Weblog Tools Collection

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Starting Monday and all through April, Weblog Tools Collection will be featuring several WordPress plugins.

This isn’t a contest but instead a showcase of the talent of our web developers.

Every day (except Sundays) we will be reviewing a plugin. This will be in addition to our daily plugin release posts.

What we will be looking at

Besides a general description and feature listing of the plugin, we will also be asking our readers to suggest feature improvements and state what else they would want the plugin to do. This would work as a great group brainstorming session to improve your plugin.

How to submit

If you would like to have your plugin reviewed during this month, send an email to wltc@ajaydsouza.com with the following details:

Subject: APAD: Plugin Name
Make sure you mention APAD in the subject of your email, so that my email filter can label it correctly.

In the body of the email, send in the following information:

URL: Provide a direct url to the plugin page. I won’t go hunting through your blog for this.

Description: A short description about what your plugin does.

Features: A detailed list of features of your plugin. Mention everything that your plugin can do.

Implementation: How does a user go about using your plugin.

Future Plans: Mention what you have in mind for the future of your plugin.

We will checkout the various plugins and select some of them for review. There isn’t any hard or fast rule on selecting this and choice will be made more on the basis of how your plugin appeals to us. So, make sure your email is highlights everything you want us to know.

Next Of Kin will monitor your visits to your blog and will send you a warning email after a number of weeks (of your choice) without a visit. If you fail to visit your blog even after that, the system will send a mail you wrote to whoever you choose.

Xiti Widget lets you add the logo of Xiti, a free tool to measure and analyse the audience of a site.

Inline Ajax Page (INAP) will allow you to load posts, comments and the add comment box inline, and also submit comments, paginate posts, paginate your homepage, display a live comment preview.

Updater Blogroll Link catches all links from your post and allows to add easily to your blogroll. (Page in French)

Score Render renders inline sheet music fragments inside posts and comments into images. It supports ABC, GUIDO, Lilypond and Mup music notations.

Web Log Generator With Cookie generates web log files enabling the site owner to track visitors.

Twitter Sharts helps you display your Twitter status in a post.

Vril’s Transparent PNG Fix adds support for the transparent PNG pictures available to Internet Explorer.

Add Your Own Headers allows you to add tags to the header of an individual page or post such as keywords/descriptions, custom meta tags, external style sheet links, or embedded style tags.

RockinLetterhead is a two-column, clean blue, green, orange and white theme designed for blog content and sharp simplicity.

Brajeshward WP Theme is a three column, fixed width theme which highlights the excerpt of the latest article on the homepage.

Soccer is a widget ready two column, dark theme based on the game.

Sleek 2C is a smooth and sleek, neat and clean, black and white, 2-column widget ready WordPress template with a professional look.

Coffee Chick is a two column, widget ready in a 1950’s style with a plaid background.

Angel is a widget ready, two column theme with a brown and cream color scheme and the picture of a little girl in the header.

AqueousWP is a three column, fluid, widget ready theme with support for Gravatar2.

Sunflower Gold is a three column, fixed width, widget ready theme with a sunflower header.

BlueBreak is a single column, fixed width, widget ready, black and blue theme.

WordPress Blue is a small and simple two column, blue theme.

Simple Blue is a blue, three column, fixed width, widget ready theme.

After reading MacManus’ post on BlogRovr I had to try it. I am a HUGE fan of Techmeme and any service that promises similar information with a personalized slant is something that I cannot wait to try. I signed up, downloaded the Firefox Plugin and exported/imported my feeds into the product. To sum up, BlogRovr is a vertical search engine, personalized from your favorite feeds that sits on top of your browser (FF in my case) and displays relevant posts about the page you are visiting from your feeds. The information is obtained real time and the display is fairly unobtrusive. For example: When I visit Photomatt.net, I get a series of 14 recent articles from my feeds, including tags from those items for links created to Photomatt for various reasons. For now, the plugin is not very processor intensive and MacManus has a detailed post on how it works and how it can be useful. I do not see the economic model yet but Activeweave, the parent company has some VC funding and is already running Stickis (on whose technology BlogRovr is built) so they have something in mind. Right?

