These are all free and open-source plugins and you can find them in the WordPress plugin repository.

The Best WordPress Plugins for your Website

1. Search Regex – This adds extremely powerful search and replace capabilities to your blog. You can find and replace almost any kind of data stored on your WordPress site including post titles, excerpts, comments, and meta data. It even supports regular expressions.

2. Redirection – If the URL of an existing post has changed or if an external site is linking to a non-existent page on my site, I can create redirection rules and automatically forward all the incoming traffic to the right pages.

3. Bing 404 – If someone lands on a 404 page for which redirection is not yet enabled, this plug-in will display links to relevant article on the error page. For example, a 404 page like labnol.org/googledocs will have links to my Google Docs articles.

4. WordPress SEO – This is probably the only SEO plugin you need for your WordPress blog. It helps you create better titles, you can block duplicate pages (like archive pages) from search bots, and it also adds the necessary meta tags required for more search-friendly Google snippets.

5. Hyper Cache – This is a caching plug-in for WordPress that will help reduce the load on your web server by saving pages as static HTML files. WP Total Cache is another popular caching plugin though I prefer Hyper Cache for its simplicity.

6. FB Open Graph – This plugin will insert the necessary Open Graph meta tags to your blog’s header so that you blog posts look good and have the right snippets when they are shared on Facebook or Google Plus.

7. 404 Email Notifier – This sends you an email notification as soon as a visitor lands on a 404 page on your WordPress website. The email messages have details about the visitor’s IP address, what browser they are using and the referral URL that led him to that broken link.

8. SlideShare – This helps you easily embed SlideShare presentations in blog posts with the help of short codes – see samples.

9. Smart YouTube – This lets you embed YouTube videos in blog posts using standing video URLs and the embedded player can be customized. It adds a thumbnail of the embedded video in the RSS feed and the same plug-in can also be used to embed videos from Facebook and Vimeo.

10. YARRP – The related posts plug-in adds links to old stories that may be contextually related to the content of the current story. It also helps expose your archived content to search bots.

11. WP Optimize – Use the WP Optimize plugin to clean-up your WordPress database tables. It can remove post revisions, trash spam comments and also optimize your MySQL tables so that it works more efficiently and also consumes less space.

12. WP-DBManager – This plugin will help you backup your WordPress database manually or you can set up a scheduled job for automatic backup and the database files will be sent to your email address at set intervals. Advanced users can use WP-DBManager to run SQL queries against their WordPress database without the phpMyAdmin tool. There are other plugins that can save backups to Amazon S3 and Dropbox.

13. Debug Queries – Is your blog slow? Use the Debug Queries plugin plugin to determine which MySQL queries are taking more time to execute and thus slowing down the blog. Debug Bar is another related plugin org that shows PHP warnings, queries and other helpful debugging information in the WordPress admin bar.

14. Auto Post Thumbnail – WordPress added support for Post Thumbnail Images in WordPress 2.9 but if you have been using WordPress for long, thumbnails may not be associated with your old posts. Use the Auto Post thumbnail plugin to automatically generate thumbnails for such posts using the first image found in the post content.

15. Regenerate Thumbnails – When you change the default size (height and width) of post thumbnails (or featured images) on your blog, you can use this plugin to regenerate thumbnails with the new dimensions.

16. Google XML Sitemaps – Since you want Google and other search engines to know about each and every page of your WordPress website, you need an XML sitemap and this plug-in lets you generate one in a click.

17. XML Video Sitemap – The plugin generates an XML Sitemap for your WordPress blog with all the YouTube videos that are embedded in your blog posts. I am also using XML Sitemap for Images and XML Sitemap for Mobile.

18. Date in a Nice Tone – This plugin offers an alternate way to display dates in your blog posts. It displays the amount of time – like “a few days ago,” or “in the last month,” or “over a year ago” – that has passed since a post or page was published.

19. SyntaxHighlighter Evolved – If you regularly embed code snippets in your WordPress blog posts, this plugin will help you highlight the syntax of the source code in different colors for more comfortable reading. Supports all popular programming languages.

20. Pubsubhubbub – This will help you beat content scrapers using Fat Pings. When you publish a blog post, it will instantly ping Google and that is a strong signal to the search engine that you are the original author.

