There appears to be a WordPress meme going around (started by John at WordPress Expert) where members throughout the community are tagging other blogs along with mentioning three plugins which they feel are under rated. Although I don’t have access to the plugins used here on WLTC, I would like to bring about three under rated plugins I use on my own blog.
- DiggThis – This plugin was written by Aviran Mordod This by far my favorite DiggThis plugin because it only displays on posts which have been submitted to Digg. My opinion, which is shared by many others is that, it’s better to show a DiggThis button when the article has been submitted to Digg rather than showing a Digg button next to every article. Unless you are ReadWriteWeb or some other mainstream blog, those buttons will show 0 diggs and will possibly hint to the content not being up to snuff. I suppose its one of those psychological things.
- Highlight Author Comments – This plugin written by Rob Marsh, SJ. makes following comments written by the blog author a cinch. After installing and then activating the plugin, you can style what blog authors comments will look like, giving you the ability to distinguish your comments versus all other comments.
- No Self Pings – No one has been able to tell me what the purpose is behind WordPress sending pings and tackbacks to itself if you link to an article located in your archive. I’ve found myself always deleting these pingbacks. Thanks this this plugin written by Michael D. Adams. this is no longer an issue for me. Now, I can easily link to myself without having to deal with those pingbacks giving me that much more free time to do other things.
These are three plugins which I feel are under rated that I use on my own blog. I invite you to partake in this meme and highlight three plugins you are using on your own blog that you feel are under rated.
Thanks for the tipoff about No Self Pings. They’ve always bugged me, and now, thanks to you, I can take steps to extirpate those pesky little self references. Gracias!
Highlight author comments and no self pings looks useful. will give it a try. thanks for the update.
I used to remove self pings too, but after some time, I found that pinging myself it’s a very good way to let the users know when I write again about the same topic.
Because a lot of users focus their search for “more information” in the post comments, so IMHO leave the self ping is a good practice.
I’m personally a big fan of No Self Pings, but am really excited to find out about ‘highlight author comment’, thanks! 🙂 On the question of self-pings, I’ll definitely have to take Samuel’s comment on board.
tn for the No Self Pings, I’ve never heard of it!
I have been using wordpress since its 1.X days, and I’ve STILL yet to figure out what a pingback is. I never notice anything like that on my own blog, apparently it must store them somewhere, but I’ve yet to figure out where, so why would it bother me if I don’t know where there located anyway? LOL
those other plugins I don’t have a need for because I never get that many people making comments to my posts. I’ll get maybe 1 comment every now and then from one person, but thats about it. with spam being so bad now I’ve even thought about disabling comments altogether and just having a contact form to have people send me comments, but I haven’t set up such a thing yet.
oh and another thing, wordpress has been very bad at sending me emails telling me when people actually make a comment to my blog. Since I get so few comments, it’d be nice if wordpress could send me an email telling me when someone made a comment to my blog, wordpress has always been bad about that even in the 1.X days and its never improved any on that.
I have been looking for plugins that do these three things. Wow! What a coincidence. I’m especially always annoyed with self-pings because I find myself linking to my different posts quite often. Thanks so much!
Nice picks, Jeff. I used No Self Pings and was looking for something like the Highlight one. Excellent.
I agree with #3. Self pingbacks are a good way to direct the reader to another article written on the same topic and are much easier than going back and editing a list of related posts yourself or hoping that a related posts plugin handles it for you. There is definitely value in them.
Hi,
I will try the ‘Highlight Author Comments’ plugin and see how it looks. Thanks for the info, really appreciate it.
Hey Jeff, funny no one is mentioning their most under rated plugins.
I don’t know if they are under rated but my vote would go to:
1. Link indication:
It automatically opens external links in a new tab/window and if you want an appropriate icon if it’s a link to a .pdf .doc or whatever file.
http://sw-guide.de/wordpress/p.....ndication/
2. Flexible Upload:
It enhances the image upload functionality a lot. Chcek out the features
http://blog.japonophile.com/flexible-upload/
3. WP-chunk
It shorten URLs within submitted comments, so a long URL in a comment won’t break a template, which happens quite often.
http://www.village-idiot.org/a...../wp-chunk/
Good stuff, I’ve been looking for the last two plugins. Thanks a bunch.
