Hello everyone.  My name is Rich Hay and I want to start off by thanking Mark for inviting me to write for Weblog Tools Collection.  I have been a long time reader of this site so it is both exciting and humbling to be given the opportunity to write about WordPress on here. I look forward to our interactions in the future. I have been banging around the Internet since the early 90’s and put my first website online at GeoCities.com.  The technology has come along way since those days and I have now been maintaining and developing WindowsObserver.com in one form or another since 1995. So as I was looking around for a subject to write about for my first blog post here I decided I would select what I consider to be a very simple but useful plugin – at least for my aesthetics. By default when you […]

Fotofolio Fotofolio is a free wordpress template designed for easy creation online portfolio for Visual Workers; Photography, Graphic Design, Manga, Architect, etc. Fotofolio is very simple and easy to use. Flowers4U Two column, fixed width, right sidebar, widget ready theme. Vector Leaves Two column, widget ready theme. Carrington Text Carrington Text is a clean, simple theme with only text and spacing used for layout and design. Mobile Clean Three column, clean and simple theme.

Windows Live Writer and All in One SEO Pack are two really good pieces of softwares available for WordPress users. Windows Live Writer allows users to write and publish blog posts from their desktop, on the other hand All in One SEO pack gives users the ability to optimize the post title for Search engines, and allows users to specify custom keywords and descriptions for the post. However the two of them do not go hand in hand in the sense that when you post from Windows Live Writer you will still have to go to the WordPress admin dashboard and add the parameters for All in One SEO pack, adding a minor inconvenience to users. I wrote a plugin called All in One SEO Pack Windows Live Writer Bridge, which aims to bridge this gap, by allowing users to specify All in One SEO Pack details while publishing posts […]

Google uncloaks once-secret server: For those of us that geek out on servers, data centers, hardware design and cool computers, Google recently revealed their server design and provided some insight into their shipping container data centers. I really like their distributed UPS design with 12V batteries to increase efficiency and reduce waste in capacity. Some tidbits of the WordPress.com hosting framework are also posted  by Barry from time to time if you are interested.

What is Post Templates? If you find yourself writing posts and pages on a regular basis which have the same structure, then this plugin would be a great addition to your WordPress plugin arsenal. Written by Vincent Prat, Post Templates plugin helps you save time blogging by letting you save and recall templates for writing posts and pages. Screenshots To create a template from scratch, you can use the new admin bar group “Templates.” After clicking “New Post Template”, you will be brought to the edit template page. After you’re finished creating your template, you can create a post from that template through the template edit page itself or the template management page. To create a template from an old post, you can use the “Templatize” button on the post listing page. What I Like About It What I love most about this plugin is simply what it does. I […]

New Plugins Disable Search Disable the search capabilities of WordPress. Linkify Tags Turn a list of tag IDs and/or slugs into a list of links to those tags. WP Minify Integrate Minify into WordPress for you and help you improve your site load time. Delete Posts Revisions Delete Revision is a simple WordPress plugin that remove all revision post within few click. This WordPress plugin also automatically search for post revision on your WordPress database by pressing the Check Redundant Revision button. No Duplicate Content in Comments Check comments for duplicate content using Google AJAX Search API as they are published. Emails you whenever it finds a match so you can check it and decide if you will delete it. MapPress MapPress makes it **easy** to add Google Maps and driving directions to your blog.  Just type an address and click the ‘insert’ button.  The plugin will insert a great-looking […]

Ipseity A light, configurable theme ideal for a personal branding website. Includes styles for H1/H2/H3 with posts displayed in a slidescroller. Lenen Lenen Theme is a free, 2-column, Widget-ready, xhtml valid and SEO friendly theme created for WordPress. Compatible with wordpress 2.7+ Alaskan Lake Two column, fluid, widget ready theme with a font-resizing bar. Also available are four other variations of the theme on the same page. Majapahit 2.0 [removed: weird/no licensing, half premium theme] Newspaper style widget ready, WP 2.7+ compatible, 3/4 columns theme with theme options and several other features. Black Carpet A three column WordPress theme, widget and WP2.7 ready. The Integrity Theme The design is sleek, usable, professional, and has several design options one can control from the theme’s control panel. The home page can be organized like a traditional blog (latest post at the top of the page), or as a magazine theme + static […]

New Plugins Home Page Text Reverser Reverse all of the text in the posts on your home page on April 1st. It does not affect titles, meta information, or HTML tags. CR-Post2Pingfm Automatically send a short update to ping.fm for each time you hit the Publish button. To use it, you will need a ping.fm Application Key. This little plugin utilizes PHPingFM API by Dmitri Gaskin. Twitter User Twitter User is a simple plugin which adds an additional field to the authors profile in which they can add their twitter username. Easy AdSenser Easy AdSenser manages all aspects of Google AdSense for a blog: insert ads into posts and sidebar, and add a Google Search box. Easy and complete! It is available in Spanish, Portuguese and French. WordPress Theme Demo Plugin These two plugins are designed to help web designers easily demo there WordPress themes. For example, you want to […]