In the late Spring, I got burnt out and kind of lost momentum to continue posting things. Ironically, the site was increasing in traffic and readership. Doh.

I was otherwise occupied throughout the summer (Damn you, WoW!). When the school year swung around, and I officially quit WoW, I decided it was time to revive my old web development/publishing pursuits.

However, for a variety of reasons, I chose not to just pick up with this site and continue. For one thing, I wanted to combine a handful of projects into one, manageable project. One reason I stopped posting here was to work on a blog about World of Warcraft. My new project – This Life of Brian – incorporates a couple of different topics/websites under one umbrella. It makes it a lot easier to keep things up to date.

Also, I grew tired of this domain name. It sounded catchy at first, but now I think it’s a bit spammy. I had a couple articles do well on Digg, and some commenters pointed out the domain name. Doh.

I’m now in the process of slowly migrating the archives of this site to my new project. They’ll all be contained in the web development and publishing section of the site – Nerds at Work. It’s pretty well segregated from the other topics (online gaming, education, and random blogging pursuits). It’s got its own theme and its own RSS feed.

I’m also hosting all of my new content at that site, and this site will no longer be updated. I just renewed the domain for another year, so this site will be here until next December. However, don’t expect anything new here… and hopefully all of the old articles will be at Nerds at Work by the spring time.

So what are you waiting for? Head on over and check out my latest work.

Google Reader provides you with a nifty tool to help you do this. With the “Share” feature of Google Reader, you can easily syndicate a list of articles that you recently read and found interesting.

Get a Google Account: Start Reading

If you don’t use Google Reader – or another feed reader – start using one. Until you use RSS feeds on a daily basis, you’ll never know how wonderful they are, and you’ll never know how much your readers may come to rely on them.

Once I decide I like a site, I generally read it through Google Reader. If an article is interesting, I’ll click through to the site and comment on it. Other than that, I rarely go back to the site. Without the RSS reader, I’d probably never return to the site at all.

An RSS reader is a great way to collect relevant readings into one location – so you can sit there with your cup of coffee and read all of the new stuff out in the blogosphere. You can then decide what is important enough to comment on (on someone else’s blog) or respond to (on your own blog).

Share Items – Creating Your Own Feed

With Google Reader, there is a cool “Share” feature. At the bottom of the article you are reading, there’s a list of options – “Add Star,” “Share,” “E-mail,” and “Mark as Read.”

By choosing the “Share” option you are adding that article to a publicly viewable list. That list also generates its own RSS feed – which makes it easy for you to syndicate the feed on your own site. By doing so, you provide your readers with a list of articles that you recently read and found interesting.

It’s a more targeted and stable than a standard RSS feed that just shows every headline from a given website – which will hopefully make it more useful for your readers.

Grab the Widget, Style Yourself

This feed is available in a standard rss xml file. You could use SimpleXML to parse the feed and display the information yourself. Or, you could use the ready-made widget that Google provides.

The Google widget uses Javascript to access the information while your page is loading. This potentially stops your page from hanging if the Google server is not responding – the rest of the page can load while the RSS feed is updated. You can find this widget by clicking on the “Your shared items” link in Google Reader and clicking on the “put a clip of your shared items” link.

The only problem is that the pre-designed styles don’t offer you a lot of options for making the list blend in with your site’s theme. My suggestion would be to select “None,” for the color scheme. You may also want to leave the title blank, and add your own title to the feed.

If you do this, the feed will be generated with the following HTML. Note: This example uses the “Show item sources” option.

