Not a good day at all. A late post today, shorter than I was planning, because my ISP went out twice, for hours each time, in less than 15 hours. This will teach me to wait until the last minute to finish writing a post. Well, okay, it probably won’t teach me. But this one is finally done.

One of the things everyone writing a blog wonders is if anyone is reading. The best way to know that from the huge amount of comments you get when you post your wonderful words of wisdom. Unfortunately, most of the people that visit your blog do not leave any comments. This is true even on busy blogs, a fact is a comfort for those of us that do not get many comments, but it does not really help find out what folks are reading. So let us look at what the prolific plugin producers have given us to find out this information.

Keeping Count

WordPress.com Stats is pretty much the default plugin for statistics on WordPress blogs. It is maintained by the WordPress and uses the WordPress.com servers for calculations, so your servers are not having to do the work. It gives a good overview of number of visitors, popular posts, referring links, etc., all the things that a blogger is curious about.

The presentation is not all that great. There is a lot of information available, but it is not always easy to grasp the way things fit together at first. Probably the greatest lack of the statistics provided by this plugin is the inability to download them. Not a problem for most casual bloggers, but handy to have. Other than that, this plugin will probably handle most of what you want to know about your visitors once you get used to the layout.

StatPress Reloaded describes itself as real time stats for your blog. It creates a separate menu item on your dashboard, with an impressive list of available statistics. The Overview page starts off with a small section listing the numbers of Visitors, Page Views, Spiders, and Feeds that hit your site. It also tells you your last hits, last search terms, referrers, agents, pages, and spiders. All of this is cross referenced, and includes the IP address of the visitor. And I almost forgot the graph of your hits.

After that, you can really get into the details. There is the Details page, the Spy page, the Search page, the Export page, and a User Agents page. The amount of information available on these pages is easily more than what you get from the Wordpress.com stats. It is not as comprehensive as Google Analytics, but it is easier to understand then either of the two, at least for me.

The ability to export a range of days as a csv file is very nice to for looking at information offline. And knowing what spiders are crawling your site, as well as how well they obey the robots.txt file, is also handy. The major downside to the plugin is the fact is the fact it uses your server and database. For a small site, this is not a big deal, but for a large one, it could be a literal show-stopper, especially if one of your posts makes it to the front page of Digg. So this is a nice plugin for small to medium blogs, if you want to know more than what WordPress.com tells you. But if your site grows larger, you will probably need to move on to something else.

Google Analytics for WordPress is the popular choice for integrating your Google Analytics account and your WordPress blog. Looking at the options, it is easy to see why. You just place your Analytics Account ID in the input box, choose where you want the code to appear, and decide if you want Google to keep track of the outbound clicks and downloads. It then starts sending information to your Analytics account.

There is also a section for more advanced options, with advice that you don’t really want to use them unless you really know your way around Google Analytics. I do not know my way around Analytics that well, so I am really not sure how well it works for most of the options there. But there are some nice things in it that are not to hard to understand, like tracking your Adsense clicks and being able to set tracking for different outbound links.

Very nice plugin, easy to set up for beginners, with a nice expansion of options you can use as you gain experience with Google Analytics. The biggest downside to it, is the wealth of information you find when you go to your Analytics account. It can take some doing to really understand and use that information to the fullest, but for large or growing blog, or one that is really serious about monetizing, it is probably worth the effort. And the plugin writer has some good documentation for helping you so just that, be sure to check it out if you decide on this plugin.

Final Words

There are other plugins for tracking statistics on your WordPress blog, some are stand alone like StatPress Reloaded, others use different outside services. And there are other plugins that will integrate Google Analytics into your blog as well, but they will have to wait for another post.

If you are really wondering if anyone is reading, or even just visiting, your blog, adding one of these plugins to your blog will help you find out. That is what they all are for, the only difference is how much detail, and complexity, you want to deal with.

After I wrote my post on plugins for increasing your blog’s security last Thursday, I sent it out on Twitter, shopping for readers. I do that because it is nice to think that someone may get something from the effort I put into writing the posts. Well I got a response on Twitter, from @blondishnet,  about it being better to use other methods, like modifying the .htaccess file, to tighten security on your blog, rather then using plugins.

