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Plug It In
As I am accelerating the content of my blog, in an attempt to keep up the pace of at least a post per day, I am also reorganizing my site and deciding what I really need. About two weeks ago I made my home page a single column, blog post summary and every other page I stuck under the title ‘Stuff’ while I thought about it.
Now - bit by bit I have moved some of the ‘stuff’ back out to the top level, but the vast majority of the site remains - and will remain - under a new heading called ‘The Ps’. I will get to that one day - but for now when you hit the home page for my blog, you see the blog, a ‘Contact Us’ page, sitting side by side with ‘Socially Yours’ - which is where - for now - I am parking all those handy dandy widgets that social sites have - that two months ago were streaming down the right hand side of my home page - and in all honesty slowing everything down.
Then of course a new Sponsor page, to be clear as to who keeps this site going and then all the rest - ‘The Ps’
….. and then there are the plugins. Again - I read somewhere that even if a plugin is not active - it can still drain resources - so - deleted - if I am not using a plug in - it gets deleted - period. None of that inactive stuff. So I am essentially running the site with 6 additonal Wordpress plugins - here they are:
- nRelate - who were recently acquired by Ask / IAC - I used to use LinkWithin - now I don’t, and am moving all my sites to nRelate
- Social Author Bio - there are a pack of these kinds of plugins - but this one works, is flexible and looks the best IMHO
- Hupso - again - lots of choices in this world - and used a few of them - but this strikes me as the clearest for someone visiting a site and knowing what to do
- Triberr - this one will get it’s onw post in the future - since I do like it - has its challenges without a doubt - but the idea of publishing to your blog and then the triberr plugin auto syndicating for you - well I like that very much
- Disqus - get rid of that commenting system that comes with Wordpress - now - and replace with it a social commenting system - absolutely LOVE Disqus.
- TablePress - tables done easily - not for everyone - but reduces the coding knowledge and though the styling is controlled through CSS - the out of the box look works - and if you are using the same table over and over - wow !
… and then of course - I use Graphene as my skin - actually - I use it on all my blogs as a default - very comprehensive, enormous flexibility - not found a reason to move off it yet - which has happenned with the previous skins I have used - there always seems to be a limit somewhere - not hit that yet with Graphene.
And finally - Sprout Social.
This one (Sprout Social) gets its own post tomorrow - and a few more besides. At the end of the day the social stuff is the future - but if your aren’t managing, controlling it, measuring it - then in all honesty - why bother. That’s where Sprout comes in …. and it comes in, in such a big way that … well one post isn’t going to be enough ….. let’s see who that all plays out - hang onto your hats.
UPDATED to include more links and TablePress on February 22nd.