wordpress
List of important Blogging tools
A blog can be made more advanced, complex and better using some blogging tools, I have tested most of the famous blogging tools that are around in the market. I tried out some of the most popular, tools, plugins that are available in the marked which work well with wordpress and on your computer. This post will have details of blogging tools which you can use with wordpress. All the blogging tools mentioned here need a computer (must) and some of them require wordpress to work along with. The blogging tools which are mentioned here are meant only for use with wordpress. Some tools which work offline will work with any blogging software. This post includes the set of important plugins for newbies and offline tools which will help you blog better.
Yet Another Related Posts plugin for Wordpress
YARPP is a related posts finder plugin. It finds all the related posts in your blog. The match can be made more strict by increasing the match threshold. More the match threshold means more related the posts will be. To make my posts highly related, my match threshold is set to 14. The posts can be made more related by increasing the match threshold. It can auto insert related posts to the blog post. By selecting the auto insert option, the related posts will be automatically inserted into your blog posts. The auto insert option reduces your work by adding related posts without any theme modification.
All in one SEO pack for Wordpress
All in One SEO Pack is another important blogging tool. It does all the search engine optimization and is an important blogging tool for any blog. It has been rated as one of the most popular blogging tools in the wordpress plugin community. It is a popular blogging tool as it was the most downloaded blogging tool for sometime. All the search engine optimization is done by it. The search engine optimization of the blogs, which is very important is handled by this tool, although you have to set the title etc. of your blog posts. You can set how titles of pages, posts, archives and categories should be. Using All in one seo pack, you can change the default title of different pages on wordpress. Due to its SEO blog visitors increase. My blogs visitors from Google has increased due to All in one SEO pack combined with my blog posts. It is a must have tool for all blogs.
Statpress for Wordpress
StatPress tells where the visitors are coming from. Using statpress you can see how many visitors have visited. It allows you to see the search queries via which users have come to your website. Statpress generates graphs showing the amount of visitors. Graphs generated by this allow the blog owners to analyze their traffic. Using these graph analysis, blog owners can make more strategies to increase the amount of visitors that come to their blog. It shows the maximum number of visitors for a blog post too. Blog owners can see which blog post is popular and can concentrate on making it better and better. Statpress is also a must have for a blog if the owners are concerned about the visitors that they get. Using statpress they can track the visitor activity.
Post Ideas for your computer
Post Ideas is a tool developed by Canober. It is a tool to store ideas of your blog posts. Using this tool you can store small snippets or ideas of yout blog post on your computer. You can store your blog post ideas all day and in the night you can easily read all the post ideas and then write good posts on them. This is a highly recommended blogging tool for all bloggers. Everyone who is involved in blogging should download this tool.
Link to others freely
Hey,
Blogging itself is an art but so is search engine optimization. When these two combine they become a real powerful way of getting a lot of visitors. I have seen in many blogs that people write about something and never bother to link to the website of what they are writing about. Yes, I am one of them. I write about something and take pain to link them to what I am writing about. It is a bad habit and I am trying real hard to come out of it. There are many people blogging on the web and many of them quote another person in their blogs but don’t care to leave a link back to them. It has not happened to me, yet, but I do read other blogs and I have seen the owners quote others but never leave a link back to them.
Search Engines will be able to perform better if we give link love to websites or blogs or blog posts that are really good. Search Engines mainly depend on links and when we give link to others it means that we are giving at editorial vote to someone. By doing that small thing, which won’t cost you much, it will benefit not only the owner of the other blog/website but also the masses, high quality information will be delivered to them.
As I told when we link to others we are giving an editorial vote, this means that we are telling the search engine that the person who we are linking to has some good quality stuff, which is worth reading for others. Blogging will become easy for every one if we link to others freely. Many blogs will improve and they might give a link back to you.
Also linking to a particular blog post will send a trackback to the owner of the other blog. That means a small link will be placed in his blog post, telling the world that you have linked to his post. This happens in a blogging software called Wordpress and someblogging websites like Blogspot (blogger). Visitors can come to your website using trackback links.
The system of trackback is not essentialy very good as there is something called trackback spamming in the blogging world too. Trackback spamming occurs when spam blogs/websites put links of your blog post and send trackbacks to you. If not moderated, these trackbacks can stay in your post as a link and your visitors can click on them and go to the spam blog/website.
