Nuker.nl

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

 That’s Wordpress, one of the most popular blogging platforms available. And guess what, I also use Wordpress. One of the great thing about Wordpress is that it is easy to use and extendable. There are tons of plugins available for Wordpress. The down side of this is that you really need to know what you are searching for. Searching for a ‘comments’ plugin will give you a lot of hits. Therefore I decided to write a article about my 10 favourite Wordpress plugins.

1. Bad Behaviour. This one of the best anti-spam plugins available. Bad Behaviour blocks automated spam bots even before they get the change to spam comments. It can be used for any PHP-Based website.
2. Akismet. If Bad Behaviour fails then Akismet will be the next thing to block those automated spam bots. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
3. Comment Timeout. Another plugin to prevent automated spam bots from posting comments in older posts. Of course it also prevents other users from commenting posts older then the specified days.
4. WP-UsersOnline. It’s always useful the able to see how many users there are online on your website. And that’s exactly what this plugin does. It also shows (search engine)bots (if they are visiting your website, that is) at a separate list.
5. Google & Alexa Rank. This plugin shows your current Google and Alexa Rank in your admin menu. Now you don’t have to visit your favourite PR checker or Alexa. Just check your main page in your WP-Admin menu.
6. Ultimate Tag Warrior. Ultimate Tag Warrior is a very useful plugin which allows you to add tags to your posts. A menu will be added below the ‘write new post’ form. You can either add tags manually or let Yahoo choose them for you.
7. Tags in the Head. Tags in the Head does exactly what it says, it puts META tags in your page header. You need to install the ‘Ultimate Tag Warrior’ plugin or ‘Jerome’s Keywords’ plugin.
8. Brian’s Threaded Comments. This plugin allows you to add threaded comments and a “wandering” comment form to your posts. Now you can reply to other posts without the need to quote them.
9. Previous Posts. Previous Posts shows the latest posts you’ve posted on weblog. It’s a useful plugin and saves visitors time. Now they just have to look at this little list instead of scrolling down your entire blog.
10. Wordpress Database Backup. With this plugin you can back-up your database on demand. You can select the tables you want to backup and choose whether it should save on the FTP or download it to your computer.

Runner Ups
These plugins below didn’t made it to the top 10, but were very close. So I do think they should deserve some attention since these plugins are also very useful and do the job perfectly.

• Get Recent Comments/Trackbacks. This plugin retrieves a list of latest comments and/or trackbacks.
• Show Top Commentators. Besides showing the top commentators this also is an easy way to attract visitors and give them link backs in return of comments.
• AutoMeta. AutoMeta saves you a lot of time by Automatically generating and including HTML Meta Tags and Technorati Tags based on the full text of your post.

 Finally there is a central place where most of the Wordpress plugins can be downloaded. And besides downloading browse the repository and comment the plugins. If that isn’t enough, you can also rate the plugins. Now you can get a much better idea of the overall plugin quality and compatibility. But not only users can take advantage of this new repository, Wordpress plugin developers can do the same. Their plugins will be exposed to the millions of people who visit the Wordpress site monthly. They well also be able to check out the download and usage statistics of their plugins. That’s not all, if you want to read all new features make sure you check out this Wordpress.org post.

Yes indeed, another couple of small updates have been introduced on my website. I’m still fine tuning Wordpress. This time I’ve increased the anti-spam measurements. I’ve installed a couple of anti-spam plugins for Wordpress. The ‘Bad Behavior’ plugin blocks spammers before they get the chance to post or even read your website. You can see my Bad Behavior statistics on the bottom of the website. I also installed ‘Comment Timeout’. This plugin disables comments on older blog posts. If you want to secure your Wordpress be sure to read Yorick’s 5 tips on securing Wordpress.

Besides those anti-spam measurements I also installed a photo gallery. You can visit the Nuker.nl Gallery by clicking on the link in the Links menu. At the moment there are only a couple of Garry’s Mod photo’s. But that will most likely change soon.

Another Wordpress update, this time the reason for updating is pretty serious. Some cracker added a highly exploitable code to Wordpress 2.1.1. So if you want to be safe, make sure you update your Wordpress to version 2.1.2 immediately. Nuker.nl will also be updating to 2.1.2 right away. Please read the How To on upgrading Wordpress carefully.

Edit: Nuker.nl has been updated to 2.1.2, no problems occured during updating.

It’s time to upgrade Wordpress once again. Version 2.1.1 has just been released. This new version includes bug and security fixes. It’s good to see that Wordpress is still being actively maintained.

“Version 2.1.1 includes about 30 bug fixes, mostly minor things around encoding, XML-RPC, the object cache, and HTML code.”

This means it’s time to upgrade Wordpress. You might experience some errors on the website while I’m upgrading. As usual, this shouldn’t take long.

Edit: the updating has finished.

It seems Yorick has moved to Wordpress after all. Even though Modx is a good CMS, Wordpress suits much better as a Weblog platform. I’m glad he managed to convert to Wordpress, since converting from one CMS to another can be quite a struggle. Welcome to Wordpress!

Wordpress 2.1 has been released a couple of days, it includes a lot of bug fixes and a couple of new features. I am going to upgrade to version 2.1 right away, you might experience some problems browsing the website. This should not take longer then 10 minutes.

Edit: Everything is up and running!

A new version of Wordpress has been released, version 2.0.6. This releases comes with some pretty important security fixes. According to Wordpress, this will be their last release of the 2.0 line.

“Whats new?  

• The aforementioned security fixes.
• HTML quicktags now work in Safari browsers.
• Comments are filtered to prevent them from messing up your blog layout.
• Compatibility with PHP/FastCGI setups.”

I will be upgrading Wordpress to this latest version right away. You may experience some problems while browsing Nuker.nl, but the updating should be finished soon.

Update: Upgrading has finished.

The plugins and site theme have been installed and configured. You can expect some modifications for the current site theme, since I’m not satisfied yet. Also, multiple plugins have been installed. This includes a back-up plugin, a statistics plugin and a couple of anti-spam plugins. I am still looking for a top 10 favourite blog-posts and a top 10 with the latest blog-posts. But those are not the most important plugins, they can be added any time.

I am currently installing multiple plugins to make life easier. And to make the website look better, of course. The theme is pretty much finished, but I might update it some day. The most important thing left is customizing the website so it does what I want it to do. I expect everything will be done today, if not tommorow. It is time to search for some more plugins!