LightBox Plus Plugin – WordPress Plugin
( The Best Web Hosting Service)- You have been lurking on a certain website, found an interesting image but it was too small. You clicked it and a larger image pops up on the window. Ever wondered how that effect is done? You may have, I know I did, but I thought that it was some kind of a complicated script and so I haven’t tried it. Until I realized that it became possible because of a simple plugin – the Lightbox Plus.
Apparently, Lightbox Plus is a simple script that enables the images to be displayed as an overlay on a certain page. You may have wondered what the difference is. Usually, if you click on a certain image (without the plugin), it will be opened on another tab or window to be viewed, or worse, if it does not work, you have to right-click on it just to view the whole image. In case of the Lightbox Plus, the only thing you have to do is the click on the image and if you’re using a supported browser, the image will be shown in its original size. If in case, it’s bigger, it will auto-resize to fit on the browser.
For what purpose is this plugin useful? Some people love taking pictures and sharing them on posts. So if you don’t want to eat up a lot of space on the page and in turn irritate your visitors, you may want to lessen the size of the image display on the page. But if you do that, the image becomes smaller, of thumbnail size, and people would not also appreciate the image you just posted. There goes the purpose of the Lightbox Plus. People will still be able to enlarge images they want to enlarge. It also enables them to view posted pictures on a slide show display, with Previous and Next buttons to easily browse through them. They no longer have to click on individual picture to know what’s in it. With Lightbox Plus, not only images can be displayed, also videos and other external content.
The feature offers the users an eye-friendly effect. It will dim the page and use a dark or light background (depending on the webmaster’s choice) to enable the user or visitor to view the image without distractions. Pretty cool, right?
With its elegant design and cool feature, Lightbox Plus is a very popular plugin for the purpose of displaying images. As the webmaster, you can have total control of how you want it to look like, how dim the background would be and how large or small the thumbnails displayed are. Apparently, as stated above, the enlarged image will be automatically resized on the browser tab so you no longer have to configure this.
Basically, if you’re an image poster (but not so much), having Lightbox Plus is a must. You may use NextGEN gallery for album sharing. But if you only love sharing pictures one by one, this plugin is a perfect fit for you.
View the lightbox plug plugin here.
Sociable – WordPress Plugin
( The Best Web Hosting Service)- With all the sharing buttons and plugins used for WordPress, Sociable is by far one of the most widely used by all bloggers. It has been downloaded a million and a half times now and continuously being shared. This is apparently due to the fact that it, although focuses mainly on sharing buttons, has everything you will basically need to market your own website and interact with your visitors.
Its latest version, Skyscraper, can be used to integrate most social networking and microblogging sites on your pages or individual posts. Want your posts to be shared and liked on Facebook with just one click? You can do so with Sociable. Want your visitors to retweet your posts on Twitter, that’s a piece of cake with Sociable. Need +1 clicks for Google Plus? Buttons can also be added via Sociable. And there goes the long list of other sites, such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Del.icious, MySpace, Technorati, Yahoo, and even FriendFeed, Posterous, Sphinn, and Tumblr.
But wait, there’s more – yeah, the list of customization you can do with these buttons is pretty long. The buttons will be displayed on rows under each page or under each post. The old Share and Enjoy note above the rows is now changed to Be Sociable, Share, however, this can be changed to whatever message you would like.
You can add ratings and reviews on your individual posts as well as individual comments via Sociable. This is typically a great feature, especially for the purpose of giving your visitors the reason to go back to your site and check if anyone ranked or rated their comments to you. This is typical of the Youtube feature, where people can like comments if they want to or if they support you on a specific post or comment. You can also display your latest tweets, posts, follows, and mentions through this plugin. Want to track visitors coming from different sites such as Facebook or Twitter? You also won’t be needing a separate visitor counter for this purpose, as Sociable Skyscraper also has this option available for you. Want a Go to Top or a Home button for easy navigating? Sociable also has it for you.
With the recent update, this plugin also loads faster than ever. However, for some, it might seem a little bit buggy, not because there are problems in the system, but because scripts are changed overall and thus, there would be problems on some themes. Tweaking and fixing those themes to work with Sociable will do just fine. And you’ll soon be looking at your cool website perfectly in no time.
Nevertheless, if you don’t want that much about your plugin, and you only want a simple plugin which can help your visitors share your posts and pages, Sociable Classic is still available for you. The icons are now upgraded and more appealing, as well as larger so the visitors can see the buttons easily.
Haven’t tried Sociable yet? Check it out its pretty cool!
WP-Polls – WordPress Plugin
( The Best Web Hosting Service)-Polls are now getting widely used by many bloggers. For the most part, it’s used to get the opinions of the visitors about certain things, their preferences, or maybe just plain answers to questions. Microblogging and sharing sites already have polls integrated on their system, so it will be easier for people to create and answer polls. However, WordPress has none, only plugins that can help you create and display polls on your WordPress site.
One such plugin is the WP-Polls. This plugin is highly customizable unlike most of the plugins of the same kind. It can be customized via templates and injected with CSS styles. There are also lots of other options that can help you customize your poll display, as well as the results page.
The main difference of WP-Polls to other poll widgets that you can use is it’s a plugin integrated to WordPress itself. You can use a widget, like PollDaddy, but it will have to take a few more steps to completely mix it with your blog. WP-Polls on the other hand, since it is completely integrated on your website and it will be easier to create polls depending on your preference straight from the admin panel.
Also, unlike PollDaddy, WP-Polls will let you edit its HMTL template fully for advanced tweaking. You definitely would want the poll to display as a part of the whole site, won’t you. Also, you can configure the CSS style of the poll you’re making based on your site’s CSS design and play with it.
