I do a love a good bit of unintentional irony.
Don’t get me wrong – I like the plugin I’m reviewing for you today. When it comes to presenting author bios on your blog, I think it does a great job. But it amuses me that the tagline for the free version is “The only author box plugin you’ll ever need”, when there is a premium version available. I couldn’t resist borrowing it for the headline of this review.
I’m all about the cloud these days.
The idea of being able to log into your life from anywhere on the world, on any machine, is pretty awesome. Not only that, the peace of mind from knowing that all of your valuable data is backed up and secure is priceless.
I made what I think is my final move onto the cloud just the other day, when I subscribed to the Spotify service. I already had Dropbox, Evernote and Gmail…my music was the last thing to go aerial, so to speak.
If you’ve been blogging for more than five minutes, you’ll understand the value of a good headline.
Your headline is what every single potential reader sees before they decide to read your content, and its ability to draw attention will to a large extent define how successful your article is.
Writing good headlines is something of an art form – something that takes time to learn; something that is never truly mastered. Having said that, there are ways in which you can boost the effectiveness of your headline writing skills.
A lot of people may shrug their shoulders at this plugin, but in my opinion, its very simple singular function should have been included in WordPress as standard a long time ago.
Here’s the deal – for the most part, old plugins not a good thing. If you have plugins on your WordPress site that haven’t been updated in many months (or even years), they could adversely affect your site’s performance (and/or functionality), or even represent a security threat (TimThumb anyone?).
With that in mind, Plugin Last Updated gives you an easy way to check when your plugins were last updated:
Okay – I’m going to admit it up front – I’m a Digg Digg user.
Having said that, I don’t have my head stuck in the sand, and am fully aware that Shareaholic is an enormously popular social sharing plugin. And since they released a major update just a few days ago, I thought it would be best to take a look and see what’s changed.
It turns out that the answer is “rather a lot”.
One Stop Social Sharing Plugin?
You love code snippets.
Why wouldn’t you? They’re like mini plugins – all the functionality, none of the bloat. You can cherry pick the key features that you need and keep your site lean and mean.
However, code snippets aren’t perfect. Before long, your functions.php file can start to get rather packed and messy. It can be difficult to remember what snippets you have, and why.
Like it or not, content sliders are here to stay.
It seems that you cannot browse through more than a few themes on the WordPress directory without seeing a content slider or two. In fairness, there is a good reason for this – sliders look pretty cool. Although us WordPress enthusiasts may get sick of the sight of them because they are so prevalent, the average web surfer is far less sensitive.
Besides, let’s not forget the fact that when implemented well, sliders can be both attractive and functional. And that is where SlideDeck comes in.
Version 2.1
We all have our fortes.
I consider myself a pretty decent writer, but my design skills leave little to be desired. And because blogging demands competency in a number of disciplines (such as writing, design, and marketing), there are very few of us who can nail all the different areas.
So there is nothing wrong with getting a little help. And if you feel that your writing skills are a weak link in your blogging process, Wordy for WordPress may be able to help.
What is Wordy?
Analytics are all the rage, aren’t they? Let’s be honest – most of us are forever checking on our stats to see how our sites are performing.
Don’t get me wrong – I try to resist the temptation, but I am ashamed to say that checking up on my Analytics is often the first thing I do in the morning, and the last thing I do at night.
Every now and then I’ll come across some fascinating data relating to WordPress, such as the 20 Compelling Statistics that Represent the Dominance of WordPress that I covered back in April. I’m a bit of a sucker for stuff like that, and I know that many of you are too.
Which brings me to this article. The folks over at HackerTarget.com have been very busy analyzing the top 1 million websites (as ranked by Alexa).
They uncovered some rather interesting information relating to WordPress sites and theme usage specifically, which I would like to share with you.
Free vs. Premium