21. WP-Associatizer – This plug-in will automatically rewrite any Amazon URLs in your posts to use your Amazon Associates ID.

22. Template Tag SC – WordPress offers numerous template tags – like wp_list_pages() or wp_tag_cloud() – that you can use in your theme files. The plugin will help you insert the sam template tags directly in your blog posts or pages using Short Codes.

23. Login Logger – This plugin logs the IP address and the exact date & time when a user logs into your WordPress dashboard. It also keeps track of any unsuccessful login attempts. Use this plugin in combination with Limit Login Attempts to automatically lock out users after they have made ‘n’ unsuccessful login attempts.

24. CF Shortcode – This helps you insert custom fields inside your WordPress posts using the visual editor. This comes extremely handy when you want to add custom JavaScript inside your WordPress posts.

25. Advanced Excerpt – The post excerpts in WordPress are fixed at 55 words and often displayed with [...] ellipsis at the end. This plugin lets you to specify a custom length of excerpts, you can get rid of the ellipsis and the excerpts can be configured to have full sentences so that there are no weird cuts.

WordPress Plugins – Retired but Useful

The first version of this list was published in 2010 and since then, I have removed or deactivated a few WordPress plugins. Here’s why:

1. WordPress.com Stats – I am using Google Analytics to track site stats and therefore it doesn’t make sense to have another tracking program for the same goal.

2. Akismet – The comments on this site are powered by Disqus and they seem to offer decent spam protection on their own.

3. WordPress PDA – This plugin helped serve the mobile version of this site based on their browser’s user agent. Digital Inspiration now uses a responsive design and thus the same site is served to both desktop and mobile users.

4. WP-Paginate – The paginate plugin provide better navigation and also helps search engines find and crawl deep content on your site. The new design of this site has pagination built-in and therefore this plugin is no longer necessary.

Also see: Essential Linux Commands for WordPress Users

This story, WordPress Plugins that Power Digital Inspiration, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 08/02/2012 under WordPress, Software.

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5. How WordPress Finds Related Posts

Facebook has rolled out a Google+ style photo viewer that displays user comments and ads next to the picture in an overlay window. Thus, you don’t have to scroll the page to read the comments and the photo viewer adjusts itself as you re-size the browser window.

Switch to the Old Layout of Facebook Photos

If you are viewing any photo in Facebook and would like to use the classic layout – where photos are displayed on a separate page and not inside a pop-up – you can do that in a couple of ways:

• While the photo viewer is active, press F5 on your keyboard (or hit the “reload” button in the browser) to refresh the Facebook photo page. This should open the photo without the overlay.
• Or go to address bar of your browser, remove the string “&theater” from the photo URL and hit Enter.
• Or the easiest option is that you hold the CTRL key while clicking the thumbnail of any photo on Facebook and this should open the corresponding photo in a new tab but without the lightbox effect.

Please see the following screencast for details.

This story, How to Get the Classic Photo Viewer in Facebook, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 08/02/2012 under Facebook, Internet.

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2. The Biggest Nuisance on Facebook – Photo Tags
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4. Download Facebook Photo Albums With a Click
5. Facebook Photo Viewer Gets Another Facelift

Do you want to put all your Google Docs files on a USB drive before you take that road trip? The Google Docs website does offer an easy option to help you download all your documents in one zip file but there’s another simpler alterative that you may want to give a try– it’s called Google Takeout.

Once you have logged in to Google Takeout with your Google Account, select the Google Docs service and hit the “Create Archive” button. It will create a zip file with all your Google Docs files and you can either keep the browser window open while the archive is being readied or download that file later from the Google Takeout website.

Google Takeout will export your Google Documents in standard Office file formats by default – Excel for spreadsheets or PowerPoint for Presentations – but you also have an option to export files in either PDF or OpenOffice formats.

Google Takeout is part of dataliberation.org, a Google project that wants to make it easy for you to import and export data out of various Google products. The same tool may also be used to export your Picasa photos and Contacts data out of Google Servers though, surprisingly, it doesn’t offer Gmail export yet.

