In my series on how to start a blog with WordPress, I discussed a few plugins, but I’ve added a few more lately. These are focused more at advanced bloggers who want to tweak the way their blog works.
Align Images in RSS Feeds – does what it says on the box. WordPress uses styles to align images, but those styles don’t work in RSS feeds. All images end up as non-aligned in the feed. Eric Gray of VCritical (Blog – Twitter) turned me on to this simple plugin that fixes ‘em.
Amazon S3 for WordPress – Amazon S3 is a cloud-based file storage service. Think of it as a web host that charges by the byte instead of a fixed monthly fee. If your site is suddenly linked by a really popular blogger, the images will be served off Amazon’s servers instead of yours, which gives you a much better chance of surviving without an outage. It doesn’t include functionality for Amazon CloudFront, but another blogger has added code for that.
DB Cache Reloaded – I used to use the WP-Super-Cache plugin for caching, but DB Cache Reloaded works by caching database queries instead of completed pages. This means it works better for more pages, plus it works with plugins that build every page dynamically. Found this by looking at the source code for Stephen Foskett’s blog after talking with him about his web host and his page volume. I was wondering how he could survive – this plugin is a big part of the answer.
Page Links To – in the menu across the top of my site, I wanted to include menu items for blog posts. Normally WordPress won’t do that, because the menu is composed of only pages (not posts). This plugin makes it possible.
Wibiya Toolbar – this is the little toolbar that goes across the bottom of my blog with links to Twitter, FaceBook, Flickr, and more. After watching my web site analytics, I don’t think this is making people stick around the site more often or be more interactive, but I like the toolbar so I’ll leave it on.
Note: I’m on a cruise ship this week and won’t be responding to comments until Monday, January 11th. If you post a comment that requires moderation, don’t fret – I’ll approve it when I get back.
Ha! You seduced me into clicking on the Wibiya Toolbar. Nicely done
Of course, I also discovered its “minimize” button, so I was able to salvage some of my dignity.
Thanks – I don’t use any of these plugins but I enjoyed the mention of Amazon Cloudfront. I’ve been following Amazon’s services pretty closely but somehow I hadn’t ever heard of cloudfront and it sounds very interesting!
Thanks for the tips Brent! I will certainly be looking into these plugins in more detail.
Cheers,
John