6 WordPress Plugins For Your Blog

Posted on by Mandy

Imagine being able to fight spam, choose a winner for your blog giveaways, and improve your blog’s SEO all with one click of a button.  If you’re using WordPress for your blogging platform and you haven’t implemented plugins into your blog, you’re really missing out on some great time-saving secrets of blogging.

What exactly is a plugin?  A plugin is an extension you can download and insert into your blog to make it do almost anything you can imagine.  There are plugins to fight spam, as I mentioned above, manage you social networking from your blog, and manage your comments section of your blog.  If you can think of anything you’d like your blog to do better and faster, there’s probably a plugin for that.

The WordPress Plugin Directory is filled with over 10,000 plugins.  Once you’ve found a few you like, I’ve found it easier to go directly to your Admin panel in WordPress, click on “Plugins” in your sidebar, and search and install from there.  Once you find a plugin you like, you can click “Install Now” and it will begin doing the download.  You will then see a message that looks like this:

Downloading install package from http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/broken-link-checker.0.9.6.zip…

Unpacking the package…

Installing the plugin…

Successfully installed the plugin Broken Link Checker 0.9.6.

Actions: Activate Plugin | Return to Plugin Installer

You will then click on “Activate Plugin” and you should be good to go.  Some plugins might require some extra tweaking, such as putting in information you want tracked, but they will also display instructions for doing that easily.

Below are six plugins I am currently using to make my blog work better for me.  Some of these may not apply to what you need for your blog, but some are pretty basic that every blogger can benefit from.

Akismet–  If you have a big problem with spambots leaving spammy comments on your blog, Akismet is great for catching any comment it recognizes as Spam and holding it in a folder until you have time to go through and take a look and delete them.  Suggestion:  If you hold giveaways on your blog, you will want to check your comment folder regularly.  Sometimes giveaway entries end up there in spam and you don’t want to lose those entries.

And The Winner Is– If you hold giveaways regularly on your blog, this is a fantastic plugin for choosing a winner.  All you have to do is install this and the next time you make a post, be sure and mark the box to the side of your admin panel that it’s a giveaway post and how many winners will be chosen.  Once your giveaway is over, simply click a button on this plugin and your winner is picked for you.

WP-Ban– If you’re trying to rid yourself of online trolls and spammers, WP-Ban can ban their IP addresses from seeing your blog.  It’s not always 100% effective, but if they have a static IP it can be very useful for preventing anyone you don’t want to have access to your blog from reading and commenting.  I haven’t had to use this feature yet, but I’m glad it’s there if I ever need it.

CommentLuv–  CommentLuv is a plugin that will visit the site of anyone who leaves a comment on your blog and post a link to their most recent post at the bottom of the comment they leave.  This is just a nice way of giving a link back to someone and showcasing their last post in case someone else may be interested in reading it.

Share This– This plugin will insert social network icons at the bottom of each post so readers can share your post via Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, and Email.  You can see mine at the bottom of this post.  I think they look pretty sharp and just make sharing super easy for your visitors.

Disable Check Comment Flood–  Again, if you hold giveaways on your blog, this is another great plugin to make entering more user-friendly for your readers.  If people try to enter your giveaway through several different ways of entering, they will start seeing a message telling them they are posting comments to quickly and to wait.  This plugin will make that message go away and help them enter your giveaways much quicker.

The above plugins are the ones I use most often, but they’re definitely not the only ones I use.  There are so many more plugins out there to fit any blog’s needs and they’re worth checking out to make blogging easier for you and your readers.

I have read online recently that more plugins might make your site run slower and impact the way Google crawls your site for indexing purposes, so you might want to keep them at a bare minimum if you’re worried about page rank and indexing stats.

I’d love to hear what plugins you use on your WordPress blog and what they do to make blogging easier for you.

The Sanity-Saving Facebook “Hide” Option

Posted on by Mandy

I see many, many things on Facebook that annoy me on a daily basis.  Sure, we all have bad days and probably complain once or twice on our status updates.  I’m definitely guilty as charged on that one.  However, I have recently come across probably the most annoying personality trait ever on Facebook.

It starts with someone sharing a little too much information.  Maybe they are having marital problems, maybe their child is being mistreated at school, maybe it’s some other relationship issue or job issue going on.  Whatever the case, they share a little more than the average person would probably feel comfortable sharing in such a public setting.  And then, they invite everyone on their friend’s list to play armchair psychologist to “help” them.

And this is where the fun starts.

People will either tell you what you want to hear, what they think you want to hear, and some brave souls will tell you the truth even when it hurts. 

And this is where it starts getting good.

After a myriad of helpful (and not so helpful) suggestions are made, the person will finally get so exasperated that they get mad, take their toys, and then leave.  But NOT without the million dollar question:

“Gah!  Why can’t everyone just STAY OUT OF MY BUSINESS???!!!!”  Then they stomp off to their angry chair.

Why, indeed!

I don’t ever respond to these types of people because it’s just funnier to sit back and watch.  But, it eventually gets so annoying and clogs up my feed that I have to hide them for my sanity’s sake.  I am so glad Facebook has that option.  It’s just less obvious than deleting them from your friend’s list and they are none the wiser.

Share Day Anxiety

Posted on by Mandy

Let’s talk about share day (or show and tell day) at school.  I swear, nothing makes me sweat bullets on a Wednesday night like trying to come up with something appropriate for my son’s Share Day, which is on Thursdays every week.  It would be different if he could just pick out something random around the house he wanted to show his classmates, like a toy or something, but no, Share Day has stipulations. 

On Share Day, whatever my son brings to share must start with the letter of the week.  Easy enough, right?  However, it must also be put in a brown paper bag with three clues as to what is inside written on the paper bag.  And this is where I start to panic, because I want him to bring something interesting, but I also don’t want him to bring something everyone else has brought that week.  (I know…that’s a complex I am working on)  I wonder how many apples were brought on letter “A” day?

So this week he brought a cookie cutter for the letter C to share.  Groundbreaking stuff, y’all.  Have you ever tried to describe a cookie cutter by giving three clues without giving away what’s in the bag?  Think on that. 

But mostly?  My brain just draws a complete blank when trying to choose something for Share Day.  I’m not too great at thinking on my toes about stuff like that and then I overthink, which gets me nowhere fast.  I have issues on that, too.  The other big problem is that I can think of a million great things for him to take that starts with the letter he is working on that week, only, everything I think of won’t fit inside a brown paper bag.  Hmph!

I thought I had it really bad until a Facebook friend just this morning shared her child’s Share Day dilemma.  Halfway to school and too far to turn back for home, her child realized it was Share Day and she had brought nothing.  The requirements for HER child’s Share Day?  The item had to be something with the short “e” sound.  THE SHORT “E” SOUND!!  Because my friend is such a sharp thinker (and also used to be a teacher), she quickly fished out a Spanish coin she had collecting dust in her car that had “Espana” written on it, and said, “Because doesn’t everyone have  money from Spain lying around in their car?”.  Well played, Mom.  Well played, indeed.

So, what are the stipulations for YOUR child’s share day?  Is it a free-for-all, or are their stringent guidelines about what is to be brought in?  Any funny Share Day stories to share?  Near misses like my friend almost had?  I’d love to hear them!