JohnTP.com » WordPress Plugins

125×125 Ad Management Plugins for WordPress

JohnTP — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 05:46:11 +0000

If you sell ads directly on your blog using block advertising (125×125 ads), then you will be knowing on how time consuming it can be to add ads from advertisers on your blog and then remove them when they expire. You may have also wanted to rotate your ads to give your advertisers equal exposure.

Here are two easy to use WordPress plugins that should make managing your 125×125 ads a lot easier: UBD Block Ad and WP125.

Watch the below video to find out how they work:

You can watch the video in higher quality from here.

If you like the video, please rate it on YouTube and you may also want to subscribe to my YouTube videos to be notified of any videos I upload to YouTube in the future.

How to resolve the ‘No tweets available at the moment’ error by Twitter Tools

JohnTP — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:42:32 +0000

Recently I installed the Twitter Tools WordPress plugin to display my tweets on my blogs, but the plugin just displayed ‘No tweets available at the moment.’

I tried reinstalling the plugin, and also tried clicking ‘Update Tweets’ and even ‘Reset Tweet Checking’ buttons but it did not work.

Finally I decided to delete the Twitter Tools table from my blogs database and reinstall Twitter Tools WordPress Plugin and it worked

Hope this helps those of you who faced the same problem.

Increase Your RSS subscribers With What Would Seth Godin Do WordPress Plugin

JohnTP — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:39:06 +0000

I have wrote about many WordPress plugins in the past. Here is one that could help increase your blog’s subscribers. What would Seth Godin do plugin displays a message for first time visitors asking them to subscribe to your blog’s feed (uses cookies).

By default the message shown is "If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!" and disappears after three visits.

I have been using this plugin for the past few days on my hardware review blog. Here’s a screenshot of it in action:

Installation is easy. All you have to do is upload the what_would_seth_godin_do.php file to your plugins folder and activate it. The plugin also allows you to customize the message, its lifespan, and its location.

Download the What would Seth Godin do plugin from here.

How To Display Your Twitter Status On A WordPress Blog

JohnTP — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 07:29:59 +0000

Twitter is a great service that most of us use to let our friends and family know what we are doing. But as a blogger you may have also wanted to let your readers know what you are doing. I have been displaying my Twitter status on this blog for some time now. It’s a great way to keep readers updated on what we are doing as well as to put up something short that you don’t want to write a post on (like to ask your readers to vote for your blog post on Digg or when you want to share an interesting post on another blog with your readers).

There are many Twitter tools for WordPress blogs, but the one I use is a modified version of twitterRSS that you can download from here (found via Paul’s blog).

Plugin Installation

download the ‘twitterrss.txt’ to your computer and rename it to twitterrss.php
edit the file to add your Twitter RSS URL, home URL, username, number of twitters to display, etc (your Twitter RSS link can be found at the bottom of your Twitter page)
Upload the file to your WordPress Plugins folder and activate it
Add in your theme where you want it displayed

That’s it. You should be able to immediately see your Twitter status displayed on your blog.

By the way, this is my Twitter page incase you would like to follow me

Give All Your Advertisers Even Exposure

JohnTP — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 15:29:35 +0000

Got Banners is a WordPress Plugin that lets you randomize banners like you see on TechCrunch and John Chow’s blog. Unlike other banner rotators, Got Banners displays all the banners provided simultaneously. But, in a different random order each time.

Got Banners will be very useful for those who sell ads directly to advertisers as it will give all advertisers even exposure. Even if you don’t do direct sales you can still use this plugin to rotate affiliate banners from AdSense, Text Link Ads, Chitika eMiniMalls or any other affiliate program.

You can see this plugin in action on this blog by just refreshing the page (125×125 ads on sidebar). Download Got Banners WordPress Plugin from here

found via JohnChow.com

WordPress Plugin: WP-Sticky

JohnTP — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 18:24:08 +0000

WP-Sticky is a WordPress Plugin that allows you to put up a post (or posts) before all other posts on your blog’s homepage. The plugin is a modified version of Adhesive which is currently not compatible with the latest version of WordPress.

WP-Sticky is useful when you want to make an announcement on your blog or when you want to make sure that your blog’s visitors see any particular post.

Installation of the plugin is easy, simply upload the folder ‘sticky’ to the plugins folder and activate it. Once the installation is over, configure the WP-Sticky options in WP-Admin -> Options -> Sticky. You can find the post’s ‘Sticky‘ Option under ‘Post Sticky Status‘ Options in the ‘Write/Edit Post Screen‘.