Coming back to Google Docs, here’s a quick video that shows how easy it is to export your Google Docs files using Google Takeout.

This story, Export all your Google Docs Files with One Click, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 06/02/2012 under Export, Google Docs, Internet.

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2. Zoho Will Help Backup All Your Google Docs Documents Locally
3. Convert Web Files to PDF with Google Docs Viewer
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5. Upload Office Files to Google Docs From The Right Click Menu

If you have small kids at home who are still trying to learn the English alphabet, you got to show them Alphabetimals (Alphabet + Animals).

This little site, designed like a flipbook, has cartoon images of animals that are shaped in the form of alphabets (the letter ‘E’ will look like an Elephant) and the visuals should help your kids quickly recognize and learn their ABC.

The illustrations are also available in the form of printable posters, Flash cards and coloring pages that be downloaded as PDFs from Alphabetimals’ Facebook page.

Everyone else may just use the Alphabetimal site to write their own name using the very-cute animal font. [via].

This story, Teach your Child the ABC with these Animal Alphabets, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 06/02/2012 under Offbeat.

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4. Online Movie Maker from National Geographic – For Kids
5. World Map Turned Into Animal Shapes

What is the first image that comes to your mind when you think of a QR Code? A confusing maze of black rectangular patterns arranged on a white background?

True, most QR Codes are available in black and white but they don’t have to be that way.

There’s an excellent online QR generator at qrhacker.com that lets you create colorful QR codes and what makes this tool different is that it provides you can option to embed photographs and logo images to your QR codes. You can even edit the colors of individual pixels that form the code.

To give you an example, here’s a QR code made using a picture of Zuckerberg and if you scan the code with an app on your phone, say Google Goggles, it should take you to Facebook.

Every QR code has a unique URL for easy sharing or you can download the image locally in PNG or PDF. Here are more examples.

QR Code made with a colored picture of Zuckerberg.

This story, Embed Images and Make your QR Codes Look Different, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 06/02/2012 under Embed, Qr Code, Internet.

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4. Create Colorful QR Codes and Brand with your Logo
5. QR Codes: Share Text Information inside Images

TechSmith has released a new iPad app called Fast Track that will help you learn the Camtasia Stuidio program at your leisure on your iPad.

The app has a collection of video tutorials, or screencasts, that cover almost every feature of the Camtasia screencasting program and whether you use Camtasia for screen recording or for recording PowerPoint presentations, you may learn something new through these tutorials. All videos tutorials have text transcripts as well though they are only available in the portrait mode.

TechSmith’s YouTube Channel (@ChannelTechSmith) also contains a good collection of screencasting related tutorials but the advantage with the new Fast Track app is that it also works offline – you don’t need an Internet connection to watch any of the tutorials. And it’s free.

I think, going forward, TechSmith will extend this app beyond Camtasia Studio and include tutorials for other products as well including SnagIt, Jing and Camtasia for Mac.

This story, Camtasia Studio Tutorials Available on your iPad, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 06/02/2012 under Camtasia Studio, IPad, Software.

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All your private and confidential emails are stored in your Gmail mailbox but are they secure? Can a Google employee working on the Gmail product read your messages?

In theory, the answer could be yes. Christopher Nguyen, who was earlier responsible for Google Apps operations at Google, shared this on Quora:

A small number of GMail related engineers have access to the servers as a matter of necessity to do their jobs; a very small number of people actually access the contents as a matter of necessity to do their jobs, and even then, almost always only the associated metadata.

The rest have to file a request and justify any access they ever need, which is extremely rare. All have to sign paperwork re users’ privacy at the risk of dismissal & legal action, knowing that whatever they do is discoverable. And ultimately, an internal culture of respecting users’ privacy helps keep one another in check.

Google also serves contextual text ads in Gmail and these ads are triggered based on the content of the email message that your currently reading. Obviously it is the bots that are scanning your Gmail messages for relevant keywords but Microsoft, with a hope that some Gmail users will shift to Hotmail, is using this point to target Google on privacy.

Some email services, like Gmail, actually read the contents of your mail (both sent and received, even if you aren’t a Gmail user but just sending to someone who is) in order to decide what kind of ads to serve up to you. They may call it “scanning” and attempt to equate it with less invasive activities like “checking for spam” but it’s quite different. For you, and the people you send mail to, it’s not spam, it’s personal.