Spam Karma 2 v2.3 has just been released with several bug fixes, better plugin support. SK2 is an anti-spam plugin for the WordPress blogging platform. It is meant to stop all forms of automated Blog spam effortlessly, while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenters.

XSPF Player Plugin embeds XSPF mp3 flash player on your blog and allows you to play local and remote mp3s.

Great Firewall of China : Use this tool to find out if your site or blog is banned in China. WeblogToolsCollection is not. It is interesting to notice that the disclaimer states that some sites might simply not be available for techincal reasons which might have nothing to do with censorship. Some of the obvious culprits that I tried came back with mixed results. Source: Various Wordpress.com blogs that seem to be blocked.
This is also a good time to mention that I am going to be visiting various cities in China and Japan at the beginning of December including Shanghai, Beijing and Tokyo and would love to meetup and exchange ideas and contacts with my readers and other Wordpress users and bloggers while I am there. I will be posting dates soon.

RockinBizRed3 is a 3 column, widget ready, business friendly theme with a red an white color scheme and replaceable header image.

RedBlue is a three column widget ready Wordpress theme with right-hand sidebars and red and blue shamrocks in the header.

XPress is a blue and green, XP Style two column theme.

Pink Flowers is a two column, fixed width, widget ready theme with a right sidebar, ideal for floral and gift sites.

Redline is a red and white, widget ready theme with support for several plugins.

Orange Juice is a two column, widget ready, fixed width theme with an orange in the header.

Moony is a fixed width black theme with a big moon in the background.

Lavrentis is a two column, fixed width, widget ready theme.

Brownish is a brown and black, three column, fixed width theme for WordPress.

Blogstamp plugin makes a request of timestamp (the number of seconds elapsed since the 0 hour of the 1st of January of 1970 GMT), certified by third parts, and adds a signature, which comprised of contents SHA-1 hash, returned timestamp and a digital signature.

The WP Link Directory is a link directory plugin on the Internet for Wordpress admin to store and maintain a set of links in classified categories.

AdSenseBot-Stats counts the visits of Google AdSense Bot (Mediapartners) and writes them into a database.

The Wordpress Updated Plugin echoes the last modification date instead of the standard the_time() and the_date().

Routes allows you to add geographical route information to articles and pages in a WordPress blog, and map the routes using Google Maps.

Subscription Icons allows you to put a set of icons for RSS subscriptions on your WordPress blog page.

Blue Quarter is a two column, blue, widget ready theme with inbuilt support for JQuery and Simple Tagging Plugin.

Artic is a two column widget ready theme cold colours and a leafless tree header.

Blue Real is a two column black, blue and orange theme.

DarkNet is a two column, w3c validated, 2 column, black, blue, white and gray theme.

Sunset Manor is a two column theme inspired by the movie Little Miss Sunshine.

OrangeView is Fixed width Wordpress theme with sidebar on the right side.

JetSTAR is a two column theme with rounded corners and a blue color scheme.

Eliba is a bright and colorful 2 column theme.

Basketball is a two column, widget ready theme meant for basketball sites.

And, Milo has released Flush, Superfly and Rion.

This is part II of the Link Building series. (view Part I)

Outbound Linking

This article is going to briefly overview outbound linking and why it can be both good and bad. Don’t fret though, the third and last part of this series will conclude with how to actually manufacturer links to your site — the first two parts are preliminary background articles for those that are new to the industry of link building.

Outbound linking is something some, even very good and amazing, SEOs overlook. When a search engine looks at your site, it looks at what sites are linking to you. But in that process of evaluating where to rank you, it also looks at what sites you are linking to.