<div id="readerpublishermodule0" class="reader-publisher-module">
  <ul>
    <li>
      <a class="i" title="Good for Hunters, Bad for Druids" href="http://4thehorde.wordpress.com/2008/04/25/good-for-hunters-bad-for-druids/">Good for Hunters, Bad for Druids</a>
      <div class="s">from <a href="http://4thehorde.wordpress.com">For the Horde</a></div>
    </li>
    <li>
      <a class="i" title="Bornakk: Druids Not to be &quot;Big Green Blobs&quot;" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Er/Resto4Life/%7E3/279629927/">Bornakk: Druids Not to be "Big Green Blobs"</a>
      <div class="s">from <a href="http://www.resto4life.com">Resto4Life</a></div>
    </li>
  </ul>
  <div class="f"><a href="http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/18391951200330501918/state/com.google/broadcast">Read more...</a></div>
</div>

By taking a look at this example HTML, you can easily style the widget yourself.

The entire thing is contained in a div with class “reader-publisher-module.” Each headline is contained within its own “li.” If you use the option to display the source of the article, it’s in a div with class “s” inside the list item.

My one gripe with Google Reader is I can’t create multiple shared lists. For example, I’ve divided blogs I read into ones related to web development and ones related to World of Warcraft. I’d love to be able to create a shared article list for each topic, so that I can syndicate each one on a different website.

If you want to see this in action, check out my World of Warcraft blog, Rolling Horde. It’s on the right hand side, in the middle column, underneath the recent articles.

So how do you get started? Is it hard to publish your first article at Helium? Not at all.

Each Topic Has Multiple Articles

On a writing site, you would expect to find a collection of articles. You might expect to find a list of titles – and each title represents one article.

This is where Helium is a bit unique. Helium is more like a collection of topics than headlines. For any give headline, there could be anywhere from a half dozen to a hundred articles.

For example, “The best ways to learn how to maintain a computer” has ten different articles. “Should cell phone use be banned while driving,” on the other hand, has 125 articles.

Once an author suggests a topic and submits an article – or the Helium staff creates a topic and requests an article – the topic appears on the site. It’s categorized by topic so that people can find it through browsing. Other users can then write their own article on the same topic.

How Do We Pick an Article to Read?

If there are 125 articles on the same topic, how does a user (or the computer) decide which article to read?

Another unique feature of Helium is the rating process. As well as writing articles for the site, users are asked to rate articles that have already been published.

When rating, you are presented with two articles on the same topic. You read each one and mark which one is better and by how much. The software uses this data to rank the articles from best to worst.

When someone clicks on a headline, they are taken to the #1 rated article. They can then browse other articles on the topic – but chances are they’ll only read the first couple. If you’re rated at the bottom of the heap… your article won’t get read much.

Get Started: Write On an Existing Topic

The easiest way to get started is to simply write on an existing topic.

Browse around the site and find something interesting. There are a number of general categories, and each one has a number of subcategories. You’ll find topics on everything from Religion, to Sports, to the Arts.

Once you’ve found a topic, click on the headline. You may want to read a few of the articles. If you don’t have anything substantially different to say – or if you don’t think you can say it better than it has already been said – then you should keep moving. After all, we don’t need a hundred identical articles under one topic.

If you do have something to add to the conversation, click on the pencil icon. This will take you to the writing screen, where you simply fill in the box and submit.

Your article will be instantaneously published. No review process required! Don’t you love instant gratification?

I’d suggest browsing the site for a while and then writing on some pre-existing topics. This will give you a chance to feel out what goes over well and what doesn’t. If your articles get rated poorly – then something needs to change! Otherwise, you must be doing something right.

I think it’s time to take a step back and look at a site where you can write for profit – without requiring any tech, design, or development savvy. I’ll be working on a complete section about Helium, but in the meantime here’s a quick overview.

Writing for Profit – Revenue Sharing

Helium is another online writing site, similar to Associated Content.

The site is a collection of articles – mostly non-fiction, but fiction and poetry are allowed. It generates revenue through advertising based on its traffic. When you post an article on the site, you carve out a portion of that advertising revenue for yourself.

The basic form of profit on the site is revenue sharing. When you article is read, you get a portion of the advertising revenue that the article’s topic generates. Helium hasn’t released specific details about the monetization formula, but basically more page views leads to more money.

