It does not take long to generate a fairly large list of old posts. This will make #54 for me, and I have not been a very prolific writer, especially the first couple of months. Keeping your older words of wisdom easily available to your newer readers is one of the challenges facing anyone that has been writing for a long period. Some ways to handle it are mentioned in one of my earlier plugin posts. Here are some plugins that try to help out on a larger scale.

Clean Archives Reloaded uses javascript to generate a collapsing list of posts on an Archive page. You tell the plugin where to place the list by using a shortcode, which also works in the text widget in your sidebar. The list is sorted by month, then by day. There are few options available on the settings page. Basically just the ability to turn the javascript collapse off, and the order the months and posts are sorted.

The biggest problem with this plugin is not really anything in the plugin itself. It is the documentation. The installation page tells you the shortcodes available for use with the plugin. What is not included are various options you can add to the shortcode to customize the appearance of the list. The only shortcode options that are easy to find are the ones you can already control from the option page. The options to turn off showing the post and comment counts are in the Changelog. All the parameters available should be in one easy to find place.

Since that is the biggest problem I found with the plugin, it is fairly obvious that I think it is very nice otherwise. Easy to install, sorts your posts by month, and neatly collapses them. If that is what you want on your archive page, or even your sidebar, this is a good choice.

Simple Yearly Archive also gives you a shortcode for use on an Archive page. It lists your posts by year, newest to oldest. You have a few options, mostly having to do with the way the list looks. There are check boxes that toggle showing post counts, comment counts, categories, and even the excerpt of the post. And there are some parameters you can add to the shortcode, controlling exactly what year or years are shown, and excluding particular categories from appearing.

There is a nice array of options with this plugin, and it is quite easy to use. The very limited breakdown of posts, just yearly lists, not even breaking the list into months, does limit the usefulness somewhat. The ability to decide what years are shown, does help this somewhat, but it basically means multiple pages of archive pages for large blogs that have been around a while. A useful plugin, but probably not for everyone.

Collapsing Archives gives you a widget for your sidebar. In something a bit different, the options page under Settings only gives you access to the CSS that is used by the plugin. All other options are taken care of on the widget itself.

And there are a lot of options. You have the choice of 4 different characters for expanding and collapsing the archives, the order they are shown, whether or not the post titles and dates are shown, even what years and/or categories will be shown. And you can have multiple widgets, if you want things split up by years or categories in different places on your sidebar. All in all, a very nice plugin, easy to install, easy to use, and even easy to style if you want.

Flexo Archives only has two options, the name you want on the widget and whether post counts are shown. The widget gives a list of the years you blog covers, which expand when you click on them to show the months in that year. Clicking on the month takes you to your archive page for that month.

While limited in options, it does what it says it will and is very simple to install and use. This can easily cover what most people need in an archive plugin, so give it serious consideration.

AWSOM Archive (formerly known as AWSOM Drop Down Archive) is a different way of presenting your posts. It creates a dropdown listing of all your posts at the top of your index page and your single post pages. You can also place the listing where you want it by either editing your PHP files or using a code provided. Other options include some CSS styling, limiting the dropdown menu to showing the months that have posts, or using custom setups for what is shown. You can even limit the dropdown to particular categories, if you have another plugin installed.

The customizations available are nice, but unless you are familiar with the WordPress tags, you will have to do some playing with them to get exactly what you want. And the requirement for another plugin, from a different developer, makes the sorting by category options less then desirable. And for at least some people, including me, the plugin does not show up on the installed plugin page.

There are some nice features in this plugin, and the customization options are nice. But the difficulty in using some of the features, and the possibility of not seeing it on your plugin page, mean you should think carefully about trying it out. If you do not know the WP tags or are not comfortable playing with them to figure them out, you lose a lot of the options available and can probably find something else that works for you more easily.

Final Words

Most of the ways of keeping your archives easily available use some kind of collapsing ability. This is not surprising, it is the easiest way of handling a large number of old posts. What it basically comes down to is exactly how do you want the links to your posts to be displayed.

Simple Yearly and Clean Archives Reloaded give you a way to place your archives on a separate page, while Flexo Archives and Collapsing Archives, along with Clean Archives Reloaded, give you some ways to put them in your sidebar. And AWSOM Archive is one of the few that doesn’t use a collapsing interface, at the price of some complexity. One of them should do want you want for keeping your pearls of wisdom in available for your readers.