To throw out an example, let’s use Google Inside. It’s a site that talks about Google and touches on search engine news and other industry related news. Would it make sense if Google Inside was linking to maybe…a casino site? What about a gardening site? Or even a site that talks about skydiving? Would that make sense to you as a user? If it doesn’t make sense to you, then it certainly won’t make sense to the robots. Related outbound linking — paid or unpaid — is very important. I’ve learned this over time by testing out different links going to various websites.

So back to the example. If Google Inside was linking to a site like Search Engine Watch or Matt Cutts’ Blog, those sites are a direct hit in relativity to Google Inside. Same industry, same vertical, same topics. A search engine will look at this and deem those links to be valuable both for the sites you are linking to and to your site because it helps position you in that specific industry or niche — wherever you may be.

This is the short wrap-up for outbound linking.

Next and last part in the series… How-to Link Building

Daily Top 10 Posts tracks the number of pageviews per blog post for the current day and cumulatively with options to display sidebar widgets for both.

Recent phpBB Topics will display a list of the latest topics in your phpBB forum on your blog.

Page Feed creates a page feed to show the page content.

All in One SEO Pack is a single plugin to make your blog more search engine friendly. It rewrites your post titles, uses categories and excerpt as Meta Keywords and Description and adds noindex,nofollow to category pages.

RockinSuckerfish2, the sequel to the original RockinSuckerfish, is a 2 column, widget ready theme, with suckerfish drop-downs in the top menu.

Snowflakes is a 2 Columns, Blue, White, Green, Red, Orange, Fixed width, Widget ready, Left sidebar, Rounded Corners, Snowflakes/Winter Template for WordPress.

Andiz has released Banksy and Whize. Both are two column themes, the former being in a pink and black shade, while the latter is in white.

WiiLike is a two column, dark blue and white, widget ready theme.

Brown Delight is a two column theme with a brown color scheme.

Sign is a two column, widget ready, blue theme with a big signpost in the right hand header.

Login Anywhere allows the user to place a login form anywhere on their site.

WP OpenAds is a Wordpress Plugin that allows website owners to easily integrate advertising into their posts and pages.

Buddy Cards are small windows that are shown next to comments and contain a subset of either public Buddy Page information available through 30 Boxes, or dynamically created information as a result of an open web search.

WP Categories and Posts is an extension of the wp_list_categories. Instead of listing just categories, the plugin lists the post under the each category as well. This is very useful for a sitemap.

Featuring CountComments counts the number of comments by authornames.

WP Amazon context link ads is a quick and convenient way to add Amazon Context Links to blog and help you monetize your content.

Breukie’s Pages Widget is a Wordpress pages widget, to replace the standard pages widget by Automattic.

Complex Email Forms allows WordPress users to easily create complex forms to be emailed to a predefined email address.

Last Posts to Picture create a picture from your last posts.

SimpleTwitter allows Wordpress blog owners to add Twitter messages to their templates.

CompleteRSS makes your feeds validate and attracts more users by displaying full article text in your RSS and Atom feeds, removing the ‘content:encoded’ tags from the XML, and makes your feeds appeal to more users.

RockinRedhead is a two-column, widget ready, clean and sleek theme with red, white and orange colors designed for reading and customization.

Typography DE is the German edition of Typography (Page in German)

Mountain Blue is a serene new “widget” ready 2 Columns WordPress theme, with a right sidebar, white content area, gray background and a tranquil blue “nature” header image.

TechBlog is a 3 columns fixed width theme that is built for tech blogs.

Aqueous Lite is a two column, blue widget ready theme that is completely customizable via the Admin panel.

OrangeFlower is a two column Wordpress theme with a right-hand sidebar. OrangeFlower has a black background with bold orange flower detail.

Blue Spring is a new 2-Columns, widget ready blue, white and gray, WordPress theme with a beautiful “spring” header image and a right sidebar.

Pure is a two columns, fixed width theme with a right sidebar.

mental offset is a rather dark theme/template for Wordpress 2.0.x, 2.1.x and widgets. The theme uses Javascript (JQuery to be exact) to keep the index page short and the sidebar even shorter.

Sunset is a two column widget ready Wordpress theme with right-hand sidebar.

