Yesterday I released my newest WordPress plugin: Tweetable. It helps integrate Twitter into your blog. It tweets your posts as they are published and adds a configurable sidebar widget that displays your latest tweets (with optional follower count). The automatic post-tweeting can be configured to use the URL shortener of your choice, and Google Analytics campaign tags can be included.
Google Analytics supports an interesting feature called campaign tagging, where you append variables to a URL so you can track a “campaign.” You could, for instance, add them to the URL of a post of yours that you will be sharing on Twitter. Then you wait for it to propogate and go viral. You can then track, in Google Analytics, how much traffic is coming from Twitter. Usually, Analytics won’t be able to give you an accurate picture of how many hits are coming from Twitter, as it only sees visits from Twitter.com. Traffic from desktop clients like Twhirl and TweetDeck appear as direct visits. Campaign tagging fixes that.
Jack McIntyre recently cooked up an interesting plugin for WordPress, one that I’m surprised hadn’t already existed. It’s called Tracked RSS. It adds campaign tags to your RSS feeds, so you can tell when someone clicks through from their feed reader to your site. This is something I’ve long wanted to do. There’s also a sister plugin, Tracked Tweets, which tweets your posts and includes campaign tags in the shortened link.
For the Twitter-obsessed who want to display their follower count on their blogs, ThemeSphere has put together a WordPress plugin that will get it in plain text.
Installing the plugin gives you access to a function and a shortcode that will return the follower count for a user you specify.
Example: <?php echo twounter('redwall_hp'); ?>
You could use this to simply display your Twitter follower count, or you could use it for something more interesting, like displaying the follower count for each user in a multi-author blog. If you look around at sites like Net.Tuts+ and Blogging Tips, they often have brief bios after posts, complete with a Gravatar and link to the author’s site. Why not add a follower count to the mix?
Version 1.3.0 of the GoCodes redirection plugin has been released. Several long-awaited improvements have been made.
Also note that GoCodes now uses the more SEO-friendly 301 redirects instead of 302s, and has since the previous release.
To update, either use WordPress’s automatic plugin updater, or download the latest version manually from WordPress.org.
If you find any bugs, or have a feature request, feel free to leave a comment.
I’ve previously talked about the distinguished BuySellAds banner marketplace. The network makes it much easier to sell ad space on your website, and has proven to be an excellent alternative to directly making deals with advertisers.
Thaya Kareeson of Omninoggin.com has put together a great WordPress plugin to make it easier to add the BSA ad code to your site. (As if pasting a bit of JavaScript wasn’t easy enough.)
The Buy Sell Ads WordPress Plugin, once installed, allows you to insert an ad zone into your sidebar simply by dropping a widget in. For ads elsewhere, or if you don’t have a widgetized theme, you can use a template tag instead.
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The WordPress 125×125 ad management plugin has just got better, with yet another release. Version 1.3.0 fixes a few bugs, and adds some useful new features.
New features in 1.3.0:
Did you know there is an easy way to dramatically improve your WordPress blog’s search rankings? Try installing the All in One SEO Pack, one of the most popular WordPress plugins.
The plugin
These things can really help out your rankings. The <title> tag is a major point of focus for Google and other search engines, and it’s the part of a result that searchers pay the most attention to. It pays to have good titles.
Meta tags may not have the weight they once did, but they are still considered, and are worth paying attention to all the same.
As with all matters of SEO, your mileage will vary. This plugin will definitely do more good than harm though.
Thaya Kareeson, maker of the useful WP Greet Box Plugin, has just released Anti-AdBlock, a WordPress plugin that detects if the user is running the AdBlock Plus extension for Firefox and displays a message “humbly asking them to support your website by turning off their AdBlock software.”
The plugin allows you to customize the message to be displayed and the accompanying image. The box will, by default, log a cookie to prevent the box from showing again after the first visit, though you can set it to show more than once. Also, the message can be set to not display until a user has visiting more than X pages on the site, and it is set to a reasonably high number by default; a nice touch.
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Smashing Magazine has released an interesting WordPress plugin called “Twittar.” The plugin, named for “Twitter Avatar,” is used in place of WordPress’s Gravatar template tag. When a comment is displayed, the plugin will check to see if the email address left matches a Twitter account, and will add the user’s avatar to the comment. Should they not have a Twitter account, it will check for a Gravatar instead.
This is an interesting idea, though some users have commented upon the plugin’s performance. It’s not terribly efficient, making two HTTP requests per comment server-side, and then the client loads the image. A solution is being considered, probably some sort of caching.
I quite like the idea, though I think it should have the option of changing the order of precedence for the avatars, so Gravatars could be favored over Twitter avatars. My Twitter avatar is the same as my Gravatar, but since Gravatars are more known for being “comment avatars,” it makes sense that some people would expect their Gravatar to load instead of their Twitter picture.
I would like to formally announce my latest WordPress plugin today. Behold Favorites Menu Manager.
When WordPress 2.7 launched, a small menu was added to the upper-right corner of the Admin. This menu was referred to as a Favorite Actions menu.
The menu, by default, doesn’t offer the user any customization options. It just contains links to Admin pages that are used often, or ones that most people use often. Shouldn’t it contain the links that you use most?
That’s where Favorites Menu Manager comes in. The plugin adds a new submenu under the Users section of the Administration, allowing each user of a WordPress install to customize his or her Favorite Actions menu. New items can be added easily, little-used ones removed. Items can be reordered and renamed as well. A handy Bookmark This item is added to the menu to make it easier to add items to the list. (Just navigate to the page you want, click, and then edit the name of the link.)
Finally, the Favorite Actions menu can actually contain your favorite actions.
Download the plugin from the WordPress Plugin Repository.
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