There are so many plugins for WordPress, that it’s rare that a new one comes along that I think all WordPress users should install. However I’ve just discovered a new plugin that will help me sleep better at night.

AntiLeech is a WordPress plugin that stops Splogs, i.e. feed scrappers that steal other blogs traffic, in their tracks. It doesn’t do this in a pointless manner like other similar plugins by inserting a copyright notice. What it does is replace your content with useless gibberish, and if you opt to, a link back to your own site!

Read the rest of this post »»

I’ve been blogging for nearly 3 years now and this site has gone from a handful of page impressions and dollars per day to around 600k page impressions and $15k per month. In that time I’ve moved hosts a few times, moved from shared hosting to a dedicated server, changed blogging platforms, tried numerous plugins and ad schemes, and the net effect of all my fiddling has been to slow this site down to almost a crawl.

I got tired of being embarrassed about having the slowest site on the block, so I’ve enlisted the help of a server expert who is making a number of changes to my server and theme to optimise my Wordpress site to make it faster and also more secure. I’ve asked Chris to keep notes of all the changes he makes so that I can share them with readers in a series of WordPress Masterclass posts, so that you can all benefit from his work.

If you haven’t already subscribed to this site’s RSS feed I’d do so now, as I think these are going to be great set of posts. He’s only been working for a few hours so far, and regular readers can already see the amazing improvements he’s made already. I can’t wait to see how fast he can make my WordPress blog and server.

Read the rest of this post »»

I’ve just added two new WordPress plugins to my site that will make it easier for users to leave comments:

1. WP-Ajax Edit Comments: WP Ajax Edit Comments (for WP 2.1+) allows users and admins alike to edit and delete comments on a post for 15 minutes (user-defined). Great little plugin that worked straight ‘out of the box’.
2. Comment Quicktags: After trying a few plugins, I finally found a plugin that allowed me to add quicktags to my comment form. Thanks Ibrahim!

Enjoy.

As promised below is a list of the WordPress plugins used on this site. I find it’s useful to do a plugins post every few months or two to share what I’m using with readers, but also to get suggestions from readers for other WordPress plugins I should give a try.

This list was created with Viper’s Plugins Used v1.12 by Viper007Bond, which allows you to display alphabetically what plugins you have enabled on your blog in either a table or unordered list. It also allows you to set custom descriptions for the plugins in the output.
Read the rest of this post »»

One of my favourite plugins is the Related Posts plugin. However, then version I’ve been using hasn’t been updated for over a year so I decided to check the WordPress plugin site to see if some clever teenager somewhere has come up with an improved version.

Visiting the WordPress plugin site has made me realise it’s been a very long time since I installed a new WordPress plugin. I spent a few minutes on the site and here are the new plugins I’ve added/replaced:

Read the rest of this post »»