I have been thinking about adding some ads on my site. I do not expect to make a living doing this, or even really make any money. I do not have a focus, which as many of the money making blogs point out, is really necessary. But it would be nice if I can get enough to occasionally defray some of the costs for my hosting. In that vein, I decided to look at the plugins out there that help handle ads on Wordpress.

And there are a lot of them. A large number are specifically made for using Google Adsense ads, but there are more that allow ads from other programs. I only wanted ones that work in Wordpress 2.7, which meant I didn’t look at a couple that had nice sounding features, but hadn’t been updated in several months.

Adsense Program plugins

• AdsenseAnna is probably the easiest plugin to use. It gives you a single widget for your sidebar, and you just need three things to get it going. A name for the widget, your Adsense-ID number, and what size you want the ad to be. And you chose the size from a drop down menu that looks like it has all the options that Google offers. No copy and paste of code, no worrying about how many ads are on a page, just input your ID and save. The only short coming is only one ad block is placed. You can’t have one anywhere but your sidebar with this plugin.
• EasyAdSenser limits your options for ad placement more than some of the other plugins, but does include an option for an ad in your sidebar, along with a Google search bar. You need to copy and paste your Adsense code from Google, but this lets you chose different size ads for different locations. There are also two ways to prevent ads showing on a particular page or post. The search bar on this one, along with the sidebar ad, makes this plugin stand out.

AdSense and Other Programs

• AdSense Integrator is a nice way to add code into a page in a variety of areas. It is probably the most versatile plugin, since you can decide exactly which posts and/or pages you want an ad to appear on. Including your Archives, Category, and Tags pages. It also allows you to place ads exactly where you want them on the page using a small checkbox gui. You do need to copy the ad script into a box on the setup page, which is one of the things that makes this useful for multiple ad campaigns. You can even set it so that ads from different programs appear on the same page/post in different places. Or ads from one program on pages, another program on posts. The only real shortcoming is the lack of a widget for sidebar placement. But the authors are working on that.
• All in One Adsense and YPN allows you to place ads from 2 different programs, Google Adsense and Yahoo Publisher’s Network. You can use either program alone, or both at the same time. Set up is easy, you just need to paste your ID number from either program into the setup page, choose the ad size, and the number of ads per page. A lot of placement options for ads, including random, on your pages. It lets you decide if you want ads on particular pages and/or posts, and gives you two short codes to give you more control over placement. It is limited to the 2 programs, and has no option for sidebar placement of ads. And the size of the ads is limited also, probably to only the sizes used in both programs.
• Ozh Who Sees Ads is a more complicated plugin to use. It allows you to control who sees an ad, so regular readers are not annoyed by a lot of them, but search engine visitors see them regularly. It can be used with any program, and you can place ads anywhere you want in a post using the generated comment codes, which are in a dropdown on the HTML editor. You can also place ads in your sidebars, but it requires editing the php file and placing that generated php code. Not the easiest plugin to set up, but can definitely be worth the effort.
• Smart Ads is another plugin that is useful for any ad program. You need to paste your generated code into the appropriate box, it will be placed either before, after, or both places in your post. You can also use a custom box that will placed where ever you put a shortcode on your blog. You can also choose to exclude particular categories from having ads shown, or not have ads appear on short posts or for registered members. But it does not have any options for sidebar placement.
• Shantanu’s WP Prefix Suffix Plugin is not really an ad plugin. It allows you to add some form of content, text, HTML/CSS, javascript, etc., before, after, or in the middle of the a page or post. It can easily be used for ads, you just need to paste the code into one of the 3 input boxed, depending on where you want the ad to appear. And you have control over whether it appears on pages, posts, your homepage, and your excerpts. Easy to set up, and can be very useful for all kinds of things, but somewhat limited for ad placement.

Other Programs Only

• Chitika | Premium plugin is only for the Chitika Premium program. According to their FAQ, you are allowed to show Chitika ads on the same pages as Adsense ads, even encouraging you to ask your Adsense rep to make sure. There are limited options for ad placement, basically above or below your post, although there are a variety of ad sizes and you can keep ads from appearing by using a shortcode.  Like many other plugins, there is no option for sidebar placement with it.

