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.

Too many plugins from developers and too much writing from me left me with the necessity of doing another post. The first part is not really surprising, the only constant about the plugin directory at WordPress is that it is always growing. As for the second part, what can I say. I want to give a somewhat complete overview of the plugins, and for some of them that requires a lot of words. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

First up is Wordpress MyLinks. Yes, I did cover it in my last post. And between the time I finished the post and it was published, the plugin developer did an update. Updates are not unusual, I really will need to go back and check out new versions of some of the earlier plugins I looked at. But the proximity to my post and the increase in features for the plugin, help get this plugin another quick look.

First off, the images on the page are now sorted by category. This makes it much easier to go through them. Next up, you can make a small addition to the shortcode to just display a single category. You can even have several categories on a single page, allowing to you set up specialized link pages. He has also included a new shortcode, allowing you to display a single page thumbnail image, anywhere on a page or post. Finally, if you are comfortable with HTML, he has included templates you can modify to customize the appearance of your link page. The author has taken a very nice plugin, and improved it a great deal.

Multiple Blogroll allows you to split up your blogroll into different parts of your sidebar. Your blogroll is split up by category, you can place more than one category per widget, and name each widget. This allows you to place links near particular places on your page. This is especially handy if you have links that are cyclical, useful part of the year, not really needed other times. Just remove the widget with those categories until it is time to use them again.

The list picks up your theme styling, just as the regular plugin does, so there is no real need of any styling. The limitations of the plugin are not too bad. No sorting of the links, and no control of what is shown beyond the choice of what categories go in each widgets. There is a bug right now, once a widgets is created and saved, you can not change what it contains. Removing the old widget and adding a new with your new choices gets around that until the author gets it fixed. Other than that, not a bad plugin, although not everyone will have a use for it.

Advanced Blogroll actually combines features from some of the others I have looked at. Installation is easy, activate the plugin, then place the widget into your sidebar where you want it. All of the options are taken care of in the plugin itself, and there are quite a few there. And the author even includes some CSS on his website to give a nice hover effect to the images. And there are classes for the images and the list if you want to do any additional formatting. Otherwise, it just goes with your theme’s styling.

First, you can place multiple widgets in your sidebars, which is in fact necessary because of one of the other options available. You can choose from a dropdown list of your link categories to only show one category, or all categories, in that widget. You can choose sorting order of links, what to sort on, the number of links to show, and whether the links will be words, images, or both. You can also control the size of the images and add nofollow to the links on the widget. This can be nice, allowing you to nofollow large sites like CNN or Google, but allowing following for smaller sites.

One of the disadvantages to the plugin is the fact that if you want a certain category set up differently from the rest of the categories, you need to add a widget for every category separately. If you only have a couple of categories, this is not too bad, but too many really makes the widget page get busy. Next, if you want to use the images, either alone or with names, any link without an image will not be shown. This is one way of controling whether a particular link shows in your blogroll, but it also means you need to provide an image for a link to show up. Which brings up the hardest part of the setup, if you want to use images, you need to either get them or make them. Some way to pull in favicons would be nice, although the 16×16 size is not very visible and looks horrible if enlarged too much.

A very nice plugin, with a lot of options for customizing.  Except for getting the images, the set up is very easy. It lives up to its claim of being advanced.

What Others Are Saying is another RSS feed blogroll. The difference with this one is it does not show a post from all of your links. You set the number of posts, and it finds that number, either the most recent or randomly, from the sites on your list and posts them.

Set up is easy, put the widget in your sidebar and set the options. There are only 5 options, how long between feed updates, how many posts to show, use the most recent posts or pick randomly, link to the site as well as the post, and add nofollow to the links. The author has also provided some PHP code so the programmers out there can put the list where they want it.

Depending on your theme, the styling can leave something to be desired with the widget. The author is working on adding some options for this, which will be nice. Other than the styling issue, the hardest part of using the plugin is adding the RSS feeds to your links. I would not use it for my only blogroll, but it makes a nice addition on the sidebar to supplement your main list. A nice plugin that does just what it says it will.

Collapsing blogroll uses a comment code to place your blogroll where you want it in a page or post. This allows for an easily created links page, divided into sections by the link categories. At the moment, there is only one option, what color do you want the category header. This is very well done, but it seems very lonely so far. The author is very open to adding more options, and was very quick to figure out a problem caused by another plugin. A limited plugin right now, but lots of room for growth, with an enthusiastic author.

Final Words

That is 4 1/2 more plugins for working with your blogroll. And there are still more out there, but I will probably move on to something different next time. It is not like I can really keep up with the plugin developers. I hope you were able to find something useful for your site in these two posts.

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.

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 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.