This is a very simple way to distinguish your Blog from everyone elses and that is by having a Favicon appear next to the URL in many browsers such as FireFox or Internet Explorer. The great thing about this is that it takes just a minute or two to setup.

About Favicons

The browsers of today have a facility where if someone visits or bookmarks your website an icon or small picture can be associated with that particular website and bookmark. Browsers try to obtain that icon by requesting for ‘favicon.ico‘ from the root directory of your website. When the favicon.ico file is found, the icon will be displayed beside the web address in the browser address bar and beside the link name in your Favorites/Bookmarks menu. Favicons are usually 16 x 16 pixels or 32 x 32 pixels in size.

Getting A Favicon

There are many online resources for obtaining Favicons, but the easiest way is to create one yourself by visiting the Favicon From Pics site. With this online tool you simply upload any picture and it will be automatically converted to the appropriate size along with additional options such as scrolling text and animated pictures. I prefer to just use the static icon. The file containing the favicon.ico can be downloaded to your desktop.

Favicon Plugin

The WordPress plugin that is used to automatically show the Favicon can be found at Favicon Head. Simply download the plugin, upload to the plugins folder and activate. Next upload the created ‘favicon.ico‘ to the root directory of your blog and that’s it!

The Favicon should appear the next time you visit your blog. Sometimes it can takes a few browser refreshs for the Favicon to appear and if at first you do not see the Favicon, then click CTRL+F5 on your keyboard to do a hard refresh.

Download

Favicon Head Plugin

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The PayPal Donate Plugin is a nice WordPress plugin which can be used to insert a PayPal Donate Button in your WordPress sidebar without you needing to mess with any HTML code. It allows visitors of your site to make a donation or contribution via PayPal, the most popular and largest online payment processing service.

PayPal Donate Plugin

The PayPal Donate Plugin adds a small PayPal Donation form on your sidebar. In order to use this plugin with Widget-Ready WordPress Themes, you will need to download the PayPal Donate Widget also. The settings for this plugin can be changed via your blog options page.

How To Install The PayPal Donate Plugin & Widget

• Download PayPal Donate Plugin for WordPress.
• Download PayPal Donate Widget
• Extract the Plugin zip file into your wp-content/plugins/ folder
• Extract The Widget zip and upload paypalwidget.php to your /wp-content/plugins/widget/ directory
• Activate the plugin from inside WordPress (Plugins tab).
• Enter your details in the Options page (make sure you do this)
• Drag the PayPal Donate Support widget to your sidebar from inside Themes/Sidebar Widgets
• Click the Widget configuration icon and enter a title and backlink option.

Options Page Settings

• PayPal Email Address (Required)
• Currency
• Donation Reference
• Return URL
• Cancelled URL
• Choice of buttons (the ones in use by PayPal)

Plugin Requirements

• PayPal account.
• WordPress 2.0+
• WordPress Sidebar Widgets Plugin.
• PayPal Donate Plugin for WordPress.

Download

• PayPal Donate Plugin
• PayPal Donate Widget

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Live is a nice WordPress plugin by HeadZoo.com that lets you watch your website activity and various website stats in real time. You can watch as people are visiting your pages, leaving comments and grabbing your RSS feeds.

The Live plugin site activity display is similar to that of Digg Spy. Each page hit, RSS hit, and comment slowly scrolls in the admin area in a smooth motion. It also includes a hit graph that dynamically shows you how much traffic your site is getting over a period of time.

You can download the latest 0.4.1 version of the Live Plugin now from the download page.

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If you would like to show video on your blog in the style of Google Video or YouTube then the new WordPress plugin WordTube by Alex Rabe is for you. Alex has done a great job in creating this plugin as it makes the process of adding and managing media files such as Videos, MP3s and even pictures very easy. This plugin can transform your blog into a complete Media Center if you wanted to!

WordTube supports the following;

• streaming Video formats .flv and .swf,
• sound files such as MP3
• and also JPG, GIF or PNG picture files.