I think I finally managed to convince her that I did agree with her point, but I was not writing these posts for the kind of person that was able or comfortable with doing that kind of thing. I am trying to point out plugins that are easy to use and add functionality for people that are not technically inclined or even tech-phobic. That may seem somewhat strange, given the plugins are for software used on the “intrawebs”, but the fact is, the web is so ubiquitous these days, all kinds of people use it.

But since I do agree with her, I decided today to put up a few links to other places where you can find information about making your blog more secure.

Links for improving your security

• Blog Security – This should be your first stop. A lot of articles, covering all levels of security. Including a security scanner that can run some basic checks of your blog.
• Geek Ramblings – An article discussing some of the things that Blog Security talks about. The comments are also useful reading.
• Webmaster World – A very informative thread on the forum there about various ways to secure WordPress. A lot of it is very technical, so it is definitely not for everyone.
• Make Tech Easier – Another post about making your blog more secure. With more good information in the comments.
• guvnr – An excellent video tutorial, along with notes on the post, for making your blog much more secure. If you are at all willing to try something new with your blog, follow along and secure it with these instructions.

Final Words

One thing you will notice about these sites is the amount of overlap. They all talk about good passwords, protecting your plugin directory, changing your admin name, and other things like that. The reason they overlap is they are all covering the most basic things you should do for security. If you are not comfortable doing most the things that are talked about and explained in the various places on the list, you should at least do the most basic.

And add some plugins like the ones I looked at last week.  A couple of them will help do some of the things mentioned in the articles, others help in different ways. They are not the best ways to keep your words safe, but every little bit helps.

Keeping your information secure on the Internet is a never ending battle. You need to keep your OS, anti-virus, anti-adware, and anti-spyware all up to date. And your WordPress blog is not an exception to this. So today will be a look at the various plugins available to help increase the security of your blog.

Secure WordPress has a nice selection of options for making your blog harder to hack. It hides your WordPress version number and creates an index.html in your plugin directory to keep that information hidden. It also allows you to remove the Real Simple Discovery and Windows Live Writer links from your blog header if you do not plan to use either of those methods of remote blogging. Two of the options are very useful for multi-user blogs. You can remove the ability of non-admins to use or even see the upgrade abilities for both the core WordPress files and any plugins. Finally you can choose to remove both the tooltips and error messages from the login page.

Not much available on this plugin, but it takes care of some of the most basic things to make you blog more secure. Hiding the upgrade stuff is obviously not useful for single user blogs, but does give you options if your blog expands. And one other nice touch is the ability to delete the plugin settings from your database if you decide to remove it. It would be nice if more plugins had this ability.

Admin SSL is designed to give you a secure connection to your admin login page, as well as some others. You can also set up some pages to not use SSL, if this is required for proper use like xmlrpc. It also allows you the option of adding other pages if you need to. It is easy to set up, and there are good instructions and a FAQ on the plugin at its homepage.

WP-SpamFree uses a combination of javascript and cookies to block spam comment attempts. Rather than capturing the spam like Akismet so it can be checked, this plugin prevents the comment from even being posted. It also give you the option of blocking both pingbacks and trackbacks if you are getting a lot of spam with that method. And there is a contact form included, if you want one that does not use CAPTCHA for spam protection.

The contact form is nice, with options for various fields, including a customizable drop down menu that can be required.  You can also have technical information about the sender included, if you are having problems with harassment. And there are some buttons included to show how many spam have been blocked by the plugin. The documentation is very good, and linked to directly from the setup page.

There are some plugins that conflict with this one. The known list is on the documentation page. The button for how many spam have been blocked is a nice touch, but it does require getting into your PHP files. A widget option, like the one for Akismet, would be much nicer for the average user. But the downsides for this plugin are fairly minor. It is plug and play, you do not have to do anything to get it working. The added options are just some nice touches in addition to its main function.

