One of the advantages of using WordPress as your blog platform is the wide variety of plugins you can find to rev up the impact of your blog. These plugins make it simple for anyone to improve a blog’s functionality, from speeding up download times to creating contact forms.

Tim Baran discusses a dozen of his favorites in “12 WordPress Plugins to Supercharge Your Blog.” Here are 10 of them.

Akismet: Fight spam with this plug-in; it identifies spam in comments and trackbacks, then moves it to a spam folder. It provides your spam stats in a dashboard.

Google XML Sitemaps: Use this plugin to create an XML sitemap that helps the search engines find and index all your pages.

W3 Total Cache: This plug-in caches your entire site, which speeds up page loads and improves visitors’ experience on the site.

All in One SEO Pack: This plugin makes sure your blog has all the basic SEO tactics covered, including keywords, description and page title.

WP-Table Reloaded: WordPress doesn’t like tables, but this plugin makes them easy to work with.

WordPress Database Backup: Schedule your backups so you don’t lose all your hard work.

Efficient Related Posts: One of the best ways to improve a post is by linking to other relevant posts on your site. This plugin finds those posts based on your tags.

Clean-Contact: This plugin lets you create a simple contact form quickly and easily. It also offers spam protection.

WPtouch: When visitors view your site from a mobile device, this plugin turns it into an iPhone application-style theme.

Maintenance Mode: Don’t leave visitors guessing when you’re doing maintenance on your blog. Use this plugin to display a splash page telling them it’s down.

See Baran’s post to get more information on these plugins and see to the rest of his current favorites.

Information in this post gathered in association with a Chicago Personal Injury Lawyer.

Since I run a number of hotel-related websites, I often receive catalogs and direct mail pieces targeted at hotel owners. One brochure I recently received had a legal angle that made me laugh, so I thought I’d post it here:

It’s for a sidewalk leveling/construction company, arguing that uneven sidewalks are a slip and fall accident lawsuit waiting to happen. I love how professional the drawing is (sarcasm). Anyway, I thought this was worth a quick laugh, particularly since I work with law firms like the Boston slip fall lawyers of Feinberg & Alban + the Fort Lauderdale injury lawyers of Fazio Disalvo during my “9-5″ job. They represent slip fall victims… the ones dreaming of “the big payoff”.

I’m no designer, that’s something I’ll tell you from the start. That’s why I love WordPress; it lets me pick and choose between free and paid templates I can toggle on and off in just a click. In that vein, what do you think of the new “lush” theme? See the credits in the footer, but I think it’s clean and orderly – straight to the point. Surprisingly, the code is clean, a testament to the power of CSS2.

I’m pleased to announce CaseDetails.com is now WAP enabled! What’s that mean? Visitors who access the “normal” www.casedetails.com URL via cell phone, Windows CE device, BlackBerry, etc. will be redirected to an XHTML compliant version of the site where past and present posts are available for review.

Now that I’ve got this up and running here, perhaps I can pass along how easy it was so you can get your WAP enabled legal website going as well. (This temporarily bypasses the soon-to-be-addressed issue of why you should have a WAP enabled website for your firm.) This advice is for WordPress users only at this point.

In short, upload wp-wap to your site. Then add a few lines to your .htaccess file to detect and redirect mobile devices:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} (x-)*(application|text)/(x-)*(vnd[-.])*(wap[-.]|wml)+
RewriteRule ^(index.php)*$ wp-wap.php [L]

That’s it! I’ll update this space in the near future with instructions for non-WordPress users.

[tags]wap enabled,legal websites,mobile devices[/tags]

There’s a new tool on the block aimed at the booming blogger market – Windows Live Writer (Beta) 1.0. In summary, it’s a desktop application that allows WYSIWYG authoring of posts by programs like WordPress, Blogger, Movable Type and more. In an interesting twist, the program also has a SDK (software developer kit) so modules can be developed for extended functionalities. (For some reason, I get a chuckle out of their homepage statement “We can’t wait to see all the things people cook up with the SDK!”)

So is it worth a try? My immediate opinion is that the workspace looks very similar to Microsoft Word, without so many buttons. Matter of fact, the workspace looks kind of sparse, but with the basics covered. In contrast to w.bloggar, I don’t see any table options. We’ll have to see what I discover as I explore a bit more.

To cover all the bases, there are also the features available for general blog management like “updating weblog style”, trackbacks and other settings. One unique feature is the ability to insert Windows Live Maps. Something I just have to try:

Insertion of the map appears to be successful. With the ability to reference “bird’s eye” views through Microsoft Virtual Earth, the maps look nice, but the accuracy is questionable.

