Crenk

Wordpress has to be one of the most popular if not the most popular blogging software in the world today. Due to its popularity there are thousands of developers all over the world who are building plugins to add to the platform. Thus, I thought I would put together a short list of my favourite plugins, so here is my top 20.

1. Akismet
   The must have spam catcher. It’s already present in your default wordpress installation, if you haven’t activated it, please do it before those spams accumulate.
2. All in one SEO pack
   (Inactive)This is an great plugin that will help you manage the meta tags for articles enabling them with unique meta and titles.I use an even better plugin now (Headspace2), which is AllinSEO x 10 times. So this one is inactive. You may want to use it if you are looking for a hassle free and easy meta tag management.
3. Feed copyrighter plugin
   This one is reposible for throwing up those copyright statement at the end of the feeds in RSS readers. It is one way of fighting the scrappers, not sure how effective it is, but it is indeed one weapon we hve right now.Bad thing - The credit link will appear on all RSS footers.
4. Better comments manager
   This is one of the best plugins I’ve always cherished using. It enables easy management of comments, lets you reply to them easily, mass edit/approve them. And yes, this is from Keith and team. His plugins have exceptional quality after all.
5. Comment Luv
   This plugin is responsible for placing the link to your latest posts on comments. Nice plugin, it crawls your site (from the info you submit while commenting), and get’s the latest URL, parse it as HTML beneath your name.Bad thing - To tweak the text that appears with it, there are no options menu, and you have to edit the code. Not too many are comfortable doing it.
6. Duplicate sidebar widgets
   This plugin helps you to duplicate the widgets modules to drag and drop on the sidebar. Ex: If you want two instances of the random posts widget, this one replicates it.
7. Enhanced Contact form
   This plugin is responsible for all those contact forms appearing in the pages.
8. Feed footer
   Adds anything in HTML to feeds appearing in RSS reader. 10 spots available, suitable for advertising and throwing up messages.
9. Google AdWrap
   You know about Googles section targeting right?This plugin adds the “sections” to be targeted to comments and content area thereby the ads that appear on Google AdSense will be heavily contextual to the information in these sections.Bad thing - You can’t manually add te google_ad_section code to any other place on the blog.
10. Google XML sitemaps
    Must have for all blogs. Generates an XML sitemap making the contents visible for search spiders.Bad thing - If you enable the robots.txt rewriting, everything you set manually on robots.txt is rewritten.
11. HeadSpace2
    The best meta tag management plugin I’ve seen in the recent times. No words to describe - killer plugin!Bad thing - Initially, difficult to understand how it functions and yo use.
12. Homepage Excerpts
    Adds a “more” link cutting posts on the main homepage within certain limit of characters. Good for curbing duplicate content on wordpress.
13. I love social bookmarking
    (Inactive)Great plugin that displays a pull down menu for social bookmarking on all the top social media websites.Bad thing - Serious alignment issues.
14. KB Linker
    Great plugin to increase the number of links within your site. It enables you to select a keyword for which you can set a link. Where ever this keyword appears, it would make it a link.Bad thing - It injects the link code even to links and in between html codes ! And you get html errors sometimes.
15. Random posts widget
    Throws up a set of random posts on the sidebar. Good options available.
16. Search Meter
    Gives me access from the dashboard to search phrases on DailySEOblog search box. And also shows if the person who searched the phrase got the info he wanted or not. Good plugin to get an idea of topics to blog.
17. SEO for Wordpress
    A little outdated plugin, it says is reduces instances of duplicate content. But it doesn’t show us how and where. Otherwise a good concept.
18. Shylock AdSense
    The killer plugin that allows you to inject adsense codes anywhere on the post, and decide which ads to go where.
19. Ultimate Google Analytics
    Great plugin that will manage Google Analytics code injection and tracking a breeze. You could very well do it manually, but this one is a laymans friend.
20. WP- Stats
    Displays the wordpress blog stats from the dashboard. A better stats if you wat uptodate results. Analytics is a day and some hours late.

Wordpress is now one of the most popular blogging platforms in the market today and it is rising very day that passes. Today, I thought I would just run through some of the worlds best 2 column Wordpress themes. All of these themes are currently free to download and you can click on the preview link to see how they look. These themes can be a great start for any new blogger using Wordpress, instead of using just the basic theme in the Wordpress platform.

Green Tech Theme

Source | Download | Demo

WP Freemium Theme

Source | Download

Mag on Wood Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Skinpress - Choc

Download | Demo

Sandville

Download | Demo

A friend with a local business came to me with a somewhat unique request.  He wanted to setup a blog that only his employees and certain other people had access to for sharing information, ideas and other business concepts.  I suggested Google Apps for this, but he said not everyone that would be using this would be as tech savvy to fully grasp how that works and he needed more than just a text editor and a spreadsheet.

I set off to search for a plugin that would allow me to accomplish the goal of restricting access to the entire blog, forcing a registration.  After a few minutes I ended up on Viper007Bond’s site.  I’ve used his plugins before, so I knew they’d be top quality.  He wrote a custom plugin called Registered Users Only which, will redirect all users who aren’t logged in to the login form where they are shown a user-friendly message.

Perfect!  Upload the .php to the /plugin directory on your server, activate it and tick one box in the Options screen, you are done.  As admin to the blog, you create user accounts for those people you wish to give access to.  Since it uses the standard WordPress login screen and user database, you can simply add them as a Subscriber and once logged in, can see the entire site.

Total installation time is less than two minutes!

While the idea of putting a blog online is usually done so that someone will read it, this certain situation started to make a lot more sense to me.  WordPress offers so much more than just a blog, it’s turning into a CMS, and a tool to allow, in this case, his business to expand and grow internally.  The more I thought about it the more I realized that a private blog has many other uses to it.