Invisible Defender is another spam protection plugin, which is even more plug and play than WP-SpamFree. There are no options, you just install and activate the plugin and it starts working. It uses CSS styling and some input fields to detect spambots, returning a 403 error when they are found. Easy to install and use, the only question is effectiveness, which only time will tell.

Login LockDown helps prevent a brute force attack on your blog login. You can set how many times it will allow retries from the same IP address within a certain amount of time before it blocks more attempts. Another easy way to help keep unwanted people out of your stuff.

Final Words

Here are five ways to make your blog more secure. They are all easy to use and seem to do the job they are designed for. None of them cover a large number of areas, but they seem to be able to work together for the most part. It is doubtful you would need both spam blockers, especially if you also have Akismet, but even they do not seem to conflict.

You should give serious consideration to these plugins, or others like them, for securing your blog. Along with standard things like backing up your blog regularly, keeping it more secure will help keep your blogging experience enjoyable.

I knew when I did my first post on Twitter plugins that there were more of them out there and I would have to do another post. And in the last two weeks, that it looks like the number of them has exploded. So with the knowledge that keeping up with the writers, here are a few more plugins that will help you integrate your blog and Twitter.

Twitbar Widget grabs your latest pearls of wisdom from Twitter and put them up in your sidebar. The only options are where you want it in your sidebar, the widget title, the words for the link to follow you, and the number of tweets that will be shown. You just need to put in your ID, no password required, and it grabs your tweets.

This plugin is pretty much the definition of plug and play. The only thing that can be a problem is the fact it shares your blogs styling. This is usually a good thing, but with some themes, like the one I am using, the look is less than pleasing. But this is not the fault of the plugin, which does everything it is supposed to. If you want to put your tweets on your blog, this is a nice way to do it.

Easy Twitter Links makes it easier to blog about Twitter. It automatically goes through your posts and changes any #tagname or @username to links, either for searches or the users Twitter home page. It does a pretty good job at this, it doesn’t grab email addresses that someone is silly enough to post. And the hashtags need to have other words around them to be linked. There are no options available, just install and activate and you are good to go. Not a big thing, but if you do much posting about Twitter and the people there, a very nice plugin to have.

Fishy Tweet places a text link at the end of your posts that allows your readers to submit your post to Twitter. You can set the text of the link, the title of the link, and you can choose to add html and CSS to the link. The plugin automatically shortens the url of your post (using 1 of 3 shortening services) and places it in the text field at Twitter.

A nice plugin for helping get your posts send to Twitter. No options about placement of the link, which would be nice, and only the three URL services, but all in all a good setup.

TwitPlusNNNF is a plugin for twittering your post automatically. When activated, it places a small window on your post editing page, where you control the tweet. It is very unobtrusive, using javascript to hide the sections for adding your Twitter info and the codes you can use in the tweet to replace the post title and URL. It can automatically use the nn.nf URL shortening service, with the option of just using www or including the http://. And there is a check box you need to click to have the post sent to Twitter.

This is a nice plugin. It gives you complete control over how your post goes out to Twitter, with enough options to avoid having your tweets looking identical. The only thing that it really needs it the ability to change the URL shortening service for people that have accounts or prefer other sites.

Bird Feeder also tweets your posts automatically. You save your message on the option page, and it is used for all your post tweets. You can choose to use the URL of your blog rather than the post itself, and you can allow the shortened URL to give a preview.

You don’t have the option to not tweet about a post, and you are limited in the options you do have. The shortening service is coded into the plugin, so you can not make any changes for that unless you want to do some PHP editing. Easy to set up and use, but limited. If it covers what you want done, not a bad choice.

WordTwit is another plugin for tweeting your posts. It has the same kind of options as Bird Feeder, all on the option page: a hard coded URL service, one message for all posts. You do not have the options of using the blog URL instead of the post permalink, and you can not use a preview link. It does use meta-data so that it will not tweet a post that it has already sent to Twitter. This is useful if you do not want updates on old posts going out.

What goes for Bird Feeder fits for WordTwit also. Limited options, but if it covers what you want, a solid choice.

Final Words

And there are 6 more plugins you can use to make your blog more Twitter friendly. They are all very focused in what they cover, not trying to be the one tool for all things WordPress-Twitter. This means more plugins, but it also makes each of them pretty simple to set up.

