So, let’s say you have a blog that publishes more than blog posts. Or rather, you use WordPress’s blog posts loop to publish glossaries, directories, or other lists that you don’t necessarily want published in your rss feed or exposed in your archives. Well, there’s a two-prong solution that takes just about 60 minutes of your time. First, installing the WordPress Advanced Category Excluder plugin and two, creating a JavaScript enhanced archives page that only exposes the posts and pages you want your users to see.
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The reason the WordPress PAD was off for a couple of weeks recently is because I was working on a new project dear to my heart. Oh, My! Oakland is a blog, directory and all around homage to the City of Oakland, where I live, work and play. Months and months ago I wanted to create a directory of Oakland businesses because I love Oakland and unlike other major and more organized surrounding cities like San Francisco, Oakland has a scattered web presence as far as websites dedicated to Oakland entertainment, information, business or anything for that matter outside of newspapers and official City of Oakland websites. A couple of weeks ago I decided to take the Oakland Photo Blog I created months back and expand it to a website completely devoted to promoting the positive in Oakland which includes a directory of other websites that are Oakland-centric. using a fabulous WordPress Directory Plugin that is truly impressive and customizable.
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What can’t WordPress do??!! Scholar Press has a great WordPress Plugin that lets you manage a class using WordPress:

“ScholarPress Courseware enables you to manage a class with a WordPress blog. The plugin give you the ability to ad and edit a schedule, create a bibliography bibliography and assignments, and manage general course information. Designed primarily for use in higher ed courses, but could easily be adapted for other uses.”

Visit Scholar Press
Download the Scholar Press WordPress class management Plugin SP Courseware

So I was working on a client’s blog recently and was having the most frustrating time trying to embed video onto the site. I recall also having the same trouble on my Film Tops blog. I went to WordPress’s Plugins page and low and behold, I found a solution with a simple plugin.

EasyTube is a WordPress plugin that allows you to embed a YouTube or Google Video in your blog post without WordPress assigning p tags where they don’t belong making your published posts and those below them screwy looking. Anyway, the cool thing about EasyTube is that the code you have to put in your post is soooooo simple: or http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=:URL, that’s it! “URL” should be replaced with the actual URL where the YouTube or Google Video is found. You can also assign width and height: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=:URL Fabulous, ain’t it!

Found this cool new WordPress plugin I think many bloggers may find useful especially for those who have blogs posts that have geographical significance. PostMapper.com hopes to be the biggest, baddest blog post mashup. PostMapper is a geographically orientated blog post directory. It’s part API, and part Mashup, and they even have a WordPress plugin that does all the work, save writing the post & entering an address. Allow bloggers to geocode their posts, and mash them up on a central post map. All travel blogs, photo blogs, and any blog with posts that concern locations can come together in one place. Check out the WordPress PostMapper plugin. If anyone uses this plugin, please let me know what you think.

Here are a few WordPress plugins you may find helpful in giving your WordPress blog some added functionality:

RelatedPosts provides a variety of options for displaying posts that are related through tags.

TextMe sends a carbon-copy of all admin emails sent via SMS to your cell phone.

Video Embedder makes it easy to embed videos from various sources, such as YouTube and Google Video.

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It’s always a good thing to give your blog readers as many options as possible to subscribe to your blog. RSS feed and email are the most common. But how about letting them subscribe using their mobile devices like a PDA.

You’ve got a couple of options. For one, there are a couple of WordPress plugins that can make your posts viewable on a mobile device:

WordPress PDA Plugin: WordPress PDA plugin enables the wordpress blog viewable for PDA browsers. It is really simple plugin which detects the browser agent and loads a simple theme on fly. The plugin comes with a theme folder which acts like normal theme with all the functionality of wordpress theme.

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The following are plugins that I think all WordPress blogs should have to make your blog ideally functional:

Aksimet and Spam Karma 2: Aksimet is the great default spam killer that comes with every installation of WordPress. Spam Karma 2 is an additional essential plugin that not only gives your blog extra security and you more piece of mind, you also have the option of sending yourself a digest of spam stats, or you can just check the stats and modify many settings in the WordPress admin area so you can control more spam the way you need to.

All-in-One SEO Pack or, Add Meta Tags and SEO Title Tags: SEO is essential for your WordPress blog if you want search engines to find your blog.

WordPress Database Backup: You should definitely backup your database as often as possible and this plugin gives you the option to do so by either downloading it your computer, emailing to yourself or saving it on your server, hourly, daily or weekly. [Read more →]