One of the problems with using social media to promote our articles is that most of us do not command the kind of authority that the top notch bloggers in our niche claim. A recent case at hand was when Google Wave was launched in public beta. We had several hundreds of blogs writing on the same subject, yet it was only the most popular blogs that garnered all the attention on the social media.

The problem here is a lack of perspective. In this particular case, most bloggers merely parrotted the same news that readers already knew, thus losing out in the social media traffic race. When the same news is presented with a different perspective, it is received much better. So here are two tips that you can make use of while writing on a topic that is likely to be on something written everywhere else and still be seen as unique.

Twitter Search

One of the easiest ways to capture attention is to be counter-intuitive in your posts. Let us take the example of ‘Google wave invites’ again. On that particular day, a Twitter search for Google Wave will show most twitterers saying one of these : “Google wave releases 100,000 invites” or “Need a Google wave invite”. This gives you the general mood of the ‘herd’. An article at this point about ‘Why it is better not to get a Google wave immediately’ or ‘Why a Google wave invite now makes no sense’ will surely catch your audience off-guard and it is likely to be shared more on social media.

TweetMeme

If you have not already known, Tweetmeme is like a Digg for tweets and lists links that are making the maximum wave on Twitter. While the homepage (or the category page) of Tweetmeme can give you the currently popular stories, what you should be interested is the search option. As you might know ‘How-to’ articles are among the most popular articles and tend to get shared pretty quickly. Search for “How to” followed by the topic you wish to cover. In the example mentioned above ‘How to Google wave’ will give you lesser known website links that have been covering an interesting perspective. You may write on a similar subject or you may use the titles to form your own clever how-to titles. While the same is possible with Google Blogsearch as well, in my experience, TweetMeme tends to be less spammy and more relevant to the keywords I look for.

The above two are just among the hundreds of different ways to use Twitter to find interesting topics for you to write on. However, as a means to providing a perspective to what you write, the above two tools can go a long way in helping you write articles that can be social media friendly.

Link Code Insert inserts the HTML code for creating a link at the active element location when the user presses Ctrl+Alt+A. I use it a lot when I am writing a comment and want to add a link. Just select the text you want to link and the userscript will add the HTML code ‘<a href="">‘ before the selected text and a ‘</a>‘ after it.

Technically, this is a UserScript – and not a plugin. But I prefer to think of a userscript as a plugin of a plugin. So I guess it can be included in the Plugin Week.

Note: You must be using Firefox and must have installed GreaseMonkey for this script to work.

Download/Install the UserScript

Plugin Week 2

This plugin is part of the Plugin Week 2 series. Plugin Week is a week when I publish a new plugin each day for an entire week. I have already one this one time – so this is Plugin Week 2. The plugins released so far…

• Weather Man
• MiniCart WordPress Plugin
• Gallifrey WordPress Plugin
• GIMP Plugin – Web 2.0 Shadows
• Drupal Plugin: Page Ad
• Export To WordPress: Joomla Plugin

If you want to get news about the upcoming plugin releases(remember, 1 per day), please subscribe to this site.

After covering WordPress and Drupal, its time for me to set my eyes on Joomla – the next major CMS software in the OSS field. Today, I’ll release my first ever Joomla plugin – the Export to WordPress plugin. This ‘component'(as Joomla users calls it), will create a XML dump of your sites contents. This XML file is readable and importable by wordpress. This plugin is important if you want to migrate from Joomla to WordPress. The XML dump will include all your posts, with categories and with all its comments.

Note: This is my first Joomla Plugin – so expect bugs. I am sure that my code is pretty horrific by professional Joomla plugin writers standards. So if you are migrating a site using this, please test the results thoroughly.

Download Export to WordPress Joomla Plugin

Installation

• Log into the Admin interface of Joomla.
• Go to Extensions > Install/Uninstall
• Enter this URL into the ‘Install URL’ field: ‘http://www.bin-co.com/tools/joomla/plugins/com_wordpressexport/com_wordpressexport.zip’
• Now go to Components > Export to WordPress to create a XML dump.
• You can import the created file into WordPress.

Plugin Week 2

This plugin is part of the Plugin Week 2 series. Plugin Week is a week when I publish a new plugin each day for an entire week. I have already one this one time – so this is Plugin Week 2. The plugins released so far…

• Weather Man
• MiniCart WordPress Plugin
• Gallifrey WordPress Plugin
• GIMP Plugin – Web 2.0 Shadows
• Drupal Plugin: Page Ad

If you want to get news about the upcoming plugin releases(remember, 1 per day), please subscribe to this site.