There are three options – Announcement, Sticky and Normal

Difference between Announcement Posts and Sticky Posts

Posts marked as ‘sticky’ will only stay on top of all the posts which is posted on the same day as the sticky post whereas posts marked as ‘announcement’ will stay on top of all posts.

You may want to read this post by the plugin author if you have not understood the difference.

Download WP-Sticky

WordPress Plugin: Feed Count

JohnTP — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 11:17:32 +0000

Feed Count is a WordPress Plugin that displays the number of subscribers to your feedburner feed in plain text. The plugin allows you to customize the feed count with CSS and I am sure those who don�t like the feedburner chicklet will like this plugin.

I first wanted to use this plugin but then decided not to when it showed yesterdays feed count when tested with EasyPHP.

Update: There is an ‘Update interval’ option that will update the feed count every 60 minutes.

Feed Count Plugin Options

If you decide to use Feed Count WordPress plugin, be sure to enable Awareness API for your feedburner account (you can find it on the Publicize tab on your feedburner account).

Also check out the 51 RSS Buttons put up by Bloggers Journey.

Optimize Your WordPress Blog With All In One SEO Pack

JohnTP — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 07:12:35 +0000

One year back I had listed out the best plugins to optimize a WordPress blog for Search Engines, but now I would like to replace three plugins in the list with one new plugin as it does all that they do and much more.

The plugin I would like to recommend is All in One SEO Pack. This plugin optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines by letting you

define your home page title, description and keywords
define your post, page, category, archive, tag and search title formats
use categories for META keywords
avoid indexing of duplicate content (prevents indexing of category, archive and tag archive pages)
autogenerate descriptions

Earlier I used to use Head Meta Description, SEO Title Tag and Ultimate Tag Warrior (for inserting META keywords) plugins to optimize my blog, but now since All in One SEO Pack does all that these plugin do, I uninstalled them.

All in One SEO Pack lets you easily define the META Description, Meta Keywords and Title of a post or page (see below screenshot).

Installing All in One SEO Pack on your blog is very easy – just upload, activate and edit the options that you see in the below screenshot

What I did not like about the plugin so far is that it has only the option to use categories as META keywords for the post, a better option would be to use tags (inserted with plugins like Ultimate Tag Warrior) as the keywords. While the plugin does allow to mention keywords while writing a post, it is not easy to edit all previous posts of a blog if there are too many.

I would like an option added by the plugin author to use tags as the META keywords for older posts and for newer posts I don’t mind manually defining them.

Please remember to only provide less than 10 META keywords for a post or page as stuffing keywords in your meta tags is not a good idea because it will hurt your search engine results. Also the plugin by default includes the blog title in the post, page, category, archive, tag and search title, it would be a good idea to remove it as including a lot of keywords in your title tags reduces the importance given to your main keywords. So it would be better to remove unnecessary stuff from the title tag like your blog title.

You should also consider using a robots.txt file for your blog to further optimize it for search engines.

Update: All in One SEO Pack can generate META keywords for your posts from Ultimate Tag Warrior. It had not worked for me earlier as I had disabled Ultimate Tag Warrior.

WordPress Plugins To Hide Ads From Regular Readers

JohnTP — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 18:15:11 +0000

Displaying AdSense or any other Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising programs in your latest posts are not of much use as they are visited mostly by only your regular readers who are mostly adblind, that is they know exactly where your ad is placed and so they will just skip it and read your content.

Hence you may want to display ads on just the older posts as that will make your regular readers happy as well as still make you money as it is the older posts that attract traffic from search engines that are more likely to click your ads.

If you run a WordPress blog, there are two plugins that can help you to prevent showing ads to regular readers: Who Sees Ads and Shylock AdSense Plugin.

Who Sees Ads is an advanced ad management plugin that lets you decide who will see your ads, depending on user defined conditions.

Shylock AdSense Plugin lets you insert AdSense units in your posts that are older than a certain number of days. Using the plugin you can put an ad on the bottom of your new posts and as the post gets older, the ad can be displayed on top of the article. Hence you can make your regular readers happy as well as earn money at the same time

To clear confusion, AdSense-Deluxe plugin also lets you insert AdSense units in your posts but it does not allow you to display ads on just older posts.

Shylock AdSense plugin also has a feature to have posts without ads inserted in them, that may be useful for payed reviews.