Unfortunately, Helium doesn’t report the number of page views your article gets. It’s difficult to gauge, then, whether Helium pays more per page view than other sites (like Associated Content).

I have a little over 80 articles on the site. Many of these are highly rated – which means they appear towards the topic of their category – but many of them aren’t on highly monetized topics. As a result, I earn an average of $5 per month based on these old articles.

Alternate Forms of Income – Contests and Marketplace

One thing that sets Helium apart is the availability of alternate (and more profitable) sources of income.

At any given time, Helium is usually offering a contest or promotion that can net you a lot of cash. One popular contest format is the “Channel Champion” contest.

A list of topics (20-30) is generated for a given category. Everyone is eligible to write articles in that category for the week, and the most popular author at the end of the week wins a prize. In the past, first place has been $75 and second place has been $25. This can be a good way to build up a repertoire of articles for revenue sharing while also possibly earning a nice bonus.

The most profitable – and unique – section of the site is the marketplace. Publishers come to Heilum and request articles on a given topic. You submit an article on that topic. If your article is chosen, you get paid a premium rate for it. It’s essentially a marketplace for freelance writing.

Although some publishers pay poorly (less than $20 per article), there are many premium publishers. I wrote an article that was purchased for $80, and there are offers available for $100+.

A Final Plus – Community

Another reason I prefer Helium to Associated Content is that there is a strong, friendly community.

The Associated Content forums are generally populated by people complaining about problems with the site. There are some decent discussions if you dig deep enough, but I find little reason to frequent them.

Helium, on the other hand, has worked hard to develop a community within their site. The forums have sections for peer review of articles, suggestions for new features, critiques of the site, and general discussions about writing. Helium employees constantly frequent the forums and you can be assured that any issues you have will be noticed.

Check It Out

The bottom line is that you should check it out. Helium is a great place to start building your online writing portfolio, and it can even net you some real freelance gigs.

The revenue sharing isn’t as strong as Associated Content, from my experience, but you can more than make up for that if you participate in contests and the marketplace. The forums are also a great place to meet up with other writers and practice your craft.

If you’re truly interested in developing as a writer on the ‘net or in print, this is a great place to start. Check it out, and check back here later for a more in depth look at writing at Helium.

However, you may find a time to work with data at the binary level in PHP (and many other programming languages). Here’s a quick guide to understanding binary numbers and the common operators for handling them.

“Normal” Numbers – Base Ten, Decimal System

When you deal with numbers, you are probably using the “Base Ten” or “Decimal” number system. These are numbers made up of a set of ten different digits – zero through nine.

A given quantity – like 512 – is created with a series of digits. The position of the digit tells us how much the digit actually represents. The ‘2′ here is in the units place, so it simply represents 2. The 1 is in the tens place, so it actually represents 10. The 5 is in the hundreds place, so it represents 500.

The number could be re-written as:

500 + 10 + 2 = 512

You’ll notice a pattern here. Each new place is worth ten times the previous place. The third digit (the hundreds place) is worth 10 * 10. If we added a fourth place, it would be worth 10 * 100 (1000).

This gives us a nifty little mathematical formula – which is why this is called “base ten” numbering. The nth digit (where zero is the right-most digit) is worth 10^n. Here’s the number 1024 re-written to illustrate this.

(1 * 10^3) + (0 * 10^2) + (2 * 10^1) + (4 * 10^0) = 1024

This is a lot of work to read a number that we intuitively know is worth 1,024. However, it helps to understand how binary numbers work.

Binary Numbers – The Base Two System

While base ten numbers are simple enough for humans to work with, computers are designed to use a binary or base two numbering system.

The simplest unit of information is a binary bit – a 0 or a 1.

To create complex numbers, we can string together 0’s and 1’s. For example, a number could be written as 0010 0101.

To understand what this value means, we can apply the same rules as we did above. However, since this is a base two system instead of a base ten system, each place is multiplied by 2^n.

Let’s start with a smaller example – 1111.

