I’ve been using the WordStats plugin on my other blogs for a while, and then realized I never installed it here. I absolutely love this little plugin, because it’s a quick and easy way to get a word count for those of us doing a little paid blogging. Before this, I was copying and pasting drafts into Word and getting my word count there – no more of that. Once you hit “save and edit” on your post, you’ll get the word count and the number of sentences. Be advised – if you’re not using the text editor, your...

Laura told me about a nifty little plugin I could use to show the people who have commented the most on my site. I installed it on tonight on another blog, and even figured out how to excluse myself from the results after poking around the code a bit. Yay me! You can see it in action in my left sidebar on my main blog.

I’m seeing MyBlogLog in the sidebar on more and more blogs lately, and I’m wondering what those of you who paid for the service think of it? Specifically, what you think of the stats package versus something in a plugin, like ShortStat for WP. I realize that I got a weeks worth of free stats when I signed up for MyBlogLog, but I never bothered to check them to compare the package to anything else.

My friend Marcus needed some assistance this week setting up PhotoPress, and since I thought this might help others, I’m sharing the info here too. If you’re using the HTML code in PhotoPress (and I recommend it) you’ve probably tried aligning your pictures to the left, or to the right, and noticed that they’re a bit off, like my example above here. Here’s how to easily fix that. Upload your picture in PhotoPress, and then browse to select it. Select thumbnail or full image, and then pick left or right alignment. Once you...

Last week, I talked about a great WordPress plugin called Photopress. This week, let’s talk about how to customize it to make it work best for you! From your WordPress dashboard, go to options. You’ll see a Photopress link. Clicking on that link will show you all of the options you can change for this plugin – and they’re are quite a few! I’m going to go through these one by one and clarify things for you. Path to your photos folder: This should already be filled in. Remember when you installed PhotoPress and you were told...

My comment spam on all of my blogs is handled by Akismet. If you’re a WordPress blogger, this is without a doubt, THE musthave plugin. You won’t have to deal with your inbox flooded with spam comments to moderate – Akismet is a huge timesaver. It will hold any suspected spam comments in a queue for you to review or delete, much like comment moderation on Wordpress, but you won’t get emails for each suspected spam comment. Each comment is run through a spam test. You don’t need to ever upgrade Akismet, because it’s...

If you’re looking for a great plugin for WordPress to help you add photos to your entries, I highly recommend PhotoPress. I originally found it on the Target Culture blog that I contribute too, and I’ve now added it to all of my blogs. Initially, I started out using the photo insert tool that is available in the WYSISYG (what you see is what you get) editor in Wordpress. I wasn’t very happy with the way it formatted the pictures, and I stopped using the editor due to it deleting code when I tried to embed YouTube videos, so I was in search...

If you’re not using stats on your website, you should be. I use a plugin called ShortStat which shows me unique visitors, last pages viewed on my site, the last keywords that brought people, domains that came, an dother information. It’s an interesting way to see where your visitors are coming from, especially when your site is brand new, like this one. For instance, my last visitors came from: blo.gs 5 wc5.worldcrossing.com 4 boards.payperpost.com 4 clicknewz.com 3 bloghijinks.com 1 whois.sc 1 I posted the link to this site on boards.payperpost.com....

Simple Tags is a plug in I started using on my other blog about a month ago. It’s so easy to use, that I’m adding it to all of my blogs. Why use tags? Tags are just another way of thinking of catagories, or keywords. But by using tags in your post, you’re linking yourself to others using those same tags all over the web. For example, if I had an entry about Google and pagerank, my tags might be Google, pagerank, and SEO. Visitors to Technorati looking for blog posts on one of those keywords would find my post. Likewise, you can link...