FindComputerStuff

It’s been over seven months now since I got acquainted with the simplicity of Wordpress. I have seen sites that did not have the default theme or 2-column layout, had well-organised pages and other funny tricks that made me wonder if I could get more out of my installation. I got introduced to the wordpress plugins much later, after moving my blog from wordpress.com to a paid webhost.

The most useful plugins to me, so far on this romance with Wordpress, are (in order of discovery) the Adsense Plugin, BDP RSS Aggregator, Exec-PHP, WordTube, and StatTraq. I am actually making this post because step 5 of the installation procedure for StatTraq says “Tell your friends and write about StatTraq”, lol. I am actually using ALL of them, and I was afraid that my upgrade to WP 2.1 would break some of them, but it didnt. I can breathe.

The Adsense Plugin

Author: Phil Hord
This Plugin inserts Google Adsense inside your posts where you see fit. This means I am not restricted to having ads in my sidebars alone, which is a great big plus. The constant positioning of the sidebar Ads create ad-blindness (people who visit you often simply dont look there anymore because they are not interested and because it is not in the column they are reading), so a method has to be devised to bring the Ads into their face.

There are a number of inline Adsense plugins out there, but this one was easy for me to install, plus all i have to do is to add a quitcktag to my post content. And did I mention that it adds a convenient “Adsense” button to my quicktag list? LOL

BDP RSS Aggregator

Author: Bryan Palmer (bryan@ozpolitics.info).
This RSS Aggregator collates RSS feeds and summarises them to a page, or whatever section of your blog you want them in. It also updates regularly without the need for cron. It is designed for wordpress-type RSS 2.0 feeds, but it also works with the Atom feeds generated by Blogger.

This plugin is one of the best things that ever happened to me. I need to constantly keep track of who just posted what, on my blogroll. You see, I love reading other peoples posts, the more scandalous/down-to-earth, the better. But I dont want to use a FeedReader because I’m not always using the same PC, so I needed to add it to my blog - where I will always notice it. It was originally in my sidebar, but it got messed up when I upgraded to wordpress 2.1, where they decided to merge post- and link-categories. Ugh.

Exec-PHP

Author: Sören Weber
This plugin allows <?php ?> tags inside the content or excerpt of your posts and pages to be executed just as in usual PHP files. There isnt really much to say about it, except that it requires PHP 4.1 or higher and Wordpress 2.x, so you either have to bug your webhost to upgrade their PHP version or move to another host if you want to use it.

Also note that if you are on a multi-user blog, using this plugin is not secure: allowing your users to include PHP code in posts or pages exposes your Wordpress API in specific and your server configuration in general to this user. By that, a user can easily include code into the posts that alters his security level to administrator rights and so can take over your blog or just read out your database password, etc. If in doubt, don’t allow a user to execute PHP code. This can be easily adjusted on a per user base.

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