So there you are. Several choices for putting ads on your blog and making a little money. Some of them place a linkback to the author’s site, others give you the option of letting the author replace one of your ads with theirs a fraction of the time, still others just ask for a donation. None of these options seem unreasonable, since you are using their work to (hopefully) make money, and on these plugins at least, you can decide if and how much any ad replacement takes place.

As for which one I will use? I am not certain yet. There is always the question of versatility versus ease of use. I am leaning toward Easy Adsenser because of the two widgets for the sidebar as well as the ads in the posts. Or it would probably be possible to combine AdSenseAnna with one of the others that does not have a sidebar option, although that would require care not to break the various placement rules.

So the week started with Bush as the President of the USA and not much happening except getting ready for the inauguration. Then Tuesday happens, and it feels like a tornado is going through the government. In over 30 years of watching national politics, I do not remember this kind of change happening so quickly, in so many areas.

CNN is making a big deal about covering Obama’s first 100 days. But is seems that in his first 100 hours, he has already accomplished more than the Bush administration did in the last year. Just the first three days of Executive Orders shows the enormous difference between the former and present administrations.

Not everybody is happy of course. The Republicans have decided that their losses in the elections are proof they need to stand up and disagree with Obama more. I am not sure pushing back hard is a good idea at this time. It will probably be popular with their base, but not so much with the more moderate section of the population that they need to woo back. It does show a certain amount of chutzpah, which I wish some of the Democrats could learn to have. On the other hand, it may just be an inability to grasp reality.

And one very important Democrat understands exactly where the country is right now. And the President let the GOP know it during their meeting this morning.

But some progressives need to see about picking up some tin foil from their haberdasher. While the title of his article, Obama and Ted Kennedy See Plans Foiled as Caroline Withdraws? does end with a question mark, Steve Clemons writes it like he knows exactly what Obama and Ted Kennedy were planning. And what they were planning was a Machiavellian scheme to set up Caroline Kennedy for a run at the Presidency in 2016. His reliance on anonymous insiders and an inability to get simple facts straight (Senator Kirsten Gillibrand will have to run in 2010, then again in 2012 if she wins), as well as his apparent mind reading abilities, tend to count against his credibility.

And it is looking like the trial in Minnesota will not be too long. Coleman does not appear to be doing well even convincing judges appointed by Republicans that his legal arguments are correct. With luck, this might possibly be over by the end of next week. (Was that enough weasel words?)

I guess it all comes down to, right now it feels really good to be able to say President Barack Obama. I hope he continues as well as he has started.

Well, I was planning on talking about some more plugins I have found and installed as a followup to my earlier post. Some from recommendations on other blogs, others just by browsing through the plugin directories on Wordpress. There are some really neat things out there to add to blogs, the hard part is keeping it down to a reasonable number. I have actually not been as good about that as I should be. I keep wanting to try out new things that seem really neat.

First off, I learned a bit more about using the child theme that Drew has in the Vigilance theme. If you do a hack in a php file, which I have done with trepidation a few times, you can place that file in the child theme directory. So an upgrade to the theme will not overwrite your hack.  Of course, if he makes a change to the file you have hacked, you may have to redo them, but then again you may not. Version 1.21 added the ability to exclude pages from the header menu in the Vigilance theme options. This is very nice, it helps keep the menu there down to a minimum, helping keep a clean look. And Vigilance has been named by Mashable as one of the 10 Best Wordpress 2.7 Themes. It is always nice to see your opinion confirmed by someone who is more knowledgeable about a subject.

I have removed the Amazon Showcase widget, there was a bug if more than one widget was placed in a sidebar. The author has stopped supporting it, but he is working on a re-written version that will have new features. I am keeping an eye there for the new one to be rolled out.

I have also dropped the All in One SEO Pack. Not because I have given up on SEO, but because I saw another plugin recommended over it. The Platinum SEO Pack does everything All in One did, plus some new stuff. If you have an opinion on what should and should not be indexed, followed, nofollowed, and noindexed, this will let you set it the way you want. And it will automatically import your All in One SEO setting.

