This is a cooperative blog: a co/blog. We've really just started this experiment, so give a few months to get some momentum. Each of the five charter authors involved are responsible for a different set of topics, and each will post on their own schedule. We hope you enjoy the content provided here, and find it useful. The information provided is meant as opinion and editorial purposes only, and should never be taken as professional advice.

Useful Plugins for WordPress - Part 2

Archived in Free, Design, Downloads, Websites | 1 Comment

You may have noticed that this little experiment that our faithful leader has cobbled together is (a) built in the form of a blog and (b) managed through a little content management system called WordPress. The system itself highly useful for website DESIGN because of two factors: first, there is an abundance of ready-made templates that can be implemented as-is and second, there are an abundance of plugins that add weird and wonderful functionality to the core system and help you customize you efforts. I’m going to review some of those here, as I get the chance.

DashBar [k] | LINK

We’ve been making extensive use of this plug-in as of late on multiple blogs. It’s a very simple install, and once you are logged in it provides a very easy way to navigate the administrative and editing functions of Wordpress from within the site itself. “Displays a WordPress.com-like navigation bar above the public blog pages, but only for logged-in users who have sufficient Role privileges. Provides direct access to Dashboard, Write Post, Edit Posts (with dropdown menu to select post to edit), Awaiting Moderation, My Profile, and other functions appropriate to the current blog page, without having to manually go into the admin area. Also says which user you are, and provides a quick logout button, just like top of real WP admin pages.”

Google Site Maps | LINK

This little bit of code is a godsend for site administrators. A back-end tool lets you configure and automatically prepare and submit sitemaps to Google for your entire blog. Brad would have been well to mention it in his recent post, “Blogging for Fun and Profit — Part 1“, as anyone setting up a blog that intends to have it crawled by Google in the most efficient way possible cannot avoid this plug-in.

Popularity: 28% [?]

Read more posts by Luke D (About the Author)

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Posts that might have similar content:

Useful Plugins for WordPress - Part 1 >> You may have noticed that this little experiment that our faithful leader has cobbled together is (a) built in the form of a blog and (b) managed through a little content management system called WordPress. The system itself highly useful for

Blogging for Fun and Profit — Part 1 >> What better way to make a few bucks on the side than by writing about your passions. Sure, you could sign up for a penny-per-paragraph freelance writing site, but who has time for all the edits and re-edits that go along

Blogs, Spam, and Deterants

Archived in Technology, Design | No Comments

There are a number of great plugins available for FREE to prevent (or usually merely reduce) spam from appearing in the comments section of your blog. This site relies on a number of actions to prevent spam within these pages:

1. The first line of defense is Akismet. You may have heard of this fantastic plugin. It uses a central repository for known spam and spamming patterns and filters those posts directly into a temporary holding bin. Usually a quick visual scan of the list lets us know what is good and what isn’t.

2. The second line of defense is reputation. Having posted a comment previously on this site will give you some credibility and you will more easily make it through the filters.

3. If this still leaves us with too much to handle, we are thinking of implementing a captcha that will layer a please-retype-the-characters from the blurry-image-above question as part of the submission process.

We find that with these three lines of defense, and having a heavily scoured blog, we tend to only get one or two messages that don’t belong through our filter every few days.

I was thinking of writing a plugin (or adapting a plugin) to add a small extra feature to the spam filter. I’d like to have the ability to redirect a known “spammer” to a different URL. In this way I could set up a kind of “please fuck off” message on a separate domain that would result in a dead end message if someone began spamming the site. If anyone knows of something like this, please post a comment. I’ll try not to filter your suggestions. ;)

Popularity: 10% [?]

Read more posts by Brad K (About the Author)

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Posts that might have similar content:

Useful Plugins for WordPress - Part 1 >> You may have noticed that this little experiment that our faithful leader has cobbled together is (a) built in the form of a blog and (b) managed through a little content management system called WordPress. The system itself highly useful for

Useful Plugins for WordPress - Part 2 >> You may have noticed that this little experiment that our faithful leader has cobbled together is (a) built in the form of a blog and (b) managed through a little content management system called WordPress. The system itself highly useful for website

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