I will probably have to once again look at Twitter plugins, it is just too popular an area to cover easily. But I will try and wait for a bit before doing so. There are a few other areas in the plugin depository that are also worth covering.

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.

Blogrolls and links to other sites are an important part of the blogging world. We share our interests and places we think are neat with our reader, and hope others will do the same with our site. The basic Links widget that comes with WordPress only allows you to display the links in your Blogroll separated by the category they are in. You can’t change the name or the order of the display. It is not a bad list by any means, just very limited. There are plenty of plugins out there that go beyond those limits.

Feed reading Blogroll gives your readers more than just the title of the blog to help decide if they want to visit. The plugin uses javascript to pull in the latest post on that blog from its RSS feed.  This certainly can help get them interested enough to go check out the site, or keep them from doing so, depending on their tastes.

There are a lot of options available, including using either 4 ready made looks or setting up custom CSS, and choosing exactly which categories show on the list. You control whether the feed shows up for particular links by choosing which ones to have their RSS feeds on the Links page. This can help keep down the length of your blogroll. Which does lead into one of the downsides. How big is your blogroll? If you already have a large one, adding in snippets from many other blogs, even on the minimalist setting of one line, can mean it really gets out of hand. One way to handle this, if you are comfortable with PHP coding, is putting a PHP snippet on a page and generating the list there. Not easy, but an option.

The setup is somewhat complicated, primarily for two reasons. One, you need a Google API from Google Code, which also means you need a Google account. Second, the plugin uses the RSS feeds that are placed in the Advanced section of each link edit page. How many people bother to get that for their blogroll when they add the link? Neither of these is a huge problem, and they can’t really be avoided because it is information that the plugin needs to perform.

Auto Blogroll allows people to add their sites to either a link exchange page or your blogroll and the page. If you use the included sidebar widget, they will go into your blogroll, otherwise they will appear on the link exchange page. There are plenty of options, including only allowing links with minimum PR ratings on the list and a toggle of whether you want to moderate new links.

The installation starts off easy, taking you to a page for just that in the settings section. It will automatically create a link exchange page, and import your existing blogroll into its list. Or you can use and existing page, and manually add blogroll links. You can put the pages into any order you want on the list, limit the number of links that appear on the list page, place the links into categories and only have certain categories appear in the sidebar widget. The plugin can check each link once daily, and if the link back fails for so many days in a row, will stop showing the link out.

There are some problems with the plugin. The major one is the limited instructions.  The instructions given are only slight more detailed then what I have already written, and the website of the developer, and the website at the link they give to find more information,  is in either Chinese or Japanese. (No, I can’t tell the difference. What can I say, I am ????????????.) Most of the functions can be figured out if you are willing to experiment. But it can be a hassle. While you can order the links however you want, you can’t break them up by category, the way the basic blogroll widget can. And it changes your existing blogroll categories when it is installed so all your links are just in the Blogroll category. This is very irritating, especially if you do not want to use the plugin widget. Not bad plugin, with a nice idea behind it. But not one to add to your site lightly.

mylinks is another plugin that puts your blogroll on a separate page. The difference here is, it uses a shortcode to create a list of your blogroll where ever you want it, with pictures, the link name, the link, and your description of the site. There are no options for the plugin so far, it is completely plug and play. This makes installation a snap, you just need to decide where to place the shortcode.

The downside to this plugin is the fact there are no options. Every link on your blogroll will appear on the page, in alphabetical order. The author has a list of things he is working on adding to the plugin, like sorting, only showing a particular category, and templates to users have more control over the layout. This is very promising news, because right now, it is a nice plugin, but if he can add in the options he is talking about, without too much added complexity for set up, it will be a really great one.

Noio Iconized Bookmarks basically just adds a bit of bling to your blogroll. Set up is easy, install and activate the plugin, go to the options page and click on the update icons button. It may take a few minutes, but eventually it will list the sites where it found a favicon. If you have not placed the included widget, your blogroll will now be nothing but the found images. The widget give you both the icons and the names of the links. There is an option to have a default image for people that either do not use favicons or favicons that the plugin can’t find. I recommend creating one, it makes things look much better and more uniform.

