Easy Asides for WordPress: Daniel has come up with another way to easily add “Asides” to your WordPress install. I use the category LinkyLoo (Of which this post is an example. If you are reading this is a feed reader, you are missing the effect) to the same effect. His method is WordPress 2.3 compatible and though it involves code modification, it is not very complex to implement.

The science of blog reading: Nick Carr gives us an executive summary of an article by a team from CMU (and Nielsen) and he explains their thesis with the following foreword: The problem of detecting contaminants in a public water system is analogous to the problem of figuring out what’s going on in the blogosphere. Any article that claims that the blogosphere is essentially a sewer, is worth the read. I whole heartedly disagree with the list of 100 blogs that “everyone should read” but the concept is amusing and the principles behind their claims might have some merits. But then again I disagree with any and all such lists because all blogs and their readers do not have the same interest in all subject matters. Also as an astute commenter on that post points out, some of the blogs on that list aren’t even updated anymore and thus their […]

Category Posts Widget displays the most recent posts from a specific category. Easy Gravatars makes it simple to add Gravatars to your blog. Hiddy is a captcha-like plugin to help fight spam comments. Highlight Author Comments automatically displays comments made by a post’s author in a distinctive style with no need to edit your template files. Random Categories with Random Posts picks random entries from random categories to display on your blog. (For WordPress 2.2.3 and lower.) Sensitive Tag Cloud provides a tagcloud that shows tags depending of the current context only.

1 Blog Theme is a 3-column theme with horizontal menu and 3-column footer. 3MOS is a 2-column theme with orange background and collapsible header. dfMarine is an attractive 2-column theme with 3-column header. DivCubs is a 3-column, dark theme with a customizable About section in the sidebar. Henrietta is a single-column theme with collapsible header that emphasizes your blog’s content. LOTR Back to History is a 2-column theme with a Lord of the Rings design. Mellowed is a nice 3-column theme with soft blues in the header and clean layout. Shifter Fluid 180 is another 2-column theme that provides the option of switching which side your sidebar appears on. Zen 8 is a 3-column, widget-ready theme with support for Adsense and SEO-optimization.

AdaptiveBlue SmartLinks for WordPress: AdaptiveBlue recently released their SmartLinks product for bloggers and also released a WordPress plugin that makes all of this easier to implement and manage. From the authors’ blog SmartLinks are automatically inserted, helping readers to discover, explore, and connect to relevant information from around the web. The links are to pages about books, music, movies, stocks, recipes, restaurants, gadgets, people, movie stars and various entertainment and media. Apparently SmartLinks is already in use on sites such as Amazon.com and Yahoo Finance. SmartLinks could be a cool way to display all the media that is related to a few words in your post but I believe this service would have a wider audience if one could include their Amazon Affiliate ID on the links that are generated. [EDIT] Seems it can be done with a hack. WordPress users have to insert the following script into their template […]

Custom Hooks for developers is mostly aimed at other plugin developers and it provides the manage_pages_columns and manage_pages_custom_column hooks, which are not present in WordPress, but have been requested often. The plugin replicates the custom column feature of the manage posts page. The new filters can can be used in the same way as the manage_posts_custom_column action and manage_posts_columns filter provided by WordPress. The author has also written a tutorial on how to add custom columns to the manage posts screen which also applies to these hooks.

TAGStention for WordPress: TAGStention is NOT a WordPress plugin nor is it a guide, its a Dreamweaver extension that has helpful features for theme developers such as Wizards for tags with parameters Help button redirects to codex Support for 90% of the tags Insert basic loops (wizard) Insert headers (wizard) Ultimate TagWarrior tags supported (NEW) Help button (NEW) PayPal button at help screen (NEW) Is supports Dreamweaver 8 and MX2004 and the author says that it might support some older versions. It is based on a CC license. Thanks to WordPress Candy for the tip.

Flash Video Player allows you to add videos to your blog. In-Series lets you write series of posts in WordPress, without having to deal with the hassle of manually writing up tables of contents or “next” and “previous” links in each post. Live Space Sync allows you to synchronized WordPress post to Live Spaces, facilitating MetaWeblog API. Mini Mugshot allows you to add to a WordPress post/page the Mugshot feature of the same name. RB Internal Links allows blog owners to easily link to posts and pages within their wordpress blog without having to enter the full URL. Technorati Tag Cloud Widget is the widgetized version of the Technorati Tag Cloud plugin for WordPress 2.3.