With WordTube activated in your plugins admin area, you simply insert the tag [MEDIA=ID] into your blog to have it displayed. You can also add a playlist of files when you use the [MYPLAYLIST] tag. You don’t need to change the WYSIWYG mode or have special HTML knowledge to insert such a tag. You can show a single media file (i.e. a flv video) or a playlist of all your media files.

How To Encode A Flash Video

There are several ways to encode your videos so that the can be streamed using the WordTube plugin. You can use the Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash Video Encoder (included in the Stanard installation) or the free version of RIVA FLV Encoder. It’s really easy to encode your Mpeg,Avi or whatever into a flash video (the FLV format).

Installation

Unpack the zip file and upload the folder to your WordPress plugins folder. You will also need the free (for personal use) Flash Media Player plugin from Jeroen Wijering. Download the player from the website and upload the file mediaplayer.swf into the WordTube plugin folder. If you would like to have the Equalizer displayed for MP3s then download the Flash MP3 Player as well. The plugins can now be activated.

Uploading Media Files

You can upload your media files via the Manage->Media Center Upload form or you can manually upload to your blog and select the URL to the file. The file you want to play doesn’t need to be on your server. Note for streaming videos; The Flash player will not show a thumbnail preview so you will need to upload a image thumbnail file. After uploading you can insert the tag [MEDIA=ID] or you show the playlist with the tag [MYPLAYLIST] in your blog.

Download

To have your blog transformed into a very flexible Media Center using the WordTube WordPress plugin please visit the following sites to download the required plugins;

• WordTube Plugin by Alex Rabe.
• Flash Media Player and Flash MP3 Player by Jeroen Wijering

Have Fun!!

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One of the great things about WordPress is the wide variety of themes that are available for it. However, often when I change my theme, I forget to change the Statcounter code that I had to manually put into the footer.php file of my original theme. This can become a real pain, so I went looking for a “Set and Forget” solution to changing themes without having worry about manually adding the Statcounter code each time. I found two plugins that will do the job and I will list them here for you;

#1. Citizen K’s Statcounter Plugin

The first plugin I found is simplicity itself. It’s by Citizen K who has developed this Statcounter Plugin. To use this plugin, simply download from here, upload to your wp-content/plugin directory, activate in the plugins admin area and then add your statcounter code in Admin Options/ Statcounter section. That’s it! Remember, that you will only need to add the invisible counter code that is provided by Statcounter.com.

#2. Luke’s Statcounter Plugin

The second plugin is slightly more advanced but it is also an Set and Forget method to get Statcounter set up on your blog. It’s by Luke and it can be found here. Luke developed this plugin based on the works of Ronald Heft and his Google Analyticator WordPress plugin.

As before, simply upload, activate and configure. The admin options for this Statcounter Plugin are slightly more involved than the one above. You need to add the three bits of information required and then enable the tracking for it to work. Again, this plugin does not create a user-viewable counter, it simply adds the proper javascript code for an invisible Statcounter.

Download

So, if want a simple solution to add Statcounter tracking to your blog, download the Citizen K version here. For a slightly more advanced option, you can download Luke’s statcounter plugin here. Both work great, so the choice is yours.

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Michael K. Bergman of AI³ has just released a plugin that extends the default TinyMCE rich text editor in WordPress 2.0+. This plugin will give you a full WYSIWYG editor for your Blog! Michael details his journey in putting together this plugin on his recent blog post, Extending TinyMCE, the WordPress Rich Text Editor.

In older versions of WordPress (1.5) the only text formatting available was by using QuickTags to format text. However, since WordPress 2.0 was released the developers have now incorporated the proven Javascript Rich Text editor, TinyMCE as part of all new versions (2.0+). However, the rich text editor adopted by WordPress is configured more like the previous QuickTags feature set and only has a few available editing functions such as bold, bullets, text alignment, etc. Here is a screenshot showing the default editor in your WordPress admin area;

Now, here is a screenshot showing the new WYSIWYG editor when the Extended TinyMCE plugin is installed and activated;

As you can see, this new editor has a LOT more options and can be considered a full WYSIWYG editor for WordPress. Here are just a few of the new features that are available;

• Table creation
• Cut/copy/paste
• Headings, H1, H2 etc
• Text Color & Highlighting
• Clean Up HTML button & lots more.

