When you’re a busy blogger, and these days I’m super busy, the administration of your blog can sometimes add to the stress of everyday business. I’ve located three Must Have plug-ins for WordPress 2.9.2 and for me, they’ve been life savers.
The first plug-in, I found at Remarkablogger. Michael always posts the BEST tips and this time he had Ari Herzog guest post about a wonderful plug in from Joost deValk. I get the newsletter from Yoast.com, but apparently this little goodie slid right past me! Its called Comment Redirect Plug-in and this perfectly named plug in is available through WordPress.org. As you would imagine, comments are what keeps a blog going, as Ari says “its the lifeblood”. I love comments, myself. And I try my darnest to reply to each of them, sometimes though, my reply is delayed because I’m out of the office, away from the computer or enjoying a day off (those are rare). What this little plug-in does is thank your commenter for adding value to your blog. Immediately. I’ll point you to my own little thank you, that I derived from looking at some others pages. (Hat tip to Ari for the inspiration) If for example you had never left a comment on this site before and you selected any post to leave a comment, you’d arrive at the thank you page. Nifty eh? Yes, you have to do a little work,besides downloading and installing the plug-in. You’ll need to write that thank you page, eliminate it from your navigation and post it. But its truly a very simple way to thank your readers from the minute they leave a comment! You can always update the information on the page just like any other page, it’s your blog after all! A great big thanks to Michael @remarkablogger, Ari, and of course to Joost, for making my crazy life a little easier!
Next I had written last year, about adding numbers to your wordpress comments and so many things within WordPress have changed, that the instructions were some what antiquated and just didn’t work any more.Enter, Gregs Threaded Comment Numbering. This plug-in works straight out of the shoot for ease of operation, or you can tweak it a bit (if you’re a code junkie) and get your comments numbered easily three levels deep! It’s also available at WordPress.org for free download. Greg hasseveral linked articles about the plug in and its development and use. Though there’s no ‘formal’ free support. You’re likely to find your answer within the comments and questions about the plug-in.
The last plug-in I found was again a development of Joost deValk. And honestly came after I futtzed enough with my robots.txt, that I wanted to pull my hair out. Easily enough, the plug-in that Joost developed for handling your robots.txt from within WordPress, Meta Robots WordPress plugin has its own settings page, where you can select recommended changes to your robots.txt file that will prevent indexing of your search result pages, while still allowing the search engines to follow the links on them, by adding noindex,follow robots meta tags. It adds in a radio button selection to each post/page so as you write you can decide and use the appropriate choice for your own blog.
Within the options, you can edit your robots.txt and .htaccess from within your WordPress installation. Important to remember “The Meta Robots plugin got it’s name because it adds robots meta tags to the <head> section of your HTML, the function to edit the .htaccess file and the robots.txt files were added later, but none of the settings will make changes to these files.” Joost has ahandy video to explain how the plug in works on his site as well!
Hi Deb, thanks for the great post on plug-ins. I have to say the Michael at Remarkablogger is one of my favorite go-to sources for all things blogging, so I am not surprised that you have a suggestion you found from him. Same thing for both Ari and anything developed by Joost deValk!
In other words, thanks for the three great plug in suggestions! Love following this blog as well as seeing you on Facebook.
Gotta go- plug-ins to install!
Thanks!
Nice to hear you’re following them all! I really am enjoying the plug-ins from a time suck aspect..They’ve taken a load off!
Very nice trio, Deb! I’m always on a lookout for indispensable WordPress goodies! Thanks!