LoopPress (only sites that use WordPress)
23. Perfection
24. Screenalicious
25. StyleBoost (StyleBoost is a blog, not a gallery)
26. StyleCrunch
27. StyleGala
28. The Best Designs
29. Unmatched Style
30. We Love WP (WordPress only)
31. Web Creme (a personal favorite of mine)
32. Webdigity Gallery
33. Website Design Awards
34. WP Cube (WordPress only)
35. WPCandy (WordPress only)

A few bonus galleries…

These are the galleries I missed and was told about via the comments:

1. Best Web Gallery
2. welovetxp (TextPattern only)
3. Oriental Gallery
4. CSS Daily
5. PixelCSS (in Spanish)

Any others I’ve missed?

Technorati Tags: web design, css

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