I’ve never really seen self-pinging as a problem, but since the No Self Pings plugin exists, I think I’ll put a stop to those shenanigans. Thanks for the heads up!
Totally agree with #3 (Samuel) and #10 (Jesse). When I was new to WP and managed to make the first self-ping, I was like what the heck!! And I got around to deleting it right away.. but 2 or 3 posts down the line, it struck me as something that should better be left alone.
For the bigger blogs with high traffic, it may be a different story… coz with so many visitors, there’s always a chance (a big one) that someone or the other will stumble across the remotest of your posts.
Not so for the smaller blogs.. I believe, for them this is a very good way of leaving a trail for your visitors to follow! None of the related post plug-ins can fetch 100% perfect related results and there the self-pings are the guiding light.
Yup, I see it in reverse, too: I don’t get people who don’t get the purpose of self-pinging. Simply put, it’s “related articles” restrained within the scope of the same blog.
Can’t be any bit simpler than that, and it’s a highly useful and visitor-friendly feature indeed. It worries me so many semi-pros don’t get it…
I’ve been finding http://www.addtoany.com/ quite useful, for the facebook/ del.icio.us / myspace etc etc users amongst my friends. And it doesn’t create seperate buttons for each service!
I’m in the “self-pings are a feature, not a bug” camp. When someone lands on an older article, a self-ping from a newer one is a pointer leading the reader to more up-to-date related material. Internal links to relevant related material is also good for SEO, yes?
I don’t have much use for Digg. I figure if I ever get a post that’s actually doing well on Digg, then I’ll just manually add it a Digg button.
Also, I prefer BM Comment Highlight as it gives you a wide array of options for highlighting different comments.
As many others have mentioned, I think self-pinging is a feature. It leaves a breadcrumb to older and newer stuff for users to read. Plus, it lets me see when and what I posted in relation to other topics on my blog. It’s a related post plugin without having to download another plugin.
Thanks for mentioning No Self Pings. It can be very useful because i don’t like pings to myself either.
Just installed the author comment highlight plugin in my blog. Matt Cutts gave a trick for editing comment.php for doing that but this plugin is direct and easier.
I like no self pings. I think that’s how it should work by default. Seeing my own pingbacks are quite annoying. They clutter up the page unnecessarily.
Jeff,
Thanks for the mention!
I used to use the DiggThis plugin, but his method of detecting incoming Digg links is not perfect and gave me a lot of trouble. I switched to just editing the theme to insert the digg javascript directly. This also gave me more control and let me make the digg buttons into submission buttons as well. It’s easy, just read this: http://digg.com/tools/integrate
I don’t much like the No Self Pings plugin, although I can see why some people would. If I post a new post about a topic I’ve talked about before, I want my old post to reflect that, so that people can continue to read about new things I’m talking about. Keep the readers around longer.
The Highlight Author Comments plugin is neat, but only works for the comment_text filter, which is a problem on some themes. Adding code to your theme’s comments.php file is really just as easy. I use the same technique that the plugin does, which is basically:
if ($comment->comment_author_email === get_the_author_email()) ...And then I use that to set a class on the surrounding comment list item. This lets me give it a different background color easily. I kinda wish all themes would do this by default.
I used to use the Highlight Author Comments but it didn’t seem to do everything I wanted. I’ll try out what Justin Tadlock suggested.
The plugs I think are the more under rated?
WP Auto Tagger Automatically finds tags based on your post content.
TabStat Show Your Database Table Status(Rows, Data Length, Index Length, Size, and Overhead). You can optimize it too.
Dagon Design Form Mailer The (Best, in my opinion) WordPress secure php form mailer script.
After seeing this post, I revisited the digg this plugin cause the way it works is pretty cool, and I wanted to have another stab at getting it to work. Unfortunately, for some reason, even posts that I know are on digg, and have been dugg quite a bit, still don’t have the button appear. Any ideas why?
Wp-chunk and Highlight Author Comments sound great, I’ll give it a try. Thanks!
Another useful tip. Thanks
Hey thanks! No Self Ping solved my problmes!
The DiggThis plug-in looks useful for me! Thanks for your information about it, I will try it and post what I think about it!