In a sceptical streak, I do hope the program doesn’t fudge up the code like other Microsoft applications tend to do. Time to post this and see!

Thanks to Andy at The lost outpost for the heads up on this program.

[tags]Windows Live Writer[/tags]

One of my few complaints about WordPress as a blog publishing platform is that the “visual rich editor” isn’t very powerful for formatting and manipulating text and/or HTML. While you can turn off this visual editor, I recently read a WordPress book where w.bloggar was recommended as a (free) option. w.bloggar 4.0, a desktop application used to edit blogs powered by WordPress, Blogger, MovableType and more than 10 other publishing platforms, offers a GUI environment for creating and editing blog posts. Free being one of my favorite things, I decided to give it a try. Matter of fact, this post is my first using that system!

w.bloggar Review

The current install version is 4.0. Setup is very straight forward. Just download the zip or exe, run the installer and start the program. It will prompt you for whether you want a new or have an existing blog, guide you through finding the xmlrpc.php file. (This is kind of “universal translator” code interface the default WordPress install puts in your root blog folder, allowing any program to be designed to pass information to and from a blog that’s live and online.) Enter your username and password and you’re in!

FORMATTING OPTIONS – Upon initial setup, you’re presented with a basic editor interface. There are clearly-marked places to enter your post’s Title and body copy. Of course, w.bloggar provides buttons to apply boldface, italicized, strikethrough and underlined text formatting to your text, as well as buttons for bulleting, linking and aligning. Except for the underline option, this is pretty well the same as WordPress. At first glance, I’m not really impressed. I do like that the program says it will output XHTML compliant code, but using traditional HTML attributes like targets, I’m not sure it’s truly 100% compliant. I also do like that nearly every option is tied to a keyboard shortcut (macro). For example, to underline text, you just press [CTRL]+U. These shortcuts are limited within WordPress.

It does appear there are more font face and size options readily available but (honestly) CSS should be used to set most of these things. On second thought, and CSS-purism aside, this is likely to be a very powerful feature for most users considering most non-technical users wouldn’t be the ones editing the CSS themselves.

So w.bloggar formatting? Eh, it’s ok. I have a feeling a quick search of WordPress plugins would turn up something with similar capabilities, though. Continuing the exploration…

HTML OPTIONS – Now we’re talking. Non breaking spaces, H1, H2, H3, hex colors, comments and more are readily available. Moreover, there’s a table button. Since
i) I, personally, am looking into changing the way I code tables from straight HTML to CSS; and ii) the native WordPress interface doesn’t have much to offer in the way of insertion/creation of tables, I’m interested to see how this feature works out.

TOOLS – This is where a few more features are offered, both basic and advanced. Options to publish to multiple blogs, adjust templates and upload files are placed along side of simple functions like blog properties and spell check. Good features, but I’m interested to see how subsequent versions of w.bloggar will expand the more “advanced” options.

In conclusion, I’m still 50/50 on the product. If I find a few plugins that emulate w.bloggar’s “unique” properties (like tables), it may make the program less useful. Time will tell.

Related Resources:

• w.bloggar site
• About.com general WordPress info
• WordPress formatting plugins

[tags]w.bloggar,wordpress,visual rich editor[/tags]

One of the first things I wanted to learn in WordPress is how to let people know that this site exists and update those sources with information about the articles here. What’s great is that WordPress provides one way to automatically do this whenever you blog: within the administration control panel, go to Options, then “Writing”. Down at the bottom, you’ll see an input box where you can enter “[tag]Update Services[/tag]“. These are sites that are automatically notified (or “[tag]pinged[/tag]“) when you write an article.

In a new blog installation, there’s usually one entry already there: http://rpc.pingomatic.com/. I’ve gathered a few more. They are:

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.wpkeys.com/

http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

We’ll see how this feature adds to the promotional efforts behind this [tag]legal SEO blog[/tag]. More soon!

[tags]blogging basics, legal blog, letting people know about your blog, WordPress Update Services, pinging [/tags]

I’ve coded sites for years now but WordPress (the “personal publishing” software used to create CaseDetails.com) is new to me. I’m interested to learn more about leveraging its features to quickly get ideas online. More than that, I’m interested in learning to leverage its predictable heirarchies and code structure to break into the emerging “Web 2.0” community. In other words, this site is going to explore building, customizing and promoting weblogs – using this site as a test subject.

What do you think are the most important first things to know or learn about blogging? In my next few posts, I’ll talk about some of the basics of getting websites and/or blogs up and running. Moving into the future, we’ll get to the heart of the matter: getting your site noticed in the search engines!