(1 * 2^3) + (1 * 2^2) + (1 * 2^1) + (1 * 2^0)
    = 8 + 4 + 2 + 1
    = 15

These rules can be expanded to represent byte-sized numbers (8-bits, or 2^8, or 255) or even larger numbers.

Manipulating Bits and Bytes – Bitwise Operators

Most programming languages come with some built in operators to handle bits. These help make very basic comparisons and manipulations of numbers.

These typically include the ‘and’ or intersection operator, the ‘or’ or union operator, and the ‘xor’ or exclusive-or operator. We’ll just take a look at the ‘and’ and ‘or’ operators right now. [Note: I use the terms intersection and union because I think they make it much easier to understand, if you are at all familiar with math sets and statistics. They aren’t typical ‘coding’ terms).

The ‘and’ or intersection operator – the ‘&’ character in PHP – compares two binary numbers and returns a new binary number with a ‘1′ in every unit in which both numbers have a ‘1′. If both numbers have a value in the second place, then the return number will have a value in the second place. If only one number has a value in the third place, then the return number will have no value in the third place.

0111 & 0101 = 0101
0101 & 1010 = 0000
1111 & 1111 = 1111

If you imagine ‘0111′ and ‘0101′ as sets of numbers ({4, 2, 1} and {4, 1} respectively), then the result of a bitwise ‘and’ operation is the simple intersection of the two sets.

The bitwise ‘or’ operator – a | in PHP – returns a value in each place that either number has a value. So if only one number has a value in the first place, the result will have a value in the first place. A place will only have no value if neither number had a value there.

0111 | 0101 = 0111
0101 1110 | 1010 0001 = 1111 1111
0000 1111 | 1111 0000 = 1111 1111

These operators aren’t used very much, but it is important to recognize them. If you don’t know what they are, it is easy to confuse them with the standard logical operators – || and &&.

For example, the following two lines of code have very different meanings.

$x = 124;
$y = 36;
$bitwise = $x & $y;
$logical = $x && $y;

In the first comparison ($x & $y), we’re finding the bitwise intersection of the two values. This would be…

0111 1100 & 0010 0100 = 0010 0100

In base ten terms, $bitwise would be equal to 36. In the second example ($x && $y), we’re looking for a simple boolean comparison. In this case, both $x and $y have a value, so the comparison will return ‘1′ or ‘true’.

Is This Useful…? Comparing Constant Flags

You may be thinking to yourself, “When will I ever use this?”

While anyone working with computer code should understand how binary numbers work, there will probably be very few cases in which you manipulate numerical values in a binary format. The rest of the world works with decimal numbers – and your programming language is designed to do the same thing.

However, there are some cases where you will want to use bitwise numbers and comparisons. A perfect example is the use of constants and flags.

Let’s say that a function takes 16 parameters. Each of these parameters is a simple “True” or “False.”

You could write the function take sixteen different parameters and use sixteen different variables. However, this would make function calls quite long – especially if you usually only make two or three parameters true.

Instead, you can pass one value as a parameter. This value – 16 bits long – includes 16 individual flags to tell the function whether a specific parameter is true or false.

If every parameter is set to true, this value would be “1111 1111 1111 1111″. If only the first parameter should be set to true, this value would be “0000 0000 0000 0001″.

Each flag is represented by a specific place in this binary number. The first flag is “0001,” the second flag is “0010,” the third flag is “0100,” etc.

Your code wouldn’t be very readable if you referred to each flag by its numerical value. Instead, you can define constant values. For example, FUNCTION_FLAG_ONE would represent “0001,” “FUNCTION_FLAG_TWO would represent “0010,” etc. These constants would follow whatever naming convention you usually use.

The value of this is that you can easily set any number of flags with the use of the bitwise ‘or’ operator.

For example, let’s say you want to set flags one, seven, and fifteen to true.

$flags = FUNCTION_FLAG_ONE | 
    FUNCTION_FLAG_SEVEN | FUNCTION_FLAG_FIFTEEN;

The result would be ‘0100 0000 0100 0001.’