I like the Wordpress Database backup, but that is all it backs up. This is the important part of a blog of course, your words, links, and basic set up. But what about your theme, plugins, and images? Well, there is a plugin for that also. The Wordpress Backup backs up your theme, plugin, and upload directories. You can schedule it to backup and mail the zip files to you. The support is very nice, he worked for several days putting out updates getting it to work on my host.

If you don’t want to mess around with uploading an info.php file, or don’t know how to do that, there is a nice plugin that replaces it. WP-ServerInfo places a window on your dashboard that gives your php and MySQL information along with some other useful stuff. But there is a caveat.

With the Wordpress Database, Wordpress Backup, and WP-ServerInfo plugins all activated, there is an intermittent bug on the dashboard. The QuickPress window disappears. Sometimes. It is very frustrating, and will happen with any 2 of them activated. Sometimes. Not always. Since I do not have a busy blog, I have kept the ServerInfo and one of the backups deactivated unless I need them. When one of them does an update I will turn on all of them and see what happens. Unless I set up a test blog and try to figure out if there is a pattern to the bug first. But the bug is not dangerous, just annoying, and they are worth using, even if you have to activate one of the backups before you can run it.

While looking for a way to manage a Blogroll that could easily get very big, I found the Collapsing Links plugin by Robert Felty. It lets you organize your links by categories and have them in a neat little bundle. I had one problem to start, but one update took care of it. The plugin has worked nicely since.

Rob has done 3 other Collapsing plugins. Collapsing Archives, also working well here, and very useful for people that do a lot of posting. Collapsing Categories, which is not working well on my blog just yet, but does play well on other people’s. But Rob is working on it, which is why it is on my sidebar, I have it set to debug for him to look at,  and it has improved. I am sure it will be working well very soon. I have not tried Collapsing Pages yet, I have not decided how I will handle my page navigation yet. But it is one of my options, so it is good to see that Rob is also very actively supporting it.

Another option for navigation is the Simple Sidebar Navigation Plugin. It works well, and has one bit of functionality that is very nice. You can decide where a particular navigation menu will appear. So some links will only show on your posts, others on your pages, and others on both. This kind of customization is very nice.

For ease of posting, there are a couple of plugins that are must haves. The Amazon Widgets Shortcode means no more working in the html editor instead of the visual editor. It adds a drop down menu on the visual editor that lets you add Amazon.com product links or widgets onto your post or page with ease. If you  are an Amazon.com associate, you don’t have to worry about making a link and copying it, you just need the ASIN. Amazon widgets are slight more complicated to add, but much easier than the regular way.

The Smart Youtube plugin makes embedding Youtube videos completely painless. You just paste the link in your post, add a letter or two, depending on the quality of the video, and it is set. I used it to add the two videos in this post. The frames and other features are options the plugin controls. No messing with the html editor or worrying about messing up coding when embedding a video. From Youtube anyway. You still need to do it the old way for other video sites.

One final plugin to help make things easier on the admin side. Reveal IDs for the WP Admin puts the IDs for your posts, pages, links, and categories on your admin pages. You can decide exactly which kind of IDs you want visible, and you can control what your users (if you have any) can see also. Very simple plugin, that is incredibly useful for setting up other plugins, widgets, and themes. If you are an admin on a Wordpress blog, even if you ignore the rest of the plugins on this post, you really want this one.

Time to stop for now. If you look around, you can see some obvious plugins on my site that I have not mentioned yet. And there are more behind the scenes as well. One of the pitfalls of playing with them so much is I add them in faster than I write about them. So I will be doing at least one more of these posts. But at this rate, I will be doing these for a while, since I keep finding more to play with.

I was looking around at some blogs that I visit occasionally, when I saw this post at Making Light. With that kind of a set up, I had to look, then I laughed out loud. This Youtube video is hilarious. This is the kind of joke that is easy to do, doesn’t hurt anyone, but is funny as hell. We need more of them in the world today.

In the meantime, Happy Festivus, Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Joyous Kwanzaa, and a happy late Solstice for the atheists out there. (You know, Happy Holidays really is easier to keep up with.)

The first line in this story from USA Today is a telling indictment of someone who is widely considered a man of honor. “Sen. John McCain is scheduled to visit Georgia on Thursday to campaign for GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss, and Sarah Palin may not be far behind.” It is not the fact that McCain is stumping for a Republican that is a failure of principles. That is expected from the person considered to be the head of the party. It is the man he is stumping for that is the problem.

