Wordpress Plugins: Author Exposed
Color Light Studio’s Igor Penjivrag first entry into the Wordpress plugin world is called Author Exposed.
When one of your blog readers clicks on a post author’s name, rather than sending them the to the author’s site or showing their Wordpress profile information, Author Exposed pops a mini window that includes the author’s name, email address, linked site address, a short profile, a link to an archive of their posts and their gravatar.
The screen capture above shows Igor’s author profile from his site.
The only change that I made to the plugin was to remove the code that showed the author’s email address from showing up. (There’s enough spam in the world already).
Great work, Igor! Thanks for the plugin!
Popularity: 40% [?]
WP-Polls Plugin Upgrade Needed with WP 2.5+
I was having a tough time trying to install and make the WP-Polls plugin work on a new blog this past weekend, when it finally dawned on me…
The version of the WP-Polls plugin that works with Wordpress 2.3.3 wasn’t compatible with Wordpress 2.5.1.
Fortunately, the developer of WP-Polls, Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan, recognized the issue and rewrote the software to work with WP 2.5. The latest version available for download is WP-Polls 2.30.
If you’re still running Wordpress 2.3 or earlier, the older versions of WP-Polls are still available for download on Lester’s site.
Many thanks to BlogClassroom member Sharon, for reminding me to remind you about the need to upgrade your WP-Polls plugins!
About WP-Polls: Developed by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan, WP-Polls lets you put an AJAX poll system on your WordPress blog. The polling software now lets visitors select more than one answer (if you allow that option) and there are ton of other options from which to choose including poll answer and result sorting, who is allowed to vote (registered users or anyone) and a wide variety of poll display options.
Popularity: 41% [?]
Have You Updated Your ShareThis Plugin?
Back in late February MySpace released a new posting API and shortly afterwards, ShareThis included a MySpace posting choice on their social web tab (shown left) that uses the new API, and gives you an easy way to post anything to your MySpace page.
ShareThis also advises that soon you’ll be able to “Post anything on the web to your Blogger, TypePad, Twitter, LiveJournal, and Orkut” and have the ability “to put ShareThis buttons on flash players”.
ShareThis currently supports the following sites:
- blinkList
- del.icio.us
- digg
- Google Bookmarks
- Mixx
- My WebWindows Live
- MySpace
- newsvine
- Propeller
- StumbleUpon
- Technorati
- Yahoo!
You can pick up the ShareThis plugin here.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Polling Plugin for Wordpress Blogs
Back in January, I added Polls to this site and have since tried a few different platforms.
For the first poll, “What is Your Biggest Internet Marketing Challenge?“, I used a third-party service called Vizu. Because I chose the free poll option, the polls shows a ‘Powered by Vizu‘ link at the bottom of the poll. As the poll is hosted on their server, that’s a fair deal. However, because I don’t like sending traffic off-site if I don’t have to and have a mountain of bandwidth with which to play on my server, I kept looking for a self-hosted polling plugin for Wordpress.
I came across the Democracy plugin, which was really easy to set up and deploy for my “How Many Web Sites Do You Operate?” poll. IP addresses can be logged to stop multiple voting and you can store an archive of polls. What you cannot do with the Democracy plugin however is run more than one poll at a time, so I kept on looking for a self-hosted polling option that allows multiple polls.
By the time I wrote the 3rd poll - How Often Do You Post to Your Blog? - I had found Lester Chan’s WP-Polls plugin, which along with his WP-Polls Widget, adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog that lets you run multiple polls.
WP-Polls lets you customize the look and feel of your polls using templates and there are number of other options from which to choose. The software allows users to select more than one answer and you can assign a maximum number of answers. You may also assign a start and end date for your poll, so if you get really ambitious, you can write a number of different polls to be queued up and published later to your blog.
The only additional feature that I would like to see in this plugin is a fill-in-the-blank option for those instances where the answer hasn’t been provided and readers would like to add more information. Other than that, WP-Polls is pretty much the perfect poll option.
Are you using WP-Polls or other polling software on your blog that you especially like (or dislike) and would like to mention? Please leave a comment and let others know!
Popularity: 6% [?]
Just Added the Simple Recent Comments Plugin
Look right… I just added the Simple Recent Comments plugin by George Notaras to the sidebar of the NPT blog.
The plugin is available for download through the link above and is easily configurable. For example, the default arguments call for 7 comments limited to 50 characters and I changed that to 5 comments limited to 70 characters.
To install it on your blog, download the plugin’s zip file, unzip it, upload to your wp-content/plugins folder and activate the plugin in Wordpress. Then place the following code - < ?php src_simple_recent_comments(7, 50, '', '') ?> in your sidebar. The 7 and 50 indicate the number of comments and number of characters respectively.
Thanks George!
Popularity: 7% [?]
