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.

These days, Twitter is one of the major ways to share your posts. And everything else you feel like. The signal to noise ratio is not the best, but it is far too widespread (and spreading) to ignore. And making it easy for people to follow you there means a ready made audience you can tell about your new posts. So the first thing you need to do is add a button on your site so they can follow you. Then, make it easy for yourself to post tweets about your posts. Oh, and check out Dan Zarrella’s advice about what words to use when tweeting your post.

Tweet Tweet

TweetMe does not have many options right now. The only one is the ability to change the template message. The author wanted a plugin that would sent a tweet when he posted a blog entry, then wouldn’t when he edited it. This plugin does that, using bit.ly for short URLs. If that is all you want for every post, this is probably the plugin for you.

Twitme automatically sends a tweet to Twitter every time you post. It sets up a separate menu on your dashboard where you put in your account name and password, it will then post a link to your new posts. You can choose to exclude categories, which allows you to focus what you share there, and you can set an auto-reply for people that start following you. The message you send can either be a template or a short post summer, both with the URL (regular or shortened) of your post.

A very nice feature is the ability to follow your Twitter account from right there on your dashboard. Including showing your followers and allowing you to send tweets or direct messages from there. Not hard to set up, and automates one of the most important ways to publicize your posts on the web today. A choice of URL shorting service and finer control over which pages and posts are sent would be nice additions, but are fairly minor points.

WP to Twitter also auto-tweets your new posts to Twitter. One of the thing that endeared this one to me is that it checks your server to see if you have the necessary php functions for it to work. This is one answer to a pet peeve of mine. There are quite a few options available for this plugin, including tweeting new pages, additions to your blogroll, sending tweets when you remote publish, and integrating Google Analytics, including channels.

It uses Cli.gs on your tweets, and if you have an account there you can see the traffic associated with your short URLs. You can set it to auto-tweet your posts, or only when you check a box on the edit page. And you can write the tweet right there on your edit page at the same time. One of the major parts of the plugin is support for multiple authors, allowing each to use their own Twitter account. A more involved setup, but a huge amount of flexibility.

Tweetbacks is not a way for others to follow you. It is for putting tweets about your posts into the comments section of the post. It defaults to putting the tweets right into your comment stream, but the author gives instructions for hacking your php to separate your tweetbacks from your comments and pingbacks.

You can block specific usernames, and clean up your database to remove spammers that get through, and it allows you to block retweets. It will also pick up old tweets about your posts from before adding the plugin and add them in. There have been some issues with spamming comments getting into feeds, so it is important to keep an eye on what is coming into your site. A good idea, but use with caution.

Twitter Tools is a very popular plugin, and looking at the options it is easy to see why. It gives you the ability to automatically tweet about posts, or to decide on a post by post basis what is sent. It will also post your tweets on your blog individually and create a digest post of your tweets, either daily, weekly, or both, allowing you to set the time the post is created. It also provides a sidebar widget that shows your recent tweets and allows you to post from right there to Twitter.

Unfortunately, there are some serious downsides to the plugin. You have no control over the message sent to Twitter, it is hardcoded into the plugin to avoid a loop of posts and tweets. It doesn’t use a URL shortening service, but the author does provide a hook that can be used to pass the URL to a service. The widget has no style of its own, but it does have some CSS tags that can be styled if you dig them out. There are some nice features to this plugin, but the necessity of coding CSS or PHP to do things other do out of the box means it is probably not a good fit for most people.

Tweet This is not a plugin for tweeting your posts on Twitter. At least not by you. It places a Twitter icon at the bottom of your post for your readers to use, just like other other social site icons. If they click on the icon, it takes them to Twitter, with the post title and shortened URL already in the text box. You can modify the exact message placed in the text box, and you have your choice of 16 different ways of shortening the URL. There are also a decent number of options on placing the icons on pages and posts. And you can choose to have a list of the tweets about the post under the content.

Despite the name of the plugin, it is not just for Twitter. The author has included 7 other services, including Digg, StumbleUpon, Plurk, and Ping.fm. None of them have as many icon choices as Twitter, although still a nice variety, and there is no listing of how many times they have been used. A nice plugin, that can make it easier for your readers to share your posts, but aside from choosing the URL shortening service and the listing of how often the post is tweeted, it is not too different from the plugins I looked at last week. I have to say, the author does give great support on his blog.

There is one more plugin to keep an eye on. If you really want to integrate Twitter into your blog, TweetSuite is a one stop shop for pretty much everything you could want to add. Buttons for your readers to tweet and retweet your posts, tweetbacks, auto-tweet new posts, and 4 different widgets for your sidebar. And an impressive amount of control of all of them.

Sad to say, there a few things missing that keep this from having everything. First, there is no way to post a tweet from your site. Not a major problem, there are so many ways to post already it is hard to keep up. The second thing is a lack of fine control over the auto-tweet function. It is not possible to designate whether individual posts will or won’t be sent to Twitter. It is all or none. And what is posted is also somewhat lacking. Finally, there is no Follow Me option on any of the widgets. But the plugin is still basically in beta, with the author wanting to add in more features. As it stands, it is already a very nice plugin, not too hard to install, with loads of features.

Final Words

So there are 6 finished and 1 unfinished plugins for getting your blog posts to Twitter. And vice versa in a couple of cases. You should be able to find something that suits your needs in the list, but if you don’t, don’t despair. This is far from all of the available Twitter plugins, but I need to cut things off somewhere.

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.

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.