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Aug 5, 2010 Posted by Kenton Bell on Aug 5, 2010

WordPress Plugins Used On Kentonville.com

WordPress Plugins Used On Kentonville.com

To celebrate the release of WordPress 3.0, I decided to write about all the plugins that Kentonville.com uses. I have been making goofy websites for a decade or more. For those of you in the know, the first program I used was Macromedia Dreamweaver 3.0. Oh, I can still remember it well.

Over the years, I have made many different sites on a myriad of topics. The site your on now is about boring ol’ me. A few years ago, I started toying with WordPress. I did not need a blog; I needed a static content website program. In Internet speak that is a CMS or Content Management System. I think I should come clean on my abilities. On a scale from 1 to 10 my level of web design mastery is at best a 4.5. No reason to pretend to be otherwise. I can get a site to do just about anything I want it to do by hacking away and Googling into the wee hours of the morning. You may be wondering if I am not that great at this, why are you the reader wasting time reading what I have to say. Excellent question, WordPress makes anyone look like a web guru. That is why I am writing about this, I thought I would spread the world about the program and some of the plugins that I use. I feel better now that you know that I am fraud. With a little work you to can be a fraud too.

Prattling aside, why WordPress? I like it; it is straightforward and has a vast community behind it. Countless themes, tutorials, plug-ins, and resources are available for WordPress. Your are not going to find anything here, besides my long-winded purple prose that you cannot find elsewhere. Here is what I know about WordPress:

A monkey can use it, by a monkey I mean me. WordPress is simple and intuitive. I will admit that my initial hesitation in using WordPress was the need for Databases. This was foreign to me and frankly, I was a little scared. The reason I know, what I know, is because I would fiddle with things until they worked. Static HTML is great for this, you mess something up, you just upload your back up, and no one is the wiser. Databasing is different and requires a scalpel not a sledgehammer. I got over it.

Here is a listing of plug-ins I use and why I use them, most plug-ins I use are on the back-end. I try to hard code anything when I can.

Accessibility Plugins:

WordPress has pretty good accessibility out about of the box. However, it can be improved and often the more plugins your use the worse you make a site from an accessibility position. Below are the plugins that add to WordPress instead of detract.

External Links

  • You notice all of those little blue arrows next to the links; I use to have to code those by hand one at a time. This program does it automatically. This practice is good for accessibility and just good design; people should know where you are sending them. That is why I do not put links in text but after in a bullet list and I always append the URL in the description. This might be nit-picky but it is what I would like to see more on the Internet.
  • External Links Plugin For WordPress: Semiologic.com
    • The External Links plugin for WordPress automatically marks outgoing links as such.
  • WordPress › External Links « WordPress Plugins: WordPress.org

Font Controller

My Read More

Remove Title Attributes

  • Title attributes are wonderful, I use to spend hours make sure I had one on every link. Well, turns out it is an accessibility no-no. All of the extra titles often just add redundant information to screen readers, the primary way users that are sight challenged use the Internet. WordPress by default add title attributes to just about everything; this plugin will remove most of them.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization Plugins:

SEO is the giant buzzword all over the internet and fortunes are made assuring people with false promises. I cannot teach you how to do it. I would not even try. Below are the plugins that will help you on your way. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is one of the most abused terms on the Internet; a thousand hucksters have a million solutions to your problems. Trust me is mostly empty promises. If I have learned anything, it is if you have something worth finding and cataloging the search engines will find you. Most people spend too much time making a site SEO friendly instead of putting something on it worth finding. I understand you are reading this on some goofy guy’s personal site that really is about nothing, but it does not mean I am wrong. The best way to ensure SEO is do it right from the beginning and this plugin will do most of it for you. You will find many different camps in the WordPress universe about which plugin to use and why. I will let the wiser and more invested fight for your souls on that one.

All in One SEO Pack

Broken Link Checker

cbnet Ping Optimizer

  • WordPress has a wonderful feature that allows you to ping various search engines when you add a Post, however if you modify a post it will do it again. If you are like me, I always forget something or see some atrocious grammar that I have to change after the fact. I wind up changing pages multiple times, thing is this will get your site black listed as a spammer. Bad monkey. This plugin will only let WordPress ping search engines once and protect you from being added to the bad list. As I said before if, you have original content and something worth reading the spiders and bots will find you. Quit trying to game the system and this plugin will help stop the manifest intent of the embedded ping service.
  • Ping Optimizer » cb.blog: ChipBennett.net
  • WordPress › cbnet Ping Optimizer « WordPress Plugins: WordPress.org
    • Saves your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer.

Google XML Sitemaps

Robots Meta

WordPress Security Plugins:

The Internet is full of bad people. Some of these people will try to break into your site and insert malicious code because they can. The plugins below might just help you avoid that.

Login LockDown

  • Your login page is under constant attack by the nefarious efforts of the haters. This will help make it harder to get into your site.
  • WordPress › Login LockDown « WordPress Plugins: WordPress.org
    • Adds some extra security to WordPress by restricting the rate at which failed logins can be re-attempted from a given IP range.

Secure WordPress

Miscellania:

These did not fit anywhere else.

PS Auto Sitemap

Redirection

Revision Control

  • WordPress is great; it does have annoyingly wonderful function. It will auto save what ever you are working on in case you are like me and often do stupid things to endanger a lot of hard work. After a while, all of these auto-saves build up and can bloat your screen and database. This is where Revision Control comes to the rescue. I have my installation set to keep the last three updates and the delete anything older. A fantastic plugin that does one thing extremely well.
  • Revision Control: | Dd32.Id.au
  • WordPress › Revision Control « WordPress Plugins: WordPress.org
    • Allows finer control over the number of Revisions stored on a global & per-type/page basis.

Further Reading:

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