Easy to install, the only real overhead is having to create a default icon. A couple of things to consider, first is the styling. The look of  the icons and links may not fit well with your theme unless you do some styling. The author includes a couple of classes on the list, with the ability to add more in the widget, if you are comfortable working with CSS. The other thing is the fact that if you decide you want to get rid of the plugin and go for a more traditional blogroll, you either need to edit some PHP or go to each link on your blogroll and delete the image URLs in the Advanced options. A case where uninstalling is more of a hassle than the installation.

Final Words

A lot of writing on this one, and only 4 plugins covered. Either I am getting more verbose or there was a lot to talk about on these plugins. I certainly hope it is the latter. I guess this means I will have to write more on this subject fairly soon, because I barely scratched the surface of what is available.

Going back to the reader’s side this time, I will look at some plugins that help you keep posts in front of their eyes.  The most important thing about the post is that the writing and content are good. But if it is from very far back in time how to get it somewhere your readers can see it. Well, the trusty plugin developers of the WordPress world are up to the task.

First up is Recently Updated Posts, an easy to install, easy to use plugin. It gives you a widget for your sidebar that will display a number of your posts that you have recently updates. You can change the title, the number of posts shown, and you can exclude certain categories from showing. All of this is on the widget, there is no option page for the plugin.

If you are comfortable dealing with php, the author of the plugin has included some of the parameters he uses so you can edit the plugin your self to customize it a bit more. You can include pages, or switch it to show new posts that haven’t been modified. Still not a huge amount of control, but some. And not at all easy to make use of if you do not do code.

TDD Recent Posts is almost identical to the Recent Posts widget included with WordPress. It places a list of your posts, from most recent to older, with a link to them. But it also includes the date of the post and a short excerpt from the beginning of the post. You can change the length of the excerpt shown, and the number of posts shown, but that is about it for easily controlled options.

Again, if you are comfortable with coding, the author gives instructions for including pages in the listing and how to increase the maximum character limit for the excerpts. There is no styling, although if your theme styling does things with unordered lists, the widget output may be included. If not, you will have to do your own CSS to make it fit in. The author has included one class name so far for styling purposes, although he says he may include more later. Nice change to the basic recent posts widget.

WordPress.com Popular Posts uses the stats from the Wordpress. com Stats plugin to give you a sidebar widget that shows your most popular posts. All of the controls on on the widget, making for easy installation. You can show popular posts, pages, or both, and can choose to limit it to only posts within a certain number of days. You can also choose to have an excerpt, length up to you, posted. And it can show the number of view each post has received.

This is a nice plugin, easy to install and use. Having to install the Stats plugin also is somewhat irritating, but not too much since having some kind of stats tracking is always a good idea. If you are relying on Google Analytics already, then it would be more annoying to add the second. The documentation on the available options could be a bit better, it is not real easy to figure out how to add the excerpts, but they are just additions to a plugin that is good from the start.

Must Read Posts allows you to put a list of posts on your sidebar that you think your readers will like. You can set the number of posts that will be in the sidebar, and the author includes a class for styling the list. Aside from putting the widget in your sidebar, the only other thing you need to do is add a custom field in your post. Posts with the field can show up in the list, making it easy to control what will be there. It does not do much, but what it does do, works well.

Old Post Promoter also allows you to keep older posts up for your newer readers to find. But it does not use your sidebar to do it. Instead, it updates the timestamp on older posts and puts them back on your front page and back into your RSS feed.

You set how often old posts are promoted, how old they have to be before they can be promoted (minimum 30 days), and whether they are put in front of your most recent post. The only other control you have over what posts are promoted is by excluding categories. The lack of fine control over what is promoted is not the best, and something about changing the dates on the posts to bring them back to the front doesn’t really appeal to me. But for blogs that are offering advice or how-tos that are not time sensitive, this can be an effective method of keeping good ideas in front of your readers. Of course, you also need to keep writing new posts, or you will end up doing nothing but recycling the same posts over and over.

