Cool Tools and Tool Makers
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We’d like to thank these bitter people for all their time spent in the basement developing the cool blogging tools that we’ve implemented on our site. Thanks for helping to pave the way. And don’t listen to what those mean cool kids say about you, you guys are the real deal. And we think the way you dance is cute. Really.
If there’s something you think we’ve missed that could help us out and make this easier and more effective. Please let us know.
Our Bitter Nod of Approval goes to:
Wordpress by Automatic. We started our research a while ago, and since then you’ve grown to be the ubiquitous open source blogging tool of choice. And we thank you and the ever-growing pool of plugin developers for doing such a cool job.
Akismet - it came with our wordpress install, and it took us a while to figure out what that API key thing is (hey - we’re content specialists, not programmers), but we haven’t had spam trouble yet. Lurvely.
Adsense beautifier - by Supriyadi Slamet Widodo, makes our ads so purdy. Update: Unfortunately Adsense didn’t think so and banned pics next to ads so we had to take this down.
Sitemap plugin by dagondesign.com - By Aleister. Displaying your posts by date just may not be the best way to do it.
Meta Tag Description Plugin - By Kaf Oseo.SEO is big, and this helps us get lots of search hits. We think.
My page order plugin - By froman118, keeps us oh, so orderly.
FeedBurner Plugin v2.2 - By Steve Smith. Changes your automatic feed to be your Feedburner feed. It does make sense to send only one feed out there, doesn’t it?
Page Link Manager Plugin - By Garrett Murphey. We don’t program PHP, so this plugin allows us to choose which of our pages need to be in the main navigation, and which ones can be in the footer only.
simple tags - By Broobles. Makes it really easy to add Technorati Tags to the end of your posts.
WP-ContactForm - By Ryan Duff. To keep the spam away.
WordPress Database Backup - because it’s the first thing we learned at school: back it up. And then again.
Similar Posts - By Rob Marsh, SJ. Adds a list of related posts to the bottom of your article. Based on Related Posts, but allows you to exclude static pages and categories. Beautiful.
Updated April 8, 2007
We got some more uber useful Wordpress plugins.
Google Sitemap Creator, by Arne Brachhold, because whatever Google wants, it should get.
Optimal Title, By Aaron Schaefer makes your page title an SEO magnet, and moves your page title to the front before your blog name. This means more meaningful search engine results because some search engines have a character limit and weigh the first words more heavily. It’s good for browser bookmark names too.
Duplicate Content Cure. Seems duplicate content is bad and can harm your Google page rankings. You sure don’t want that, so make sure it won’t happenwith this plugin.
More Bitter Nods to our favourite Wordpress and Blogging advisers and experts :
UPDATED APRIL 08
Hi guys, I’ve just updated my fave blogging guru sites because I came across make money blogging expert Victor Franqui, who has been making waves (and enemies) in the blogospere by slamming the A-list “blogging experts” for promoting methods and tools that don’t work. Scammers he called them.
Well, you may not know this about me, but I always trust a clown, and believe you should never discount what the trickster personality says. Listen hard - this trickster’s lessons go deep.
Vic’s taught me some lessons. Making money online with blogs is hard and you won’t make it if you follow the standard techniques. You may find fame and you may acquire readers, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to money. To me that’s a big distinction.
So with that I offer you my new list - first up, the wholly trio. Between these three you’ll be getting a very whole education:
- make money online with BloggerUnleashed.com - generous beyond belief. Don’t mind the language. I don’t.
- Vic’s bud Griz has a great site about how to make money blogging for beginners. Very well written.
- And squeaky clean Courtney Tuttle’s Internet Marketing school by http://courtneytuttle.com/
offers super white hat techniques.
Problogger.net.
We’ll keep Darren Rouse here, because if you want to run a flagship blog where money is not the goal, then he still has tons of useful advice. Do not however buy text link ads - read the sites above to see how that can get you into trouble with Google, and why you don’t want to do that.
Fave post: (though they are all good):
How To Market Your Blog in 2007 - thorough!
Lorelle is still a Wordpres expert
We still trust her.
Fave post :
The Art of a Good Site Map convinced us to get a site map going.
Reclusive Leftist
Doctor Violet Socks is funny and super smart. And that’s our favourite way to be.
Fave post:
Religions Evolve, Part 1: Christianity
Booted off my list is John Chow. I haven’t read his site for almost a year. Why? He doesn’t write useful stuff anymore. He used to at least be entertaining, but now he just writes about dining experiences, trips he takes, and reviews sites that pay him to do that. He also got booted out of Google for scamming the system and doesn’t even rank for his own name. You don’t want to get mess with Google, and you don’t want to trust a guy who’s being paid to promote your stuff so all in all, his site makes him richer, not you.
Read what Courtney, Griz and vic say about him and his techniques and proceed with caution.
Cool Tools:
Keyword Elite
Seo Elite
BookMarking Demon
Promote your sites here:
Free Link Directory