WordPress Community provides help, information and evangelism for WordPress users by WordPress users. In Episode 11 of their WordPress podcast, Charles Stricklin and David Peralty, among other things, went through a list of new plugins (some good, some not so good) that have been released. I was fortunate enough to have my Kottke Style Archives plugin receive a really good review. If you’re interested in what they had to say, you can skip forward to 26m55s marker and check it out.
Category Archives: Blogging
Akismet, How I Love Thee
Towards the end of September, I posted that Akismet was the bringer of light. Roughly six weeks later and nearly 30,000 dirty dirty spam messages later, my opinion of Akismet as a spam filtering mechanism hasn’t changed one bit at all.
Akismet has been so consistent at blocking spam from my blog that I am heavily considering letting it simply delete the spam automatically. I don’t think I would want it to report all of what it automatically deletes as spam, as that might very well harm the Akismet service (read: skew their statistics).
Of course, if I implemented some form of human computer interaction during posting, that would also pretty much crush the spam problem as well.
WordPress Plugin: Kottke Style Archives
Are you sick of seeing WordPress archives that stretch the length of your arm? If you are, then you might have just found the next best thing to sliced bread! The Kottke Style Archives plugin is a WordPress archives plugin which will display your yearly archives in a similar format to Jason Kottke.
If you’re wondering why you might want your archive page looking like that, there are a couple of simple explanations:
- You don’t like having to scroll
- You need or value your screen real estate
- You want your site to be more accessible on mobile devices, see point #2
- You want a change, after all – everyone has the same ol same ol archives page
You can find out all about the Kottke Style Archives plugin at its permanent home. If you have any comments, problems or suggestions – feel free to drop them into this thread.
Google Adsense Fluffer
In the middle of July, I thought it seemed like a good idea to see what all the fuss was about regarding Google Adsense.
After adding the simple snippets of JavaScript into my WordPress templates, I immediately started to earn through it. The first few days were very sketchy, earning me under USD$0.50 per day and then it slowly picked up. Roughly two months later and Google Adsense is consistently earning over USD$1.00 per day and I currently have an average earning of, wait for it – USD$1.58 per day!
Though the numbers are no where near as impressive as some of the internets biggest Google Adsense whores, it makes a difference. My web host charges me AUD$15.00/month, so in approximately two and a half months – Google Adsense has essentially paid for an entire years worth of hosting!
A thank you must go out to Google for providing such a simple advertising medium for content publishers and the sites readers for clicking an advertisement as they passed through the site.
WordPress Plugin: Subtraction Style Archives
Looking for a new way to display your WordPress archives page? Look no further, you’ve found the Subtraction Style Archives plugin. The Subtraction Style Archives plugin provides functionality which will allow you to generate an archive page similar to that on Subtraction.
There is a permanent page for the plugin which describes:
- where to download it
- how to install it
- how to implement it in your own web site
- some notes on the plugin
- a changeset for the plugin
If you have any questions, problems or suggestions about the plugin; feel free to drop a comment about it.