RosalindGardner.com

Learn Blogging & Affiliate Marketing with Rosalind Gardner

Genesis: How to Create Custom Sidebars for Categories, Posts and Pages

By

Seeing the same sidebar on my site day after day gets boring — even for me — so I can just imagine how blind regular readers become to sidebar messages when the message never changes.

There is a solution to sidebar blindness though — create different sidebars for different categories, posts and pages.

In this post, I'll show you how to create a custom sidebar for categories, posts and pages using the Genesis Simple Sidebars plugin, designed specifically for Studiopress Genesis users.
[Read more…]

That WordPress Plugin is Messing Up Your Google Listings

By

WWSGD pluginDo you use either the WP Greet Box or WWSGD plugin (What Would Seth Godin Do?) on your WordPress blogs?

Have you placed them to show at the top of your posts and/or pages?

If so, you might be losing some valuable free traffic from the search engines.

Take a look at the screenshot above to the right. The “if you are new here” text shown in bold shows up in the Google search results description when bloggers allow the code from those two plugins to render at the top of their posts.

By result, they lose the space allotted for a proper description — which when written correctly can generate LOTS of extra traffic.

This problem can be solved in one of 2 ways:

  1. Have the plugin set to render at the bottom of the post.
  2. A better alternative is to enter a proper meta description either through your Custom Fields or by using a plugin like the Platinum SEO Pack.

Your choice.

Do one or the other, but please don't waste valuable free search engine traffic — it hurts my head when I see you doing that!

BTW, if you liked this post, you might also be interested in reading “WordPress Plugins and How I Use Them“.

Did you find this post informative and useful? If so, please share it with others! If you have a comment, question or suggestion, please leave a comment below!

Cheers,
sig-ros

WordPress Plugins and How I Use Them (2009)

By

UPDATE: A new (2019) version of this article about WordPress plugins is available.

Below is a list of my most frequently used WordPress plugins, along with descriptions of how I use them and links to examples in some cases.

The name of each plugin is linked to its download page (each link opens a new window).

Plugin

Description
Akismet Included with your WordPress installation, Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog's “Comments” admin screen. Use it on all my blogs. As of today (publishing date November 30th 2009), Akismet has caught 181,601 spams on this blog.

Amaniche LOVE this plugin. Adds Amazon products and reviews to your blog in the blink of an eye. You can see how I use it here.

Breadcrumb Navigation XT Generates locational breadcrumb trails for your WordPress blog. Used on my of my blogs. See it in use here at the top of the page above the post title. You don't need this if you're running StudioPress or Thesis as it's built into those themes.

Broken Link Checker Exactly as the name suggests. LOVE this plugin. Placed on all my blogs — works especially well when I actually use it. 🙂

Contact Form 7 Manages multiple, customizable contact forms. I use this one on MyEnergyPal.

Deactivate Visual Editor For use with Exex-PHP to ensure that you don't break your php code. Using is heavily on AffiliateBloggerPRO

Exec pHp Use it to execute PHP code in posts, pages and text widgets. See also ‘Deactive Visual Editor' plugin.

Faq Tastic VERY nice plugin. Can generate multiple FAQs. I use it here.

Dynamic Content Gallery Use it in conjunction with all my StudioPress themes — on almost all my sites.

Google Analyticator Enables Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog without template modification. Stats show up in your Dashboard as in the screenshot below (and then some).

Platinum SEO Pack SEO plugin allows you to specify keywords, description and more. I use it most often to specify a title that is more search engine friendly than the one used on my posts. For example the SEO title for the post, “Have Patience Young Grasshopper” is actually “How to Improve Your Online Buying Experience”.

Popshops Use to build product feeds with affiliate marketing networks like Commission Junction, LinkShare, Google Affiliate Network, ShareASale, LinkConnector, buy.at, Pepperjam and more.

Popularity Contest Popularity Contest keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular. Valuable for determining your readers' real interests.

Search and Replace LOVE this plugin! As name implies, allows you to search and replace anything in your ID, post-content, GUID, titel, excerpt, meta-data, comments, comment-author, comment-e-mail, comment-url, tags/categories and categories-description. Excellent for changing links if you haven't created a single redirect page or you're not using MaxBlogPress' Ninja Affiliate.

Search Everything Choose which of your posts, pages, comments etc. you wish to include in search. I use this specifically to exclude pages from my search functions.

Sexy Bookmarks Xxtremely useful plugin for getting your readers to actually submit your articles to numerous social bookmarking sites.

Subscribe to Comments Lets commenters sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. Used on NPT.

Tweetmeme Displays button that allows your blog posts to be retweeted and displays retweet count. Used on almost all my blogs. See above left.

WP-DB-Backup Easy backup for your core WordPress database tables.

What Would Seth Godin Do Drops cookies to display different messages for new visitors and returning visitors according to your specifications. Check it out on the homepage at 101Date.com.

WP Email Allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog's post/page to a friend

WP No Category Base Completely removes the mandatory ‘Category Base' from your category permalinks.

WP-Polls Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can see it in the sidebars here and here.

WP-Print Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog's post/page.

YaCaptcha yaCAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA plugin for WordPress that helps you block comment spam from automated bots.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin Displays a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.

Akismet: Catching 1500 Spam Comments per Day

By

This hat is the best blog comment spam filter ever… not. 🙂

Actually, the best blog comment spam filter is the one that comes with WordPress. It was developed by Matt Mullenweg and is called Akismet.

Akismet checks comments posted to your blog against the eb service to see if they look like spam and you can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”

Akismet is now catching approximately 1500 spam comments per day on this blog.

In the picture below, you'll note that there were 4,731 comments in the filter waiting to be trashed (I emptied the trash about 3 days before I took the screen capture) and that the plugin had caught 67,694 blog spam comments since I first installed it.

I just noticed that Akismet picked up 10 more spam comments in the time that it took me to write this post!

To use the plugin, you will need a WordPress API key. To activate it, go to “Plugins”, scroll down to “Akismet” and click “Activate”. Enter the API key at the “Akismet Configuration” page, also under the “Plugins” tab.

As your blog gets more and more traffic, you'll be SO glad you installed Akismet! I certainly am!

Learn more about WordPress plugins at WordPress Plugins and How I Use Them.

Did you find this post informative and useful? If so, please share it with others! If you have a comment, question, or suggestion, please leave a comment below!

Cheers,
sig-ros

Categories