Though third-party poll widgets are useful, given that they are external, you don’t actually “own” the poll. The polls you create must be within their terms and conditions, unlike if you own the poll yourself, it can be about anything and everything under the sun. For third-party solutions, you may have the dilemma of them closing your poll at any time if they wish to, and though it’s not that often, it still can impact a blogger greatly. So there goes the benefit of using an integrated poll manager such as WP-Polls.
Also, access and configuration to these polls are in your hands. You have access to who participated in your polls, their IP addresses, the exact time they voted, to name a few. This also gives your visitors the security that they will not be sharing information about themselves through a third-party application, and it reassures them that only you as the webmaster can see who they are and where they are from. The advantages of owning the poll are endless. Even php codes can be configured to work the way you want them to. And don’t forget, you won’t have to bear with the third-party site mark on the bottom of the widget (i.e. “Brought to you by WEBSITE”, or via Website.com).
Apparently, there are more advantages to having your own poll via a plugin such as WP-Polls rather than a third-party application. The only downside I guess is the fact that it will be down if there happens to be some problem on the plugin, unlike in PollDaddy where their servers are monitored. But nevertheless, any application or plugin undergoes the same, so that won’t be too much of a problem.
Check out the Wp-Polls plugin here.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
( The Best Web Hosting Service)-You’re reading a certain post. You maybe have landed on that post via Google search or another search engine. However, at some point you wanted to see if there are more information on that site related to the topic you need. Would you browse each post by the owner one by one? You wouldn’t. So you’d definitely leave and go somewhere else.
If you’re the webmaster of that site, you already lost a visitor. Apparently, he/she may have not found anything more helpful than that specific post he/she went to. If only you could find a way to let them stay.
Good thing there’s plugins in WordPress which offer listing of some related posts on the bottom of each post. Your visitor would not leave once they find more information on your blog about a certain topic. Chances are, they would click on the different links posted, trying to find more and more. Very helpful, eh?
One such plugin is Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP). It gives you relevant content on your whole site, whether it’s a page or a post. So how does it differ to the other related posts plugins?
It does have an advanced and versatile algorithm that other plugins of the same kind don’t have. This algorithm enables you to customize the relevance of each posts to each other, whether it’s related by title, by content, by tags, by category, or even by taxonomy. Through this, you would be sure that you only have the right posts listed on the bottom of your post that would potentially be useful for your visitors.
It does have a unique templating system that enables you to control how the related posts are displayed on your pages. Since the list would take up space on your page, you won’t have to worry about it going against your template. At most themes, you actually don’t have to do anything to tweak your theme again to work with this.
It does have caching ability that records how related posts are visited to improve performance. The more visitors come to look at your related posts, the higher chances of improved suggestion.
It has the ability to also display related posts even on RSS and Atom feeds. And the best part is, they are also completely customizable.
It offers you the ability to disallow or remove certain tags and categories from the algorithm. This basically means that the plugin would not search related posts via the disallowed tags or categories anymore, increasing the relevance of each list.
It enables you to have complete control over your related posts and pages listed, and it supports PHP5 and MySQL 4.1 or greater.
Nevertheless, YARPP or Yet Another Related Posts Plugin is a favorite amongst all related posts plugin downloadable. Not only will you stay once you use it, but you’ll be amazed by its big help on your site being visited frequently every time. Not still using it? I highly recommend for you to try this.
All in One Webmaster
( The Best Web Hosting Service)- If you are a webmaster, you may have tried different webmaster tools to help you in optimizing your site for search engines and for better marketing. You may have already been familiar (or you may have tried) Google Webmaster Tool. And in case, you may have also tried Yahoo’s SiteExplorer or Bing Webmaster Central with the same purpose. These tools are used to help you monitor the indexing of your site on those search engines, and get detailed statistics for better earnings.
All-in-One Webmaster is a WordPress plugin that has the similar purpose, but without any complicated codes. Contrary to the abovementioned tools of the same kind, this plugin enables you to monitor and add all webmaster codes for the above sites. Yes, whether it’s for Google, for Yahoo, or for Bing, you can simply monitor activities through this plugin. Aside from those sites, you can also access the tracking codes on Clicky, Compete.com, Quantcast, and SiteMeter.com for advanced monitoring of your site stats.
This plugin adds specific meta tags in the headers of your blogs, as well as JavaScript codes on your site’s footer. Apart from the above, it also enables you to create XML sitemaps that you can submit on the above sites for better search engine optimization. And if the submission failed, it will also prompt and update you. You also have the option to manually edit the HTML header and footer section to further filter your meta tags.
With this plugin installed, you no longer have to install the above tools one by one. You only need the All-in-One Webmaster plugin. That’s it. It’s a one-stop solution to meta tags integration problem. You just of course have to access the codes to be copied to the text area on the sites themselves.
The latest version of this plugin has an updated asynchronous tracking snippet as per the latest version by Google. It also has a PRO version, with the addition of the StatCounter analytics option and Facebook Insight option. The analytics options for each site – Google, GetClicky, Quantcast, and SiteMeter are present. And apart from Google, Yahoo and Bing, you also have the ability to check on your Alexa ranking and BlogCatalog, as well as Facebook Insights.
Apparently, for most webmasters, this tool is among their top ten favorite plugins of all time. Not only does it enable them to maximize their site’s potential for earning, they are also helped by this plugin to prevent wasting lots of time doing the coding themselves, especially if they aren’t knowledgeable at all with the codes and the likes. Imagine being able to optimize your site, allowing it to be indexed by all the top search engines, and maximizing your visitor count even if you are just a beginner or you have just created your site. What else? You can track everything, do more action if needed to, in order to know if you’re succeeding or not in your blogging venture. Definitely a great plugin to try. So, haven’t tried All-in-One Webmaster yet? Download it now and optimize your blog!
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