Xavisys» Twitter Widget Pro http://xavisys.com WordPress Plugins and Custom WordPress Development Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:45:51 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Twitter Widget Pro 2.1.3 Released http://xavisys.com/twitter-widget-pro-2-1-3-released/ http://xavisys.com/twitter-widget-pro-2-1-3-released/#comments Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:12:29 +0000 Aaron D. Campbell http://xavisys.com/?p=766 The new Twitter Widget Pro support forum has turned up some great ideas and has helped catch some easily missed bugs. This latest release of Twitter Widget Pro includes a bugfix that removes a duplicate closing tag for the title link, which was caught by someone in the forums, as well as an enhancement that makes the date format a per-widget setting (also suggested int he forums).

If you want to request a feature, or need support, go to the Twitter Widget Pro Forum. For more information, go to the Twitter Widget Pro page.

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]]> http://xavisys.com/twitter-widget-pro-2-1-3-released/feed/ 0 Twitter Widget Pro 2.1.2 Released http://xavisys.com/twitter-widget-pro-2-1-2-released/ http://xavisys.com/twitter-widget-pro-2-1-2-released/#comments Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:37:40 +0000 Aaron D. Campbell http://xavisys.com/?p=762 There was a small formatting issue introduced in Twitter Widget Pro 2.1.0 where there were no spaces between the tweet and meta data or between the date of the tweet and where the tweet was from (such as “from TweetDeck”). When I added the shortcode functionality I had to remove a lot of the excess whitespace so that the formatting built in to WordPress didn’t mess up the formatting of the widget when it was embedded in a post or page. I just released version 2.1.2 that fixed the spacing without messing up the formatting for the shortcodes.

I also added in some links to the WordPress Twitter Widget Pro Support Forum to make it easier for you to ask questions or make suggestions or requests. For more information, go to the Twitter Widget Pro page.

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Join the forum discussion on this post]]> http://xavisys.com/twitter-widget-pro-2-1-2-released/feed/ 0 Twitter Widget Pro 2.1.1 Released http://xavisys.com/twitter-widget-pro-2-1-1-released/ http://xavisys.com/twitter-widget-pro-2-1-1-released/#comments Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:51:59 +0000 Aaron D. Campbell http://xavisys.com/?p=757 Recently, a Twitter Widget Pro user (alx) asked on the support forum for a new feature. He wanted to be able to have all the links open in a new window, and that’s a great idea! I just released version 2.1.1 of Twitter Widget Pro with this exact feature. If you want to request a feature, or need support, go to the Twitter Widget Pro Forum. For more information, go to the Twitter Widget Pro page.

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]]> http://xavisys.com/twitter-widget-pro-2-1-1-released/feed/ 0 10 Great WordPress Plugins http://xavisys.com/10-great-wordpress-plugins/ http://xavisys.com/10-great-wordpress-plugins/#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:00:23 +0000 Aaron D. Campbell http://wpinformer.com/?p=26 One of the greatest things about WordPress is how extensible it is through it’s plugin system. There’s a plugin for almost everything. There are more than 4,400 plugins just in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory and there are plenty more that aren’t in the directory. Unfortunately, sometimes there are so many plugins that it makes it hard to find the best WordPress plugins in the massive sea of options. Here are some of my favorite overall plugins.

  1. Akismet
  2. Simple Trackback Validation
  3. Headspace2
  4. Clean Slugs
  5. Google XML Sitemaps
  6. Twitter Widget Pro
  7. WP Super Cache
  8. Sociable
  9. Subscribe to Comments
  10. Twitter Tools

Akismet

Akismet is the only useful plugin that ships with WordPress (so to speak). It requires that you sign up for an API key, but it’s well worth it. Comment spam is a huge problem on any site that allows comments. The WordPress Akismet plugin checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. It’s actually quite effective, more than most (if not all) the other comment spam plugins I’ve tried.

Simple Trackback Validation

Fighting spam is the never ending task of anyone running a site that allows user content of any kind. Akismet does a great job of handling the comment spam, but Simple Trackback Validation fills in the gaps and handles trackbacks. Simple Trackback Validation Plugin performs a simple but very effective test on all incoming trackbacks in order to stop trackback spam. Basically, it makes sure that the page claiming to be posting a trackback actually links to the page it’s posting that trackback to.

Headspace2

WordPress is pretty good with search engine optimization right out of the box, just by turning on permalinks. However, there’s definitely plenty of room for improvement. HeadSpace2 is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site. Headspace will help you to better handle your tags/keywords, meta descriptions, and it does a great job of cleaning up and customizing your title tag. No longer do you need a bunch of conditionals in your title tag. A simple wp_title(”) will suffice, and the rest can be handled by Headspace2.

Clean Slugs

Another plugin that will help you get a little better search engine optimization. Joost’s Clean Slugs plugin looks for and removes more than 650 “stop words” from your post or page title when the slug is created. These are words that most search engines ignore because they are inconsequential, so removing them will help your raking. Unlike all the other plugins on this list, this plugin can’t be downloaded from the WordPress.org repository. To get this plugin, simply sign up for Joost’s WordPress Newsletter.

Google XML Sitemaps

While it’s true that search engines can spider or crawl your site by following links, having a proper XML sitemap allows you to make sure that every post/page is properly indexed, as well as letting you specify a priority level for each. This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

Twitter Widget Pro

Twitter offer javascript widgets that display your latest tweets, but there are a couple problems. First, you need to be able to modify your theme or put the code into a text widget. Secondly, since it’s javascript, search engines don’t see the content. Twitter Widget Pro is a widget that properly handles twitter feeds, including @username and link parsing. It supports displaying profiles images, and even lets you control whether to display the time and date of a tweet or how log ago it happened (about 5 hours ago, etc). It does all this as a server-side widget, so the content can all be parsed by search engines. Requires PHP5.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly, reduce CPU/memory usage, and lessen database strain. If you have a high-traffic WordPress site, this is absolutely necessary.

Sociable

Social marketing is a hot topic and many have found that it’s incredibly successful. There are a few plugins for WordPress that will help you with this. Add This, Share This, and Sociable are the most popular, and I think Sociable is the best. It’s the only one that allows all content to be loaded from your site, no scipts or images to load from some other site. The reason this is so important to me is that I don’t ever want my site to load slowly because of a different site. Sociable automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites!

Subscribe to Comments

Getting people to comment on your posts can be a challenge. Even more difficult is getting people to come back to the same post and continue a discussion. Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address!

Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. The only part of it that I use is the ability to automatically notify Twitter of new posts. The problem is that it prefaces all these Tweets with “New blog post:” and this text isn’t customizable. Additionally, it uses tinyurl to shorten the URL for the post, and I would prefer that it let me use something like SnipUrl which lets me track the number of clicks. Still, the fact that it’s all automatic saves a lot of time for me, especially on sites like Web Developer News where people other than me post articles on a regular basis.

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]]> http://xavisys.com/10-great-wordpress-plugins/feed/ 2 Twitter Widget Pro 2.1.0 Released http://xavisys.com/twitter-widget-pro-2-1-0-released/ http://xavisys.com/twitter-widget-pro-2-1-0-released/#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:38:57 +0000 Aaron D. Campbell http://xavisys.com/?p=746 I just tagged a new version of Twitter Widget Pro which includes an oft-requested feature, a twitter-widget shortcode. You can now embed a twitter widget into any post or page by simply dropping in a shortcode like [twitter-widget username="xavisys"] to embed a widget like this:


Tweets from Xavisys

To read more about how to use the shortcodes and to download the plugin, go to the Twitter Widget Pro page. For support, go to the Twitter Widget Pro Forum

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