Let’s mint have released 3 wordpress themes, Quickmint Left Nav, Quickmint Right Nav and QuickMint 3 Column (Fixed & Fluid).

Bright Side is a new widget ready, three columns WordPress theme with a beautiful header image, a left sidebar and a right sidebar, white content area and soothing blue background.

Crispy Cornsilk is a two column fixed width theme with sharp edges and shades of brown. Right hand sidebar supports widgets. XHTML and CSS validated.

Blue Idea is a high quality two-column, widget ready theme.

Andreas Moser has released ElegantWords, IceWords, FruitWords, FlowerWords and FreekyClouds.

Subscribe-Remind will automatically place text at the end of each of your posts inviting your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Comments Waiting Count is a simple plugin that adds the current number of comments in the moderation queue to the Wordpress 2.1 admin menu. It will also display the number comments that have been flagged as spam if your using an anti-spam plugin.

Folding@Home Stats is a WordPress plugin that displays your total score, overall rank, number of processes completed in the last 50 days.

Fuzzy Colorpicker adds a color picker to your post pages. This lets you choose the color of your text at will.

wp-page-linker is a Wordpress plugin that allows the insertion of links to internal pages while writing a page or a post.

EasyTube allows you to easily embed a youtube player into your website but one simple tag.

TypoXP Revisited is a modified version of TypeXP.

RockinDarkQ is a two-column, dark modern, clean and sleek theme with red and orange highlights designed for reading and customization … and it’s widget ready.

RockinSeaside is a 2 column, widgetized free WordPress theme with a calm, blue and white color scheme, compartmentalized sections, and a customizable header with photoshop file included.

Sakura is a 2-column Wordpress theme with spring motives and it’s widget ready.

Oceans 11 Wordpress theme designed with a three column fluid layout and a custom header painting inspired by the movie Oceans 11.

OrangeCones is a fun two column Wordpress theme with a widget enabled left-hand sidebar.

Hongkiat has Five more colors on Rounded v2

AddThis Plugin will automatically insert the AddThis widget below each post in your blog.

Wordpress Plugin Template includes all the framework necessary for a displayable plugin (Something which will show up in a sidebar, template, or anywhere in a post using a token such as )

SETI Stats shows the current credit, average credit and team stats for a given SETI@Home account.

The StripTease plugin is a simple filter that strips fragment identifiers from WordPress’s default teaser links so that they link to full posts.

Post Notification sends an email to every registered user whenever a new post is made on the blog.

LiveSig is a WordPress plug-in that automatically inserts your MyLiveSignature code after each of your WordPress posts making it seem like each post has been personally signed by you.

On the side, one thing to remember when doing a WordPress-to-WordPress Import is to Delete Spam Comments First.

Textlink Adder generates your very own textlinks to each single post your wordpress has to offer. Bind as many textlinks as you want to each post.

Raven’s antispam is a smart antispam based on a JS solution of Jakub Vrana.

AnswerTips are small bubbles of information triggered by double-clicking any word on an AnswerTips-enabled page.

SEO-Plugin allows you to add Meta tags for Description and Keywords to your blog. (Site in German)

Blogging Pro Theme is a three column theme with a blue top navigation bar and big search box. Comes in two flavours, with plugin support and without.

SciEarth is a 2 column Sci-Fi based theme.

YUI-Mainstream is a clean, two column theme built on the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI). Supports fluid width, 950px, 750px and custom widths with possible sidebar sizes of 160px, 180px, 240px or 300px. Widget ready.

IceCream is a fun two column Wordpress theme with a widget enabled right-hand sidebar with an ice lolly image.

Pomodoro is a bright new 3 columns, “widget-ready” theme for WordPress by Headsetoptions and MandarinMusing based on design by Free CSS Templates.

Milo has released MCMAC and LAX.

Quicklime is a three columned (main content + two sidebars) theme with a lime green feel to it.

Cozupix is fresh colored widgetized theme with 2 columns in the colors green, blue and orange.