The WordPress Plugin Competition 2.0 has been getting a lot of good press in the past few weeks and we already have four interesting and useful plugins announced for the competition. If you are planning to participate, why don’t you register on the PluginBlog and post your announcement? The last date to submit your plugin is the 31st of July. Lots of new prizes have been announced for the competition including over $700 in prize money from myself, Ajay, Jonathan and Darren, a Hostgator sponsored dedicated server for a year, an 8GB iPod Nano from Imthiaz, more hosting from PJMommy, a signed copy of Lorelle’s new book and a copy of Angsuman’s latest Translator Pro. Thanks to Matt, Lorelle and others for helping to promote the competition. Oz and Lorelle have also helped me make the PluginBlog more user friendly and clean it up. Ajay is helping me judge the […]

Advanced TinyMCE Editor expands the abilities of WordPress’ native TinyMCE editor and doubles the editor’s available functions to 60, improves existing functionality for handling images, corrects errors in the standard WordPress editor, and makes it easier for maintain and configure the WordPress editor. Feed Count provides an alternative to FeedBurner’s subscribers count chiclet. Users can customize the CSS style, refresh time, and link. Feed Count also uses before and after tags and integrates with the WordPress admin panel. Feed Master is a beta-release plugin that allows blog owners to count the number of subscribers to their blog’s feed. Feed Master offers greater personalization of your feed, improved plugin interface, more specific statistics, ability to create feed networks, information about subscribers, and automatically creates a robot.txt file.

I’m pleased to be joining the contributing staff here. My name is Jim Stitzel, and I’ve been a blogger for nearly four years. I cut my blogging teeth in the Xanga community before discovering a much larger blogging community when I “accidentally” ran the auto-installation for something called WordPress on my hosted site. It was the best mistake I’ve ever made. Since then, my own website has undergone several iterations and now runs almost entirely on WordPress. I’m a self-taught coding geek who’s proficient in HTML/CSS and is learning more and more about PHP everyday. I’m a writer by passion (who hopes to one day make a living doing so), but I work as a data analyst at Purdue University in order to pay the bills. I’m an avid Halo/Halo 2 fan and a loyal member of the TTL Gunslingers, where I head up the management of the news portal […]

Trackbackers is a plugin that allows you to link back to the domains that send the most trackbacks to you, much like top commenters. It might be a good idea to run some kind of trackback validation or Akismet with this plugin. High Keyword density Plugin checks for the user-agent and removes certain common words from the post text accordingly. So when Googlebot visits your page, it won’t be seeing these words, while your readers can still read your meaningful sentences. I am not sure of the viability or the effectiveness of this plugin but it might be on the border of being Google un-friendly. Please use at your own risk [EDIT] We choose not to promote this plugin. Please see comments below. AJAX Edit Comments 1.1 allows admin and users to edit comments from a post. Users see a countdown timer when editing a comment. Admin can now also […]

WP Plugin: Listen Button: Create instant podcasts from your blog text with this plugin from Odiogo.com. It creates a “Listen” button on your blog that people can click to listen to the text of a post. The content is read by a machine and the voice stream is linked in a flash player format on your blog. The mp3 resides on the Odiogo server and can also be downloaded. Weblog Tools Collection can now be downloaded in a podcast format with the help of this service. You can do the same for your blog by signing up for their podcast service. I am not sure this format makes sense for the staccato delivery of this blog but it might be a cool feature for blogs with longer articles and lesser linked content. At the very least, it is a novelty  for any blogger that always wanted to hear themselves type […]

Adding Custom WordPress Hooks: This migt be an interesting article for Theme and Plugin authors looking to enhance the functionality of their themes and plugins. Though the procedure is not complex, most of the questions I get surrounding plugin development centers around WordPress hooks.

Bruce is a three column fluid layout theme that is widget ready with multiple columns at the front page. There is also a cross fader built in. Row is a also a three column fluid layout theme in the magazine style with two mini loops displaying two separate categories. Both themes are artsy and designed by Milo. Dimension is a two column, somewhat two dimensional theme for WordPress designed in gray and black. Lovecraft is a three column, blocky simple, colorful and widget ready theme for WordPress. It is Garry’s first theme. Ministry is a two column, wide, clean and clear theme for WordPress in shades of lighter blue. The design reminds me of some Drupal themes. Gathering has been updated from the inside out. Now it is a modern, subdued theme with two columns, a fixed width, sidebar widgets ready, and will work with WordPress 2.0 and above. Stockholm […]

The Ultimate RSS Toolbox – 120+ RSS Resources from Mashable. Overwhelming at first but the list will be useful later. Flickr also has many such lists of tools and they come in handy when you need a tool and cannot remember the Web 2.0 name for the service.