This is my first Drupal plugin – so I’m not sure how much mistakes I have made in creating this. Page Ad module allows the admin to add advertisement specific to a page. It will create a textarea in the edit/create page of content. Whatever HTML you type into it will be shown in a block anywhere on the client side display of that page.

Download Page Ad

Note: This module is for Drupal 5. I have not tested it in Drupal 6.

Note 2: I will not provide support for this plugin. If you run into any trouble, you are on your own.

Installation

• Download and extract the module
• Upload the module to sites/all/modules folder of Drupal.
• Enable the module from the admin side
• Edit the node.tpl.php template file and insert the code <?php print $page_ad ?> where you want the block to show up.
• Edit the template.php file and add the code 'page_ad' => t('Page Specific Ad') in the returning array for the regions function.
• Go to the block configuration page and set the ‘Page Specific Ad’ block with the ‘Page Specific Ad’ region.

This is a plugin that I created to learn a bit about Drupal. I did this quite a while ago. It may have a lot of error – because I’m not an expert in Drupal. I don’t use it much.

Screenshot

This is how the admin side will look…

Plugin Week 2

This plugin is part of the Plugin Week 2 series. Plugin Week is a week when I publish a new plugin each day for an entire week. I have already one this one time – so this is Plugin Week 2. The plugins released so far…

• Weather Man
• MiniCart WordPress Plugin
• Gallifrey WordPress Plugin
• GIMP Plugin – Web 2.0 Shadows

If you want to get news about the upcoming plugin releases(remember, 1 per day), please subscribe to this site.

Gallifrey is an image gallery WordPress plugin based on the Galleriffic jQuery plugin. It will replace the standard wordpress gallery when you activate it. You don’t have to change the code of all the earlier galleries.

Download Gallifrey Image Gallery WordPress Plugin

Gallifrey Demo

Features

• Smart image preloading after the page is loaded
• Thumbnail navigation
• Support for bookmark-friendly URLs per-image
• Slideshow (with optional auto-updating url bookmarks)
• Events that allow for adding your own custom transition effects
• Graceful degradation when javascript is not available
• Same shortcode as WordPress Gallery – so previous galleries will be updated as well

Installation

• Download the zipped file.
• Extract and upload the contents of the folder to /wp-contents/plugins/ folder
• Enable the plugin from WordPress admin area
• Add galleries into your post using the normal method

If you have any issues with the plugin, post a thread at the Gallifrey Plugin Forum.

Plugin Week

This plugin is part of the Plugin Week 2 series. Plugin Week is a week when I publish a new plugin each day for an entire week. I have already one this one time – so this is Plugin Week 2. This is the second plugin released this week. The first is Weather Man and the second one is MiniCart WordPress Plugin

If you want to get news about the upcoming plugin releases(remember, 1 per day), please subscribe to this site.

MiniCart will implement a mini-shopping-cart in your blog. You can add items from the admin side and embed the cart into posts. This can also be used as a donation plugin. By design, you can only show one item in a cart.

If you like this plugin, consider making a donation…

[MINICART donate “Mini Cart Plugin”]

The above donate form is created using the MiniCart plugin. To see an actual cart in action, got the MiniCart Demo page.

Download MiniCart

Features

• Supports Paypal
• Easy to use interface
• You can also embed it directly into a post
• One item/cart restriction. This will force the users to focus on just one item.

Installation

1. Download the zipped file.
2. Extract and upload the contents of the folder to /wp-contents/plugins/ folder
3. Enable the plugin from WordPress admin area
4. Go to Settings > Mini-Cart Setting page and set the paypal id(Make sure this is done).
5. Go to Tools > Cart Items and create items
6. Embed the cart in a post by using the code [MINICART item=”ID_OF_ITEM”] anywhere in a post/page.
7. Alternatively, you can use the code [MINICART donate] to show a donation form.

If you have any issues with the plugin, post a thread at the MiniCart Plugin Forum.

Plugin Week

This plugin is part of the Plugin Week 2 series. Plugin Week is a week when I publish a new plugin each day for an entire week. I have already one this one time – so this is Plugin Week 2. This is the second plugin released this week. The first is Weather Man.

If you want to get news about the upcoming plugin releases(remember, 1 per day), please subscribe to this site.

Photo Credit

After the success of Plugin Week, I have decided to do it once again. So, without further ado, Welcome to Plugin Week 2. If you don’t know what a plugin week is, its a week when I publish one plugin per day – for an entire week.

There is one big difference between Plugin Week 1 and Plugin Week 2. In Plugin Week 1, only wordpress plugins where release(they are Eventr, Autofields, Pollin, Surveys, Quartz and Quizzin). This time around, I will not restrict myself to WordPress plugins – I’m going for other software too – expect Drupal plugins, jQuery plugins and more.