Microsoft has also released a video, titled the Gmail Man, highlighting this Gmail behavior. Microsoft uploaded the video to YouTube, a platform owned by Google, and it isn’t therefore surprising that the video has garnered more dislikes than likes – after all, most YouTube users are also Gmail users and they aren’t buying Microsoft’s argument.

Related: Find if your Email has been Read

This story, Can Google Employees Read your Gmail?, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 02/02/2012 under GMail, Tech Notes.

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Amazon today launched Junglee.com in India today and, in its current form, Junglee is more like an online marketplace where you can quickly compare prices of books, electronics, music, apparel and other products offered by hundreds of online and offline retailers in India.

Several shopping stores in India – including Homeshop18, India Plaza, Shoppers Stop, Fabindia, Microsoft Store, Future Bazaar and many others – have added their product catalogues to Junglee so it becomes a little easier for the consumer to research product prices from one central place.

Is Junglee Cheaper than Flipkart or Infibeam?

As you may have noted, the two most popular shopping sites in India – Flipkart.com and Infibeam.com – are both missing from Junglee.com. These sites might have better deals to offer than Junglee so I have a written a simple bookmarklet that lets you compare prices of books on Junglee.com with that of Flipkart and Infibeam in one go.

Is Junglee Cheaper

To install the bookmarklet, simply drag the “Is Junglee Cheaper” button from this page to your browser bookmarks toolbar. Then open any book page on Junglee.com and click the bookmarklet to instantly know the price of that book on Infibeam and Flipkart.

The first version of the bookmarklet works for books only though I might expand it to other product categories later. Here’s a quick video that demonstrates how the Junglee bookmarklet works.

This story, Compare Junglee Prices with Flipkart and Infibeam, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 02/02/2012 under Amazon, Bookmarklets, India.

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4. Compare Product Prices from eBay and Amazon
5. Amazon Online Store is Live in India

If you are to a buy a product from Junglee, you don’t buy it from Amazon.com (probably because of the FDI rules in our country) but will be redirected to the seller’s website. The seller is responsible for the shipping, they may have their own refunds and returns policies and each may offer a different payment mechanism.

Also see: Compare Junglee Prices with Flipkart

Amazon in India

Thus, at this time, Amazon in India is mostly looking like a comparison shopping engine. There’s no universal shopping cart (you cannot buy products from multiple sellers in one go) though you can use your main Amazon.com credentials to log into Junglee.

I am still quite happy with this development though as it highlights the lesser-known online merchants in India and one can always use Junglee to get a better idea of the price of a product. It may not have an immediate effect on the business of Flipkart but going forward, that could change.

Full credit to BGR and MediaNama for breaking this story.

This story, Amazon Online Store is Live in India, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 01/02/2012 under Amazon, India.

You may also like:

1. Add Items to your Amazon Wish list That Aren’t Available on Amazon
2. Which Amazon Store Should You Use for Buying Books?
3. Compare Junglee Prices with Flipkart and Infibeam
4. Apple India Online Store – Price of Apple Products in India
5. Adobe Software Online Store in India for Electronic Download

The same j & k keyboard shortcuts can be used for navigating items in Google Reader, for moving between tweets on Twitter.com, and it even works with Tumblr.com.

So why do developers commonly assign the k and j keys for moving up and down respectively and not any other key combination?

When Bill Joy created the vi text editor for Unix, he used a ADM-3A terminal and its keyboard didn’t have any dedicated arrow keys (see illustration above). Instead the keys h, j, k and l were inscribed with arrow symbols and these keys, in combination with the CTRL key, were used for moving the cursor on the screen.

The keyboard layouts have changed (they got dedicated arrow keys) but the same j & k keys are still popularly used for moving the cursor up and down inside the vi text editor. And since most developers have their roots in the Unix world, they implemented the same shortcut inside their web apps.

Wikipedia has more details on the history of vi and the HJKL keys.

This story, Why do Gmail and other Web Apps use j & k Keys for Navigation?, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 01/02/2012 under Keyboard Shortcuts, Internet.

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