Parents who want to setup a blog for their children, either from day 1 in their life or as they enter the tween stage probably won’t to protect who sees photos of their kids and what activities they do.

This plugin restricts ALL pages of the site, that is the only option.   This fits the goals of my friend and I think many other people.  Be aware, this does not protect your RSS feeds.  I would suggest deleting all RSS feeds from your WordPress install to fully protect your blog, if that is your goal.

Download from WordPress.org

Joost de Valk, a Wordpress and SEO specialist has written a basic beginner’s guide to Wordpress SEO which has to be one the best articles I have ever seen. You can find a variety of different SEO technique and it covers everything from basic technical optimisation to off site blog SEO. Make sure you head over to the site and check it out, I have already added some of the suggestion onto Crenk.

For nearly the last two years I have been blogging, writing nearly a thousand articles.  Lots of time, energy and creativity go into these words I write, and I publish them in the hopes that others will not only read them, but enjoy them, apply them and leave comments or ask questions.  The one evil of the Internet is Spam though, and over the last few years Spam bots have been attacking blogs like no other.  This is partly due to the number of new blogs being created.

The problem is comment spam.  These are comments that are left on articles that usually point to some website that tells you how she’d like you to be thicker and longer lasting, or how to find a great deal on your next new car.  Nothing of value, in face, these types of comments detract from the credibility of your content and worse, possibly lead to your readers leaving from clicking on a bogus link.  There is help.

Shortly after one particular article got bombarded with tons of traffic from several social bookmarking and networking sites at once, the comment spam started to roll in.  Using WordPress, my preferred platform for blogging, I set out to find some sort of Captcha system to add to blog posts to help cut down on the spam.  Generally speaking, I don’t like anything that interferes with a users experience, but this plug-in is a must have.

Did you pass math? adds a small math question to the bottom of your comment box, above the submit button.  It prompts the commentator to do a very simple math equation, like 7+3= [fill in the answer].   The plug-in can be found here: http://www.herod.net/dypm/ - and while it hasn’t been updated in two years, I don’t see that as a problem, it simply works.  To install it, simply download to your computer from their site, unzip the files and upload [via FTP] two PHP files (English is default, but support is there for dozens more).  Login to the admin section of WordPress, activate the plugin and you are done.

Since installing the Did you pass math plug-in, my comment spam has been near completely eliminated.  As an added bonus, there was zero negative feedback and no backlash from the my readers after installing.  Some even thanked me for not using a true Captcha system, since they can often be very hard to read.  My suggestion would be to install this when first setting up a blog, so you aren’t in a situation like me, trying to fix a broken problem while it is being broken even harder.

You might have noticed towards the end of last week Crenk got hacked and someone from South Korea placed malicious software onto our website. The only way I could get rid of it was to reinstall Wordpress. The site is now back to normal and it is functioning fine. However, this being said, the intrusion has caused us a great deal of problems and has also killed our traffic. Google has placed the site on watch and has been suspended from their search results until the problem has been resolved. Now it has all been resolved so Google will be placing the site back up in the next day. Thank you good people at Google. This cost us a lot of traffic!

Has anyone else had the same problem or a similar one?

I was just reading a very interesting post over at GigaOM which discussed the possibility of Automattic (Wordpress creators) creating an application to turn Wordpress into a social network. It is rumoured that Automattic have just hired Andy Peatling, who is the guy who created BuddyPress, which is a Wordpress-based social network. The next key is that on Matt Mullenweg’s blog, he writes:

It’s clear that the future is social. Connections are key. WordPress MU is a platform which has shown itself to be able to operate at Internet-scale and with BuddyPress we can make it friendlier. Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape.

Now does this mean that Matt just wants a piece of Zuckerberg and what he has, or does he really want to develop a product that Blogs, Forums, and Social Networking, together?

Im all for open source software and I think what Matt has done with Wordpress and possibly also trying to create with BuddyPress is the way forward. Open source software is nearly a part of every developers life in one form or another. Improvements in this market will always be moving and social network is the newest market to get involved in.

I just noticed yesterday that I am currently listed on the ProBlogger list over at Million Dollar Wiki. This is pretty cool. I would never really consider myself a problogger. This being said I guess I have written for some high class sites, such as Read/Write Web, Rev2.org and Pureblogging.

Wordpress Developer and Designer

I have mentioned in previous posts that I have been looking for a Wordpress ninja for a long time now. Im looking to really take Crenk to the masses. Im wanting to slightly change the format of the site and add some great new features. If your a design or know a design who might be interested in this, please get in touch with me or just comment on this post. Thanks.

Box.net has raised $6 million in a Series B financing led by venture capital firm U.S. Venture Partners, and includes Box.net Series A investor Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The capital will be used to continue company expansion, including the development and marketing of new services and products.

The New York Times reports that Automattic, the commercial arm of the popular WordPress publishing platform for blogs, has received $29.5 million in financing from four companies, including a small portion from The New York Times Company. Many other have reported on this round of funding, so take a look at what has been said at GigaOM, RWW and Techcrunch.

In the last three months we have had a lot of changes here at Crenk. Our previous theme was personalised and since we now have Ade on the team it was a good time to move from a personal weblog style to a more commercial theme.

I have never thought about Crenk being a pure commercial entity. It has long been my personal weblog and I would never want it to be seen as just a stupid money making blog that is trying to earning as much in revenue as it can per month. Since on the new theme I have placed Adsense, this will not be a permanent fixture, just a stop gap until I can arrange some nice in-house placements.

The colour scheme on Crenk has changed and some bought some much needed branding to the site.

Please bear with us as we make a few changes over the coming days. If you have any suggestions or comments about the new theme, please let us know.

Thanks and hope you like the new theme.

Crenk Team