From Whoa to Go

Plugin ID’s The Blogging Blueprint- The Practical Application Guide. Part 8: WordPress Plugin’s with Filezilla FTP

16th April, 2010 at 18:37 | Posted in Blog Development, Blogging | Comments Off
Tags: Ebook Benefits, Feedburner, PluginID, RSS, Wordpress

In the finale of the PluginID‘s Blogging Blueprint series we get to look at the ways to enhance our blogs with plugin’s. All the plugin’s mentioned have been installed on my new site where we’ll be moving to in a very short time now that I’m getting back on my feet.

Throughout the ebook Glen advocates Hostgator as a hosting service and recommends downloading Filezilla to load files on to your website using the File Transfer Protocol system. While it seems technical at first, and it’s certainly not as easy as Glen makes it seem, we are blessed that Hostgator helps with FTP using Filezilla with fantastic tutorials, another reason that Hostgator surpasses so many other hosts.

Once I watched their tutorials it has been almost smooth sailing. I noticed occasionally that some plugin’s would download to my site according to Filezilla but not actually show in WordPress/ Appearance/ Plugins page, I was only successful when I deleted them and reloaded the individual .php files from their .zip folders. If you don’t use a FTP it is easy to install the plugin’s by downloading them to your hard drive, unzipping the files and using Plugins/ Add New to upload.

In the Blogging Blueprint Glen offers up a few of his most used plugin’s so I’ve decided to test drive them on my site:

• Brian’s Threaded Comments: allows for in-box replies to comments people leave on your site. It works a treat, check it out.

• Feedburner: super easy to install and edit. I already had a Feedburner account set up for the new site so it was a simple case of going to Settings/ Feedburner and adding the Feedburner feed address. If you click this link you can easily subscribe to my new site through your RSS reader http://feeds.feedburner.com/fromwhoatogo/live, alternatively, if you prefer to receive updates by email visit the home address and select By Email in the Keep Tabs on Me section. Super easy!

• Feed Footer: this is a good plugin for adding additional snippet information to the bottom of your feed, that is, whether someone has subscribed to your site and receives the updates via RSS or email. I haven’t fully tested the functionality out at the time of writing this but I’m sure that it only needs a few tweaks. If you subscribe to my new site now (with the links above) you’ll see the footer I’ve added for testing purposes once I write a new post.

• Enhanced Contact Form: an easy to install and edit contact form, although it’s not without its problems. Once installed half of it wasn’t correctly aligned to the left and my styling knowledge is too limited to figure out why, when I contacted the creator I was less than impressed with his impersonal and unhelpful responses and have since decided to use a different contact form: The Fast and Secure Contact Form by Mike Challis. It too has alignment problems and can be viewed here, I suspect however to get a better response from Mike than Joost since he has a support page on the WordPress Forum

• My Top Commentators: this plugin is good at illustrating who the most frequent commentators on your site are, however, it is biased towards the author of the site. So far, I cannot see how to prevent my own comments from being included in the stats so I may need to research a better plugin later.

WordPress offers Askimet as a default component of the installation so it’s easy to implement and works to prevent being spammed. So far I’ve only received a few in my Spam Inbox and none in my Published Comments field. It also offers statistics and a touch of vegetarian humour so you’ve gotta love that. Although I’ve since deleted it, you also receive Hello Dolly as a default too, apart from recognising it was the first ever plugin for WordPress it is pretty pointless.

From playing around with the above plugin’s I’ve learned a lot from how to make a better site. Even though these examples are specifically for this blog series I’m looking forward to diving head first into the WordPress Plugin Directory and going nuts on all the cool (& free!) plugin’s for my site.

Got a favourite plugin? Send me the link in the comments …

Conclusion of The Blogging Blueprint series

All good things must come to an end, isn’t that how the saying goes? Except that this ending has been wayyyy too long in coming. When life gets in the way of your online objectives it can be really difficult to maintain a momentum or even a care factor.

A great deal of what I’ve written about sits in the archives of my memory but what I’ve learned is that I can still refer back to my own posts, links and ideas for things I’m working on now. And this is the point to a series. It isn’t necessarily about following every step, making sure that you’ve dotted the i’s, it’s about providing something that you (& your readers) can use, now or later.

Indulge me a moment to thank Glen Allsopp, the author of PluginID’s The Blogging Blueprint for this opportunity! I’ve learned a lot from what you teach, many blessings and best wishes for your continued success!

Missed the Beginning?

• Part 1: Getting the Blog Ball Rolling
• Part 2: Setting up a Hosting Service
• Part 3: WordPress & All that Jazz
• Part 4: Theme’s Are Mean
• Part 5: Website Traffic & Search Engine Optimisation
• Part 6: Spreading your Brand
• Part 7: Content & Engaging your Niche