10 essential WordPress plug-ins
Top 10 WordPress plug-ins
It’s hard to imagine blogging without Akismet, the free (for personal use) spam filter — both as a stand-alone service and WordPress plug-in — created by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and five of his colleagues. About 99 percent of the time, Akismet identifies spam as spam, saving you from having to filter genuine comments and trackbacks from the evil scourge that is spam. Akismet comes already installed on all WordPress sites; you need to activate the API key.
My understanding is that the major search engines like it when you deploy and activate a plug-in like Dagon Design Sitemap Generator. In the old days, site maps were for humans. Today they’re chiefly for search engines to help them index your site. The plug-in lets you configure what to show through your WordPress dashboard: pages and posts, how many items to display on each page, etc. I also use Google XML Sitemaps.
When I worked for Microsoft in the late ’90s, my favorite tool was our internal system’s dead link checker. I missed this tremendously during first eight years of blogging, since such a tool would serve as an automated editor when I messed up a link or when link rot set in. Now, Broken Link Checker for WordPress does the trick, checking your posts and pages for broken links and missing images and notifying you on the dashboard if any are found. Genius.
Last July I reported that our developer, Esteban Glas, had crafted a Creative Commons plug-in that woud allow users of WordPress blogs to use different CC licenses for each post on the site. Absolutely essential for group blogs like Socialbrite (see the Creative Commons license at the bottom of this post?). You can download it here. For sitewide use of Creative Commons, WpLicense still works.
While WordPress comments are serviceable, I was immediately torn between adding IntenseDebate or Disqus to upgrade the look and functionality of the comments. I settled on IntenseDebate because it’s owned and operated by the WordPress guys and thus will likely see cycles of improvement in the years ahead. You get threaded comments, user images, a comments dashboard, comment voting (though haven’t figured that one out) and Twitter integration. I love the fact that users here can log in via WordPress, OpenID, Twitter or Facebook. (See the Facebook Connect plug-in.)
When adding new plug-ins and monkeying with the code, anything can happen. So install WordPress Database Backup — you’ll be able to return to an earlier state if something goes wrong.
Here’s another unsexy plug-in that does only one thing well — but it’s an important thing. All in One SEO Pack optimizes your WordPress blog for search engines. Just fill in the title and short description at the bottom of your post.
I’ve been using Zemanta for more than a year now and it’s one of my favorite plug-ins. It offers supplemental links, tags and images to your blog post — even before you’re done composing it — by listing on-the-fly with content suggestions relevant to the current text. See at bottom of this post for an example. Zemanta draws from Creative Commons images, Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon, BBC, CNN and elsewhere. It’s also available as a Firefox plug-in.
Audio Player is a highly configurable, simple mp3 player for all your audio needs. You can customize the player’s color scheme to match your blog theme, have it automatically show track information from the encoded ID3 tags and more. I use it to embed podcasts. Another choice: WPAudio MP3 Player.
Did you know that every time you update a WordPress post, it sends out a ping that delivers the update to most RSS readers? That’s pretty awful, especially for minor corrections. Smart Update Pinger solves that problem by pinging only when publishing new posts, not when editing.
Thousands of Twitter passwords exposed
55,000 Twitter accounts exposed.
It’s unclear who’s responsible for posting passwords for Twitter accounts to a public Web site. The exact number of accounts is also unclear, as Twitter says many are duplicates and many had already been suspended.
Twitter is investigating the release of what appear to be thousands of user account passwords and e-mail addresses.
“We are currently looking into the situation. In the meantime, we have pushed out password resets to accounts that may have been affected,” Twitter spokesman Robert Weeks told TeenTech in an e-mail. “For those who are concerned that their account may have been compromised, we suggest resetting your passwords and more in our Help Center.”
The user data, so vast that it took five Pastebin pages to post, was released yesterday andblogged about on Airdemon.net, putting the number of accounts affected at 55,000 or more. It’s unclear who posted the data, and why.
Weeks disputed that estimate, noting that many of the passwords and accounts seemed like duplicates.
“It’s worth noting that, so far, we’ve discovered that the list of alleged accounts and passwords found on Pastebin consists of more than 20,000 duplicates, many spam accounts that have already been suspended, and many log-in credentials that do not appear to be linked (that is, the password and username are not actually associated with each other),” he said.
The list does seem a bit odd, with many passwords that appeared to be robust, and a separation between e-mail addresses and user IDs that hacker Adrian Lamo noted on Twitter wasn’t representative of a typical password dump.
We will update this story as we get more information.
Updated, 5:39 p.m. PT: Adds comment about list being odd.
Update May 9 at 12:02 p.m. PT: After Lamo and others found that at least some of the alleged account data had been posted on the Web last year and speculated that the list appeared to be compiled from various sources, including spam accounts, Twitter provided TeenTech this statement when asked for comment: “We’ve looked into this and can confirm that Twitter was not compromised. For extra precaution, yesterday, we pushed out password resets to accounts that may have been affected.”
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