Inside the function, you could then use the bitwise ‘and’ operator to see which flags were set. For example, this would let you check to see if the fifteenth flag was set to true.

$fifteen = $flags & FUNCTION_FLAG_FIFTEEN;

Although your function’s code will have to do some legwork to find out which flags were set and which ones were not, this makes the function call itself much more efficient and readable.

To use Google Analytics, you need to place some javascript on your website. A commonly asked question in forums is, “How do I add Google Analytics to my Wordpress template?”

Where the Analytics Code Goes

When you sign up for Google Analytics, Google provides you with a short piece of javascript to place on your site. The code should look like this.

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-2894597-3");
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

According to Google’s instructions, this needs to be placed at the very end of your site – just before the closing body tag. To do this, we need to find the closing body tag on the Wordpress template.

Look In Footer.php

As we previously discovered, a Wordpress template is made up of a series of files. Three basic files – header.php, sidebar.php, and footer.php – help build the components of the page.

If your Wordpress template follows normal conventions, the closing body tag should be in the footer.php file.

Go to your themes directory of the Wordpress installation, navigate to your current theme, and open footer.php. You should see something like this at the end.

<?php wp_footer(); ?>
</body>
</html>

Add a blank line before the closing body tag. Simply copy and paste the javascript code that Google provides on that blank line, save the file, and you’re good to go.

I got the site up and running, updated some content, and then submitted my sitemap information to the Google Webmaster Tools. As usual, the next step is to wait and see how long it takes Google to start regularly indexing the site.

Instant Indexing

When I checked my site’s info in Webmaster Tools the next day, I found something strange – a page in the site was already cached in the index.

I had included a link to the site in the article here. This site has a decent reputation with Google. According to SEO Meter, this site gets crawled every 1 to 2 days.

Apparently, Google crawled the site, followed the link, and cached that page in the index. It has yet to sort through the new links and the sitemap, but the home page is accessible through a Google search.

Get Articles Listed Quickly

This leads me to a pretty useful bit of information. If you have a link on a trusted site to an page that is previously unknown to Google, it will quickly get stored in the index.

I’ve never found this type of quick response with directory listings or forum links. I suppose the difference here is that it’s a direct content to content link that carries some real weight.

If you already run a website – or if you write articles at Associated Content or a similar site – this seems like a pretty good strategy for jump-starting the crawling process. Choose some of your main landing pages and link to them immediately from other sites that you own and write for.

This will send Google your way, get your pages indexed, and start bringing in a modicum of search engine traffic. From there, you can wait for the rest of your link building strategy to help improve your SERP and Page Rank.

The pictures are presented in the mark-up that flickr creates, and I used the styling that came with the template I was working from. It creates a simple two by two square of photos, with a slight gap in between them.

Although I like the way they are presented, I’m not sure I like the mark-up that flickr creates. What would be the simplest, semantic way to mark-up and style images in a small album like this?

Semantic Mark-up: An Unordered List

Flickr places all of the photos in divs. These are then styled to float next to each other or appear however you like.

In my opinion, the most semantic way to mark-up photos like this would be to create an unordered list. A photo album is essentially a list of photos.

This could be an ordered list if the photos were intended to be sequential – like a photo essay or a comic book – but the average photo album is just a collection of pictures.

The mark-up would look something like this.

<ul id="images">
  <li><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3047/2362739858_c82b4de7c2_s.jpg" /></li>
  <li><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3047/2362739858_c82b4de7c2_s.jpg" /></li>
  <li><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3047/2362739858_c82b4de7c2_s.jpg" /></li>
  <li><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3047/2362739858_c82b4de7c2_s.jpg" /></li>
  <li><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3047/2362739858_c82b4de7c2_s.jpg" /></li>
  <li><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3047/2362739858_c82b4de7c2_s.jpg" /></li>
</ul>

The images would then be displayed in a long, vertical list.

