As an avid Wordpress user, I have come to rely heavily on some of my plugins. Occasionally I’ll browse the Wordpress.org plugins section looking for cool ones to try, but usually I stumble across them trying to solve a problem or make my life easier. I’ve come up with a list of the ones that I find the most useful, or that are cool and worth having anyway.
I’ve been using Azureus for years as my BitTorrent client, but I’ve been increasingly dissatisfied with its performance. I often had trouble getting downloads to start (even with no proxies or encryption enabled), and it was hogging system resources it didn’t deserve. It’s become more bloated with each new release, and it got to the point that I didn’t even want to use BitTorrent anymore because my client was frustrating me so much. Then I discovered Deluge, and that all changed.
Google announced yesterday that they have partnered with AOL to allow GMail users to sign in to their AIM accounts in the GMail Talk interface, and chat with them right from there. I decided to try it out, and I have to say, it’s wicked cool.
Once you sign in to your GMail account, and are brought to your inbox, you simply go over to the Google Chat buddy list and click Options, then sign in to your AIM account. It prompts you for your AIM screen name and password, and then you’re good to go. It shows status the same way that it does for Google Talk buddies, and displays aliases as well as away messages right on the buddy list. I have everyone on my buddy list aliased for easy reference, so I was pumped to find that out! The chat window pops up the same way, either within the GMail window you have open, or optionally as a popup window.
Google added in features like chat history from the Google Talk system for use with AIM, so it almost makes you want to just use GMail for AIM all the time. Even if you continue to use the regular AIM client, or something like Pidgin as your primary instant messaging client, it sure is a huge improvement over AIM Express for web-based AIM access. I, for one, give it two thumbs up…right after I finish using them for my conversation.
Skribit is a new blog widget created by Startup Weekend Atlanta to allow readers to suggest topics to bloggers to write about. You simply place it on your site, and readers can post ideas for topics. It’s currently in closed beta (it was only created this weekend, brainstorm to product), but I’m anxious to be able to try it out.
I take a lot of pictures, and I like to upload them to my blog. My camera takes large resolution photos though, so preparing the pictures for upload can be annoying. I used to open up each photo I wanted to upload individually in GIMP, resize it, and once all the pictures were resized I’d upload them one by one. I then decided I would go looking for a batch resizer, and found a very basic one that got the job done. It still wasn’t ideal since I was resizing and then uploading, adding (I felt) unnecessary steps to the process. Finally, today I decided I’d see if somebody had been smart enough to write a Wordpress plugin to resize images when you upload them. Lo and behold, somebody was, and the results more than fit the bill.
A couple days ago I decided to get a Twitter account. It seemed like a cool idea, especially when I saw how Paul Stamatiou had integrated it into his Wordpress blog. Being able to have a real-time status update on my site sounded like a cool, more personal touch to stay connected with readers. I wanted to do it in a way similar to Paul’s site - one line that simply displayed the most recent tweet. A number of plugins exist to do this; I tried a few of them and overall my results weren’t great.
I recently got a new computer, which came with Windows Vista. I’m a Linux guy at heart, but like most of us, I’m forced to use Windows by the nature of my work. So, I decided to give Vista a shot, and see what it had to show for itself.
One of the nicest aspects of Wordpress is its ability to be used as a complete web site management tool, rather than just a blog. Its ease of use makes it a great solution for people unfamiliar with web site management, and daunted by the complexity of larger content management systems. However, there is something missing from the default Wordpress installation: the ability to easily manage page menus. There are a number of plugins that let you do this, but I’ve found two that I think are the most valuable to have.