This plugin is a great addition to your WordPress installation and these extra features are sure to be useful. It is also easy to remove unwanted buttons by simply editing the advanced-wysiwyg.php plugin file using the Plugin Editor in your WordPress installation.

To download this plugin visit Mike Bergman’s site here.

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Dagon Design has created a great WordPress Plugin that generates a nice looking real sitemap for your website. The sitemap is very easy to implement and the final result is well worth the small amount of time it takes to add this to your website.

To see this plugin in action on this website, visit my Sitemap page.

This plugin is not another XML sitemap plugin, it is a real sitemap generator which is highly customizable. This plugin has an options page in the WordPress admin panel. Some of its advanced features include:

• support for multi-level categories and pages,
• category, page exclusion,
• multiple-page generation with navigation,
• permalink support,
• choose what to display,
• what order to list items in,
• show comment counts and/or post dates,
• and many other options.

What is really great about this plugin is that it is good for your website visitors as they can quickly find what they are searching for by accessing the sitemap for your site. It also benefits the search engines that visit and trawl your site for content. This Sitemap Generator plugin give the SE spiders plenty to index and crawl when they decide to dig deeper into your site.

The plugin can be downloaded here; Sitemap Generator Plugin v2.6

Installation is as simple as uploading the plugin and then activating it. In order to use this plugin you need to add a single line of code to your template or page. I found that creating a blank page, calling it Sitemap and then adding the line of code using the HTML button is all that is required to have the sitemap up and running fast.

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Katesgasis.com has just released an updated Sideblog Plugin v3.0 for WordPress. This plugin puts a series of short posts that are usually 1 to 2 sentences in length, in your blog sidebar. The plugin allows multiple categories of posts to be published to the sidebar.

What’s really cool about Sideblog Plugin v3.0 is that it is now Widget enabled! This means it is ultra-easy to setup if your theme supports widgets. With a Sidebar Widget theme just activate the plugin, select the categories that you want to appear in the sidebar and drop the Sideblog widget to where you want it. It can, however, still be used on themes which do not support sidebar widgets, by adding one line of code to the sidebar.php theme file.

Download: Sideblog Plugin v3.0

Current Version: 3.0

Plugin Author: katesgasis.com

Widget: Yes

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Elliott Back has released a plugin called WP Autoblog that allow you to automatically post to your WordPress blog from any RSS, ATOM or XML feed. The plugin will creates these new posts in the proper assigned categories and publish either excerpts or full feeds.

WP Autoblog Plugin Features

This plugin basically converts RSS, ATOM or XML feeds into WordPress posts. This plugin has several features which include;

• Automatic publishing
• RSS .92, 1.0, 2.0 and Atom support
• Multiple categories
• Cronless cron jobs
• Optional source attribution
• Optional find and replace
• Optional excerpt republishing

In common usage it could be used to run an aggregator site where a collection of your favorite feeds can be posted to your WordPress blog (if the terms of the feed creators allow this). However, the power of this plugin means that it can be abused, as it could be used by spammers to push high-profit keyword posts into their blogs. Whatever the issues, this is an easy plugin to setup and use straight away.

Download

You can download WP Autoblog as a zip file here: wp-autoblog.zip. It will always be linked to the latest version of the wordpress plugin.

Installation

Unzip and copy the wp-autoblog folder to your …/wp-content/plugins/ directory. Then, activate in the administrative interface. Make sure the wp-autoblog/cache directory is writable. Then, an options panel will appear under Options/WP Autoblog, where you can configure the plugin.

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