Styling – Making the List Inline

In the end, we’d like to have the images sit side by side. Ideally, they’d form a rectangle of either 2 x 3 pictures, or 3 x 2.

The first thing we want to do, then, is remove the list style type, clear the padding/margins of the list, and make the images appear next to each other. The last bit we can achieve by giving the list items the “display: inline” css declaration.

#images {
  list-style-type: none;
  padding: 0;
  margin: 0;
}
 
#images li {
  display: inline;
}

This would create a simple horizontal list, like this…

Width: Restricting the Number of Columns

Notice how the list terminates at the end of its container div and continues on a second line?

Without a width declaration, the unordered list expands as large as wide as it can. When that width limit is hit, it starts a second line, and continues until all of the list items have been displayed.

We can use this to our advantage by setting a width declaration. This allows us to limit the number of images to be displayed in each row.

If our images are 75px square, and we want to display three images across, we can set our width to be about 250px. The extra space can be used later for paddings and margins – but the images will appear left justified within the list container.

#images {
  list-style-type: none;
  padding: 0;
  margin: 0;
  width: 250px;
}
 
#images li {
  display: inline;
}

This would create a list like this…

Finishing Touches: Padding and Borders

With the basic structure complete, we can add a few finishing touches.

First, we might we to add a little padding to the images. This would space them out a few pixels from each other so that they don’t appear so cramped.

#image img {
  padding: 4px;
}

Adding this line to the css file would change the image album to this.

Finally, a cool effect for images is to add a border around the image. If you include a padding value for the img tag, the border is placed 2-3 pixels away from the edge of the picture. It gives a nice framing effect.

#image img {
  padding: 2px;
  margin: 2px;
  border: thin solid black;
}

This final change would look something like this.

By using an unordered list to mark-up your image collection, you end up with semantically correct and simple to style content. Much better, in my opinion, than a string of divs.

In order to maintain the meager search engine and referral traffic that the old pages had, I planned on using 301 Redirects. I figured that I would re-create each of the old articles (~10 total articles) on the new site and set up an individual 301 Redirect to send users and search engine spiders to the new location.

The problem, however, was that the standard .htaccess rewrite that Wordpress uses was conflicting with the 301 Redirects. For some reason, they just weren’t working – so I turned to a PHP-based solution.

301 Redirects In htaccess

Normally, you can handle a 301 Redirect with a .htaccess file. You can do this with a single line in your .htaccess file.

redirect 301 /path/to/old/file.html http://newdomain.com/file.html

The first part “redirect 301″ indicates the type of redirect. This tells the browser (or the search engine spider) that the page has permanently moved to the new location. HTTP has several other options. The 302 Redirect, for example, indicates that the move is temporary.

The next two parts indicate the old path to the file and the URL of the new location.

Normally, that’s all there is to it. However, Wordpress adds its own layer to the .htaccess file which makes your pretty URLs work. The URL that you request is really just a bunch of variables that tell Wordpress what article to pull out of the database and display in the template.

Although you should be able to get the two to work together, I couldn’t. The server was ignoring my 301 Redirect and going directly to the other rewrite rules.

Using PHP to 301 Redirect a Wordpress Page

The solution? PHP.

Creating a 301 Redirect in PHP is fairly simple. I’d read about it before, and just the other day I came across a brief article about it in one of my regular RSS feeds.

You use the header() function to send custom headers to the user’s browser. With these, you can tell the browser that you want to initiate a 301 Redirect. You can then tell the browser where to go to find the article.

header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://newdomain.com/article.html");

Simply replace the URL with the URL you want to redirect to.

Making It Work With Wordpress

If you look in your site’s directory structure, you may realize that the path to your article doesn’t really exist.

Let’s say we want to redirect the article located at http://www.earn-web-cash.com/2008/03/20/useful-wordpress-plugins/. To use PHP, we’d need to create a PHP file to replace the article that is being redirected, and include the snippet of code above.