Chambliss is the person that was responsible for running ads during the 2002 Senate campaign that attacked Max Cleland’s patriotism and commitment to the security of the United States. The ads were called “beyond offensive to me” and “[I]t’s worse than disgraceful, it’s reprehensible.” These aren’t the words of some liberal whiner. They are the words of Republican Senators Chuck Hagel and John McCain, respectively.

These were the same kind of ads that Karl Rove developed and used against John McCain during the 2000 Republican primaries in South Carolina. McCain said “I believe that there is a special place in hell for people like those.” referring to the people that used his daughter in push polls. But he had the same people working for him in his 2008 campaign.

And that same primary showed that McCain was not all that committed to his principles. The controversy over the Confederate Flag during that campaign resulted in him admitting “I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary. So I chose to compromise my principles.”

For a man that is supposed to be a maverick, who promised to always tell the truth about his beliefs, McCain seems to spend a lot of time failing to actually follow his principles. He showed “poor judgement” in the Keating Five mess, lied about his beliefs regarding the Confederate Flag controversy in South Carolina, then hired people he earlier called reprehensible to work for him in his Presidential Campaign. And now he is campaigning for Chambliss, a man that uses any means he has to win.

Maybe all of this isn’t a failure of his principles. Maybe his principles are actually exactly what he has been showing us. He wants to win, and is willing to do anything he has to in order to do that. I do not know the man personally, I have to go with what is on the public record. And that record is getting more and more damning.

I guess I should mention this, since it was big news for the last day or so and will probably be news for most of today. It didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t know about Obama. I try to look at candidates and their positions before deciding who I will vote for. For those that are undecided or unsure about Obama, it probably did a good job helping them get to know him and his positions better. It may have helped some folks make up their mind or be more certain about their decision.

I think the one thing that really says it all about the current campaigns from both sides is this from TPM.

That is just the section that was produced for airing. It doesn’t include the last few minutes that were at a live rally in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. I haven’t seen that anywhere on the web that I can link to. But there is this commercial, which is worth watching.

If you pay any attention to news programs and/or election news, it is easy to guess what is the top story of the day. That would be Secretary Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama for president on Meet The Press Sunday morning. I just watched it again, and it is  one of the most thoughtful and articulate listings of the current state of the country and the world, and what is needed to meet the problems that exist, that I have ever seen. The video is here on MSNBC.com.

This is all over the blogosphere of course. The Arena at Politico.com has a large number of comments, from all over the political spectrum, talking about it. There is also a variety of responses at Mike Murphy’s Swampland blog, some well reasoned, others much less so. Some on the left were very happy about the endorsement, others discounted it because of Powell’s history with Iraq.

CNN just had an interesting piece on an encounter outside a McCain rally. Someone was making some nasty comments about Islam, and passing out bumper stickers equating Obama with radical Islam and the Soviet Union. He was confronted by the American News Project reporter about what he was saying, then several Muslims and Christians that are McCain supporters started taking him to task. Then a McCain campaign organizer came up and told him that the McCain campaign did not support what he was saying and did not want him saying it there. The video is not the highest quality but it is a good story.

This is a very good look at the McCain campaign, showing them supporting moderates and repudiating some of the extreme points of view that have been outside their rallies in the past. The sad part is, Rich Sanchez was going to do an interview with the McCain staffer, but had to cancel because the McCain hadn’t given him permission to talk to the press. I can understand the campaigns wanting to make sure their staffers do not say unfortunate things. But it seems to me that stopping a story like this is counter-productive.

It is sad to see how McCain’s campaign has been using innuendo and smears to try and beat Obama. I didn’t like it when it happened to McCain in 2000, especially since he would have been my choice to vote for in the general election that year. (Yes I am a Democrat, but that doesn’t mean I turn off my brain and follow blindly where someone else leads.) His choices since then, especially the way he has ran his campaign this year, have lost him a lot of respect from moderates and even conservatives. He has to have seen this, endorsements like Powell’s, the Chicago Tribune’s, and the Salt Lake Tribune, show how much he is driving away the moderate conservatives. But he continues, using the same kind of negative campaigning that he once denounced so loudly.