Serial Posts Plugin is a way to send people to other posts in a series. It is much more powerful than the typical related posts plugins, with exact control over what posts appear, where the list appears on each post, and what information about the series is given to your readers. The documentation is much better than average, including a nice tutorial, although that lacks the shortcode information.

Set up is remarkably easy. You need to add a custom field to the posts you want included in a series (Note: Make sure you put Serial in just like that. Lowercase will not work.) with the name of the series as the value of the field. Then place the shortcode in the posts where you want the list to appear. You can have multiple series going at the same time, just use different values for the custom field. And there are several ways to control the styling of the list if you do CSS, so you can make it stand out from the rest of the post. There are improvements that can be made, like specifying the order of the list or making the styling easier for non-coders. But really, it is a very nice plugin as is, well worth using if you do series of posts.

Hackadelic Series does almost exactly the same thing as Serial Posts, but slightly differently. The plugin generates a menu of related posts, defined by a custom field added to the post (Sound familiar? Great minds think alike.) the places the list in a collapsing menu at the top of the post. It has many of the virtues of Serial Posts, as well as adding a very nice back end for controlling your series and the meta fields. And the collapsing menu means even larger series, like these are starting to be, can be added to your posts without taking up too much room.

When the developer found out that the Serial Posts plugin was out, he even created his so that you can use his back end for admin of that plugin, without using his frontend and placing his menu at the top of the post. This is very nice, and it means that if you have already started using Serial Posts you do not need to stop.

The downside of the plugin are not major, but they are real. In order to use this plugin, you have to install the authors other plugin, Sliding Notes. This is a nice plugin by itself, and does not take any set up if used for the Series plugin, but it is one more thing to install. And there is no control over the location of the menu, it automatically shows up at the top of the post. The styling is very vanilla, but can be made to blend to your site if you are comfortable with CSS. All in all, a nice plugin that you will definitely want to consider.

Upcoming Posts goes in the opposite direction from most on this list. Rather than trying to interest your readers in older posts, it gives them a glimpse of what you have coming up. Again all of the controls are in the widget you place in your sidebar, but there are quite a few options available there.

You can set the number of posts, whether to have a timestamp, the category of the post, and whether an excerpt will show. You can have either scheduled posts or drafts on the list, and can put a message up if you have nothing planned. And you can specify specific categories to be shown. Nice options, easy to install and use. One problem, the styling out of the box is not very good, and you need to do it in the css in the plugin folder. But that is pretty much the only downside to the plugin.

Final Words

So there are some ways to keep people reading your old posts or get them interested in what is coming soon. If you think something is really good, you should be able to find something here that will let you share it with your readers and keep them coming back.

Edited to remove error about Hackadelic Series plugin.

So I decide to do a clean install of WordPress to take care of some database issues. Or at least lessen them. I have done something like 5 installs, including moving 3 blogs, in the last month, so no big deal, just go through it step by step. That was 5 hours ago, I have installed it 4 times, including creating 3 new databases. Thank god for backups. Of course, I don’t think it helped. I hate incompatible plugins.

And I do not even have all of them re-installed yet.

Everyone can see things like what ads you are running, or what your contact form looks like. They may not know what plugin you are using, unless you allow the linkbacks that some developers put in, but the effects of those plugins are quite apparent. But there are a lot of plugins that are made for the admins of WordPress blogs, to make things easier to run. I thought I would look at a few of those this time.

I mentioned this one before, but it is worth bringing up again. Reveal IDs for WP Admin is possibly the nicest admin plugin out there. With so many other plugins using IDs for posts, pages, and other parts of your site to give y0u control over them, it is really hard to understand why the WP developers decided to hide that information. But this plugin brings it back into view. Unless you are running a completely clean install of WordPress, with no plugins at all, you can probably use this.

If you are a steady blogger, you probably write posts ahead of time and schedule them. This allows you to keep a steady stream of posts going, with a standard posting time for your readers. Dashboard: Scheduled Posts gives you a way to look at all of them without opening the Edit Posts section of your dashboard. You can open one to edit from right there, or go to the Scheduled Post section of your Posts page. Not a vital addition to a dashboard, but handy to have. The only thing that would really improve it would be the ability to change the scheduled posting time.

Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu is a way to give yourself more room on your dashboard. It moves the vertical menu on your dashboard to a horizontal position. It also gives you a lot of control over the header at the very top of your page, including removing it. You can customize the color of the menu bar, and choose to have text, text and icons, or just icons. It does have some problems with some browsers, most notably Firefox 2, Camino, and Opera. It is amazing how much space that vertical menu takes up, even when it is compact.

Page Management Dropdown adds an entry on your Pages menu for every page you have on your site. This allows you to skip going to the Edit Pages section if you want to edit an existing page. You just click on it and to directly to the edit page. It is compatible with the Drop Down Menu, the two together makes things much nicer.

Dashboard: Technorati Reactions Extended is apparently for putting back something that used to be on the main dashboard, a list of any links from other blogs that show up on Technorati. I did not miss this, since it was already gone when I started doing this, but it is nice to have the information along with the standard Google Incoming Links widget. You can choose how many links to show, and whether the URL and date are shown.

Dashboard: Recent Posts Extended is by the same author as the Technorati plugin. It lists the most recent posts that have been published on your blog. You can set the number of posts that will be listed, and toggle whether to show the post author and the date posted. This is obviously much more useful on a multi-author blog, although even single writer can use it to more easily keep an eye on their post frequency.

StatPress Reloaded is an upgrade to a popular plugin that is no longer supported. It shows you all kinds of information about your visitors, feeds, referrers, pageviews, and possibly your shirt size. It seems to give the same kind of information as Google Analytics, but you don’t need a Google account to get it or leave your blog to look at it. And it is a nice complement to the WordPress Stats plugin, but you don’t need to sign up for an API to use it. It even gives you the option of exporting the information in a csv format.

So there are 7 plugins to make things easier on the back end of your blog. Most of them have to do with giving you more information about your blog, which can help you make better decisions. The others can make it easier to carry out those decisions. Anything that makes running your blog easier, gives you more time to take care of what to write for it. Which is why we all do this.

I have been looking at a lot of plugins lately, as you can see from my posts. I have noticed something about most of the plugins I look at that is very annoying. I was thinking about posting this today, when I checked my RSS reader and found the post from Ma.tt about there being 4000 plugins in the directory as of today. He then posts on the Wordpress Blog that today is Thank a Plugin Developer Day. Well, I do thank them. But I also have a bone to pick.

Wordpress requires MySQL v. 4.0 or better and PHP v. 4.3 or better to run. They deliberately did not use version 5 of either in order to allow more people use the software. This is a good thing, it has helped spread the use of Wordpress over all corners of the web, as blogs and as CMS.

Then there are the plugins, and some themes for that matter. Programmers, especially hobbyiests, like using the latest thing. Updated langauges and software call to programmers seductively, tempting them with more gadgets and easier ways to do things. I have no problem with this, I like things being easier and faster when possible myself.

What this results in is plugins that are developed and tested one MySQL 5 and/or PHP 5. Which means they may, or may not (bet on not), work well on version 4 of either. This is also all right. Sometimes you just can’t do what you want with the older version, or it takes much more overhead that makes it impractical. It will mean less people can use your plugin, but there are still thousands that can. And eventually most places will upgrade.

What I do not like, and think is incredibly stupid, is the huge number of plugin developers that do not say what versions of PHP and MySQL are required to run their plugin. So someone will install it on their site, try to run it, and have errors. So they go to the developer and ask for help. The developer will spend time and effort trying to figure out the problem, until he asks, or it is mentioned, what version of PHP is on the server. Then it is “Oh, it won’t run on version 4.”

Developers, please. You have the front page of the directory page for your plugin, you have a FAQ section on the page, most of you have websites that are linked from the page. Someplace on these pages, or on all, you could easily mention what versions of PHP and MySQL are required. It will save you, and your users, so much time and trouble.

That won’t make any difference, but it felt good to say. And thank you developers, I do appreciate your efforts. I like playing with your producopts.