In WordPress 2.2, the post preview frame (the frame at the bottom of the edit screen showing a preview of your post) was removed and replaced with a preview link. Though I prefer this new change due to the speed improvements in editing a post, some people do not like it.

For those who want do not like this change, there is a plugin to return the preview frame.

Installing the plugin is easy, just upload the preview-frame directory to your wp-content/plugins directory and activate it in the admin panel. The post previews will immediately start displaying when you edit posts.

Continue reading ‘How To Bring Back The Preview Frame In WordPress 2.2′

Placing videos from YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, etc on a blog post can be hard at times. I have been asked a few times on how to add YouTube Videos on WordPress Blogs by some readers, so I would like to mention some WordPress plugins that will make it easier for you to add videos to your blog post.

Viper’s Video Quicktags is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to easily insert videos from YouTube, Google Video, IFILM, Metacafe, MySpace and Vimeo by just clicking one of the buttons that th plugin adds to the write screen and then paste the video URL into the prompt box. You can also fully configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, alignment on the page) and much more.

Continue reading ‘How To Place YouTube Videos on WordPress Blogs’

Few days back I had mentioned the Top 5 WordPress plugins that help increase comments on a blog. Here are some more plugins that can help.

• WP Ajax Edit Comments: This plugin (for WP 2.1+) allows users and admins alike to edit comments on a post. Users can edit their own comments for a period specified by the Admin, and Admins can edit all post comments. This plugin can help reduce typos on reader comments and at same time encourage more comments from them.
• Get Recent Comments: This highly configurable plugin displays the most recent comments in the sidebar. You can make the plugin to link the recent commenter’s site along with an excerpt of their comment. Linking to the commenter’s site can encourage them to comment even more.
• Live Comment Preview: This plugin will display a live preview of your readers comments as they type. To install the plugin, just activate it!
• Comment Quicktags: This plugin inserts a quicktag toolbar on the blog comment form that will help your commenter’s to easily make thier comment in bold or italics, or to insert links.
• MyAvatars: This plugin displays the reader’s MyBlogLog avatars besides their comments. This may not help in increasing comments much, but readers may like seeing their avatars on your blog

Do you know any more plugins that can help increase comments?

Most blog readers are lurkers, inorder to encourage them to comment and make your blog more active try installing the WordPress Plugins listed below:

1. Show Top Commentators: This Plugin encourages discussion from your readers by displaying their name (linked to their site without a nofollow tag if desired) and number of comments on the sidebar. The Plugin also gives you the option to reset the list every hour, day, week, month or year.
2. Brian’s Threaded Comments: This plugin adds a ‘Reply to this comment’ link to every comment. When you use the reply link, your comment is placed directly under the comment you replied to. This plugin helps increase comments, makes it easy for people to reply to comments and prevents readers from scrolling down to look for answers to their questions.
3. Subscribe to Comments: This plugin allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments. This encourages readers to come back and take part in the conversation.
4. Comment relish: This plugin sends a thank-you email to your blog’s first time commentators. This encourages them to come back again and comment regularly.
5. Link Love: This plugin turns off nofollow for all commenters who have made at least 10 comments. The number of comments is configurable by changing a variable in the plugin.

Continue reading ‘Top 5 WordPress Plugins That Help Increase Comments’

SEO Title Tag is my favorite Search Engine Optimization plugin for WordPress and I recommend all WordPress users to install it. The plugin allows you to easily optimize the title tags across your WordPress-powered blog (for not just the single post pages and homepage) and since Title tags are one of the most important on-page factors for search engine optimization, this plugin can be very helpful.

Continue reading ‘SEO Title Tag 2.0′

MyAvatars is a plugin for WordPress that displays the readers MyBlogLog avatars besides their comments. In my opinion MyAvatars is much better than Gravatars as I think most of my commenters use MyBlogLog rather than Gravatars.

To test this, I activated Gravatars for some time on this blog and found that very few commenters were using Gravatars. When I activated MyAvatars, I was happy to see most of my readers faces

MyAvatars is easy to install, just download the file myavatars.zip, extract and copy it in your plugin directory preserving the folder name and then activate the plugin.

You will then have to edit your comments.php file and add the following code inside the comment’s loop

<?php if(function_exists("MyAvatars")) MyAvatars(); ?>

The disadvantage of using this plugin is that it can increase your page loading time by loading all those MyBlogLog Avatars

Permalinks Migration is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website and even without affecting your search engine rankings.

It does this by generating a “301 Redirect” or a Permanent Redirect when a user or spider visits your site through old permalinks and redirects them to the new permalinks of the same post.

I found this plugin via Everton’s blog who recently changed his permalinks using the Permalinks Migration plugin from something like this

www.connectedinternet.co.uk/2005/12/05/652/

to a better Permalink Structure like this

http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk/2005/12/05/post-title/

A good permalinks structure will help you improve your search engine rankings, so if you currently use a bad permalink structure like

http://www.example.com/?p=57

you can safely change your permalink structure to a better one using Permalinks Migration without fear of losing your traffic and pagerank

A few days back I noticed that the latest version of WP-PageNavi WordPress Plugin was not working with the latest version of Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) on Tag pages in WordPress 2.1. I contacted the plugin author of WP-PageNavi and soon got the fix for it.

As the author won’t update the plugin on his site until about 1st May 2007, you can download the fix from his forum.

Back in August 2006, I had explained a way to add Related Posts to your feed. But it involved modifying the wp-rss2 file. Now thanks to Solo Technology, you can add related posts to your feed without modifying any file but by just activating their wonderful WordPress Plugin.

You will need either UTW or w-a-s-a-b-i Related Posts plugin installed and activated.

Their first release of the plugin only supports UTW. So if you want support for w-a-s-a-b-i Related Posts, download the second release.

Installation

Download the plugin from here, unzip it and upload it to your plugins directory and then activate it. That’s it!

Why do you need to add related posts to your feed?

Because it will help you get your RSS readers to visit your blog and thereby increase your blog’s pageviews.

These days I have been getting spam mails send using the contact form on this blog. Some of these mails look like

Britney wrote:
You have a wonderful website here. May God rich bless you always.

Nicole wrote:
Looking for information and found it at this great site

Just while I was thinking of a way to avoid this, Mark (from Weblog Tools Collection) came up with a plugin that adds the Akismet comment test to the PSXMail plugin. Inorder to use this plugin you have to have Akismet installed and activated as a plugin already with a valid Akismet Key.

Continue reading ‘WordPress Plugin: PXSMail with Akismet’