The problem is that the directory /2008/03/20/useful-wordpress-plugins/ doesn’t exist. Those are parameters sent to the Wordpress script to fetch information out of the database.

To make this type of redirect work, we need to create this directory structure. Start at your root, and create the directory “2008.” Create a directory “03″ inside that. Create a directory “20″ inside that. Finally, create the directory “useful-wordpress-plugins” inside that.

You’ll notice that there is a trailing slash in the URL. In a normal directory structure, “useful-wordpress-plugins” is a directory, even though it would seem to represent the file where your article resides. To get the browser to access a PHP file at this location, we place an index.php file in that directory. Then, accessing the URL will automatically pull up index.php.

In short, create /2008/03/20/useful-wordpress-plugins/index.php, add the snippet of code above, and your redirect should work flawlessly.

This is a good way to move a few articles on a site to a new site. If you’re moving an entire site, you’d definitely want to look into using the .htaccess method, or creating a PHP file that dynamically chooses what page to redirect the user to. I only had to move 10 articles, so I created ten php files to do the work for me.

There is one caveat to keep in mind. If your installation of Wordpress uses the URL http://www.earn-web-cash.com/2008 to access the yearly archives, you’ll run into a problem. /2008 will now be an actual directory – so the server will try to serve up the directory. You’ll need to change your settings so that the archives are located in something like http://www.earn-web-cash.com/archives/2008.

One of the greatest features is the thousands of plug-ins available for Wordpress. You can find a plug-in for just about anything you want to do – or if you have some PHP know-how, you can develop your own.

Here are five basic Wordpress plug-ins that I’d recommend using for any project you start.

Akismet – Spam Protection

This plug-in comes pre-installed with Wordpress – and there’s absolutely no reason you shouldn’t use it. All In One SEO Plug-In is just what it sounds like. It adds some extra functionality to tweak the SEO of each of your posts and pages.

For example, All In One will automatically generate a description meta tag based on your excerpt and it will automatically generate keywords based on your tags. You can also use this to modify the title element of each page. I’d say it’s a must have for optimizing your website.

Exec-PHP

Early on, I was looking for a way to execute PHP code inside a post. Wordpress doesn’t have built-in support for this, so you need to find a plug in to do it.

There are dozens of plug-ins that attempted to implement this feature. Exec PHP is hands down the best that I’ve found. You simply add regular PHP tags to your post and the PHP code will be executed properly. I’ve never run into any bugs while using the plug-in, unlike some other plug-ins I’ve tested.

Per Post CSS and JS

Per Post CSS and JS allows you to attach individual stylesheets or javascript files to your posts or pages. This is great for changing the look of a specific page without creating an entirely new template. By attaching these files to individual posts, you cut down a lot on redundancy.

For example, let’s say you wrote a javascript file that you use in 10% of your posts. Why should it be attached to the other 90% of your posts?

I’ve also found it very useful for creating HTML/CSS/JS tutorials. I can place my sample code in external .css and .js files and have it attached properly to the page. This way I don’t have to write in-line styles to demonstrate functionality.

WP Unformatted

This simple plug-in removes all of the auto-formatting that Wordpress adds to your posts. With WP Unformatted, you can add a custom field to your post to tell the plug-in to strip out all of that formatting.

For example, Wordpress likes to wrap text in <p> tags. Sometimes – like with forms – this is entirely undesirable. It can mess up your carefully formatted (and syntactically correct) HTML.

By using WP Unformatted, you can add sophisticated mark up to your post content without worrying that Wordpress will screw it up with random <p> and <br /> tags.

And Many More…

There are, of course, dozens of other useful plug-ins. I’ve used plenty of other plug-ins that I liked. However, these are the ones that I feel appeal to the widest audience.

No matter what you’re doing, you’ll probably find a use for spam filtering, individualized stylesheets, SEO, PHP, and clean formatting. I would never start another project without these plug-ins.

What else do you find useful?