You know if we all started to freely link to each others post it will be like a perfect blogging world. Some people prefer not to link as they will be giving publicity to the other blog and losing the PR Jucie, if you are one of those guys then please change your opinion. PR Juice loss is NEGLIGIABLE and giving publicity point is true but it helps visitors if the other blog has good information on what you are writing. When you link to others, it means that you are giving promotion to people who deserve some attention and that is a good quality of man. Linking to others also helps as the owner might come visit your blog, look around feeling happy and might link back if he thinks that you are worthy of getting a link. Duh!! Ofcourse you are, if you blog well why won’t he think that your blog is worthy of a link. The owner of the other blog which you link to can also read this blog post and develop a wider view of a good blogging environment.
Take Care.
KP
Here is the problem with using Wp Cache and YARPP together
Immediately after using WP Cache and YARPP together, I spotted a problem. Its pretty inevitable. Say you make a post about a topic x, the related posts in this post will come up well, but the new post won’t show up in old posts that have been cached. This is a quick post just pointing out the problem, I don’t think there is a solution to this. Using WP Cache speeds up the wordpress blog but plugins don’t run I guess.
Well there is a solution, but its not really that easy. Clear the cache, disable WP Cache, make a program or a macro to browse through your entire blog and again activate WP Cache and cache the blog. If you do this from time to time them the websites related posts will be perfect. Keep the match threshold high for a better match result. By two to three posts I will search for a program that will browse through your entire website or I will make one like that.
WP Cache and YARPP working fine together
Just installed Wp Cache as Mitcho (the maker of YARPP) told me in a blog. Both WP Cache and Yarpp are working fine together.
YARPP does fulltext searches every time a page load takes place. Adding WP Cache will reduce that as the pages are cached. Although I am not sure if there will be real time display of the related posts. This means that a change might not appear in other posts if a post related to it is added but I have not confirmed this yet. I will do that after posting this.
Many people now are concerned that the page load time and server load will increase. I have not observed any thing like that happeing now but Fulltext Searches in MySQL tables every time a page loads can put some additional server load, although the maker of the plugin claims that this is not true.
There was a similar plugin in a forum software called vBulletin, it was called as “Similar Threads”. vBulletin is a stable and a famous forum software and after installing this plugin, people started facing some errors. But that was definetly NOT the case with YARPP, for standard human eye, like mine, every thing looked normal and page load time was approximately the same, although I didn’t check the actual time, my spidey sense told me that the page load time was same 
.
I have also asked the maker of this plugin when he will be releasing the next version of his plugin. There are some bug fixes that are coming up in it. This is the good thing about open source, that when someone finds a bug, he can also give the solution. I didn’t find any yet, but I wil glad to help if I find one. Many times it has happened that a fatal problem has been averted due to open source nature of a software. But some times open source also affects other companies.
Replacing the related posts plugin in Wordpress
Hey,
I am using a related posts plugin which works only using tags. It is good and has worked well but it does not show the excerpt of a post and that is pretty important for the visitors because they’ll get to see a small insight on the post. So I saw a new plugin called as Yet another related posts plugin. There are a lot of features in it but the major thing that I liked was the Match Threshold feature. You can set how strict the matching patter should be. Higher the match threshold more accurate the relativity factor will be, but less posts might be shown.
I tried this plugin on my video website and the match was pretty good. The default match threshold was 5 which was a bit too high for my site, so I reduced the match threshold to two and accurate results were being shown.
A fellow blogger pointed out some possible errors like overload to the CPU but it was all fine. The script is compatible with the latest version of wordpress, that is wordpress 2.6 (as on August 1st 2008). Wordpress 2.7 is being developed now, so we should wait and watch if it works with that.
Coming back to Yet another related posts plugin, it has features like disabling specific categories that are being included and you can set the importance given to the title and body of the post.
Support is also being given, so if someone finds a security hole in it, it can be immediately fixed. Wordpress 2.3 is an example of failed security, there were so many blogs that were affected. I use a software which can update Wordpress, so as soon as the patch was released, I updated it.
Related posts is good for both SEO and for your visitors to browse.
Take Care, Have Fun
KP