Category Archives: WordPress

wordpress, plug-ins, and other blogging software and tools

Similar Posts 1.11 WordPress Plugin

Posted on by
Reply

Looks like Rob has a new update to his Similar Posts WordPress plugin. The latest version, 1.11, improves the sanity checking of parameter values to avoid database errors. Since my previous review, Rob also added the ability to exclude certain authors on a multi-author blog. The text to show if no matches are found is now customizable and there is a new option for displaying links. All the options can be set via the options page. However, the option can also be specified via a query-style parameter. This gives the flexibility to use Similar Posts in several places with different behavior.

Rob has also created three new plugins which use the same infrastructure: Random Posts, Recent Posts, and Recent Comments. The random posts plugin displays a list of posts chosen at random from your blog. The recent posts plugin displays a list of your blog’s most recent posts. The recent comments plugin displays a list of your blog’s most recently commented posts. Like the similar posts plugin, Rob's new plugins give you more options (such as excluding certain categories) than what WordPress provides out of the box.

free eWeek

Better Feed WordPress Plugin

Posted on by
1

Hey, check out the Better Feed WordPress plugin. Better Feed gives you the ability to add extra stuff in your feed. For instance, the footer below appears at the bottom of each post in my feed. You won't see this footer on my blog, but you should be able to see it if you are reading this post from a RSS reader.

Better Feed WordPress plugin

Yes, I know you can already insert links with FeedFlares. The difference is that FeedFlares are actually images that link to FeedBurner before they are redirected to your URL. Better Feed links are text links that point directly to your site. So if your site is syndicated elsewhere, you will have real links pointing to your site. Links that can pass PageRank juice to your site.

With this plugin, I can also insert images (ad banners) in my feed. I was even able to get phpAdsNew ad server to serve ads into my feed. I could see two different ad banners in my FeedBurner feed (the one at: feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed). However, the ads are implemented via Javascript, which don't seem to work in RSS readers like Bloglines, Google RSS Reader, and Newsgator.

I love the plugin, but if you don't like playing with HTML code, the plugin isn't for you. There is no admin interface. You have to edit the plugin file itself. It isn't hard. For instance, I added the HTML code below to the plugin file for my RSS feed footer:


<hr noshade style="margin:0;height:1px" />
<p align="center">Permalink: <a href="%%posturl%%">%%posttitle%%</a><br />Links:  <a href="http://izachy.com/">iZachy</a> : : <a href="http://daddyforever.com/">Daddy Forever</a> : : <a href="http://www.embeddedstar.com/">Embedded Star</a> : : <a href="http://edageek.com/">EDA Geek</a> : : <a href="http://edablog.com/">EDA Blog</a><br />© %%date[Y]%% Online Destiny Ltd : : <a href="%%blogurl%%">%%blogname%%</a> is a trademark of Online Destiny</p>

free creative and multimedia magazines

Go to the Better Feed WordPress plugin page for more info.

[Update: The extra stuff you insert into the feed will not be displayed unless you are using full feed. However, you can limit how much of your post is displayed in the feed via the <!–more–> quicktag.]

Google News Bot Chokes on Links in Titles

Posted on by
2

Over on SEOmoz is an article on how to increase web traffic with Google News. At first I thought, "oh, another article about getting included into Google News." I figure it was the same stuff I've seen previously elsewhere. Then I saw something that caught my attention:

1. No links in titles
The Google News crawler can't handle links in titles. Run your titles in h tags and include a permalink on the page that the Google News bot can use.

Holy jumping up and down Martha, that can't be right. Can it? After all, on most WordPress themes, the title of each post is a link to itself. I thought for sure Brian, the author of the post, must be wrong so I checked on the Google News site and this is what I found:

…each article must link to a page dedicated solely to that article. When the headline on this page is an active link, however, we may have difficulty displaying it correctly. Making headlines regular text, not links, will increase the likelihood that our crawler will extract the correct headlines.

Good golly Miss Molly, Brian does know what he's writing about. This brings me full circle with a question I had when I first started using a blog platform (I have been using a blog platform for less than a year). One of the things I noticed after installing WordPress was that the title of each post links to itself. I thought it was very odd so I did some research. What I found out was that the title links to itself because it was convenient for the developer to copy the same code over and over. Otherwise, the developer would have to spend more time editing out the links on some pages/templates.

free eWeek

I didn't want the title linking to itself so I removed the link. Then I noticed that just about every blogger had titles linking to the same page. Doubt crept into my mind. I was thinking, "I'm a web 1.0 dinosaur, maybe these web 2.0 bloggers know something I don't know. Maybe having the title linking to itself was great for SEO." So, I went back and reinserted the links into the titles. Now, I have to go back and remove the title link on my newsy site. The chances of getting my news site included in Google News is very, very, very, very slim. But why make it more difficult?

Similar Posts WordPress Plugin

Posted on by
13

If you are a fan of the Related Posts plugin, then I think you will like the Similar Posts WordPress plugin. The Similar Posts plugin is based on the Related Posts plugin, but with extra functionality. Rob Marsh, the developer, even used a couple of my ideas (excluding categories and unrelated pages) in his plugin.

But Rob didn't just stop there, he improved my hacks by placing the "exclude pages and categories" options in the admin menu. No more messing with the code. I was actually planning on doing the same thing, just not sure when. Now I don't have to write my own plugin. Rob already did it.

Another nice feature of the Similar Posts plugin is that you can tweak the similar keywords for each post when you are writing the post. This gives you the ability to fine-tune the keywords to your liking. In addition, if you have previously used the Related Posts plugin to assign keywords to posts you can now import them all from the Options page. I didn't even know you could assign keywords with the Related Posts plugin.

Here's my little comparison of the two:

  Related Posts Similar Posts
Can set the number of posts to show yes yes
Customize before/after post yes yes
Show excerpt yes yes
Customize before/after excerpt yes yes
Show password protected posts yes yes
Exclude static pages no yes
Exclude certain categories no yes
Checks title for match yes yes
Checks content for match no yes

The plugin is great, but I would suggest changing the "no similar posts" result when there's no related posts. Instead, it would be nice if the plugin could display a set of user-defined posts when the plugin can't find a related post. I have not seen "no related posts" on my site recently, but it will eventually show up again when I write an oddball post.

free computer magazines