I’ll start off with a very simple plugin…

Weather Man WordPress Plugin

Weather Man shows the weather as a widget in the sidebar. You can add the widget using the Widget page under Appearance. Or you can add it in a post using the [weather-man] shortcode anywhere in the post. It uses Yahoo’s Weather API.

Download Plugin

Demo of Weather Man WordPress Plugin

Installation

• Download the zipped file.
• Extract and upload the contents of the folder to /wp-contents/plugins/ folder
• Go to the Plugin management page of WordPress admin section and enable the ‘Weather Man’ plugin
• Go to the Widget configuration(under Appearance) and add the Weather Man Widget into any sidebar.
• Alternatively, you can add the [weather-man] tag in any post and the Weather Man Widget will show up there.

Screenshots

Feedback

If you have any suggestions or notice any problems with the plugin, post it in the Weather Man Plugin forum.

About Me and Plugin Week

If you are new to this blog(I hope to get many new visitors due to the Plugin Week), I’m Binny. I’m a freelance web developer on the LAMP platform. I specialize in PHP and JavaScript. More about me on my personal site. Plugin Week 2 is an initiative to force myself to a small deadline to write code. It worked great during Plugin Week 1 – so I’m doing it again. Also, I get a lot of visitors during the Plugin Week – that can’t be bad.

If you want to get news about the upcoming plugin releases(remember, 1 per day), please subscribe to this site.

If you like the concept of the Plugin Week or if you found it helpful, consider writing a post about Plugin Week on your blog. If you write a post, please let me know – and I’ll list your post on the last day of the plugin week(it will have a ‘Thank You for your Support’ section).

Next plugin will be released tomorrow.

After eight posts, I am ending the plugin killer series. It has been a nice run. Hopefully, I have given you an idea of how easy it is to customize WordPress yourself – without having to resort to third party plugins. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Its just that, its more satisfying when you do it yourself. The advantages and disadvantages of customizing a theme rather than installing a plugin is given in the introduction to the WordPress Plugin Killer Series.

The Posts

Avoid Duplicate Content – Use Canonical URL in WordPress

If you are on wordpress, the canonical tag can be integrated into your theme easily. There is a plugin to do the job for you – but you don’t need a plugin to do something as simple as this.

Show Popular Posts in WordPress – without a plugin

A list of the popular posts of the blog is a standard feature in many blogs. There are quite a few plugins that offer this feature. But it can also be implemented using a simple SQL query that counts the number of comments in a post.

Adding Social Bookmarking Button in WordPress – Without Plugins

Many blogs have links to add the current post to various social bookmarking site like Digg, Reddit, Delicious, etc. This blog don’t have it – but my LinDesk blog does. This effect is achieved using wordpress plugins. But when you take a look at the code, its just simple HTML.

Show Related Post in WordPress Without a Plugin

Related posts is a very popular feature. My default wordpress installation often includes a plugin that has this functionality. There are quite a few plugins that lets you have this feature. This can be implemented by listing other posts with the same category/tags as the current post.

Highlight Author’s Comments in WordPress without using a WordPress Plugin

Many blogs highlight the author’s comment in the comments section. You can use plugins to get this effect(For eg., the Highlight Author Comments Plugin) – but you don’t have to. You can get the get the same effect by adding a small bit of CSS code to your theme stylesheet.

A Tweet This Button for Each Post in WordPress – Without a Plugin

TweetThis is a WordPress Plugin that ‘adds a Twitter link to every post and page, so your readers can share your blog entries on their Twitter accounts with ease.’ And in the tradition of my WordPress Plugin Killer Series, this post will show you how to do it without a plugin.

Creating a Paypal Donate Widget in WordPress – Without a Plugin

Paypal donate plugins. This is extremely simple to implement – you don’t even have to edit the code to get this done. Just copy/paste the code provided by Paypal.

Create a Better 404 Page in WordPress – Without Plugins

Recently, one of my friends posted a list of plugins you can use to optimize your 404 page. In case you don’t know what a 404 page, its the page that shows up if the URL requested by the user don’t exist. He listed eight plugins to do this. And since I am working on the Plugin Killer series, it got me thinking – is it possible to do it without using any plugins?

Other People’s Posts

Many other people have written on this topic too. Here is a few posts I could find….

• Add Custom Status or Notes to a Post without a Plugin
• How to Display Any RSS Feed on WordPress Blog
• WordPress Maintenance Mode Without a Plugin
• How to: Show related posts without a plugin
• WordPress: Removing Nofollow Without A Plugin
• WordPress & jQuery Contact Form without a Plugin

If you know of any such articles, post a comment.

Recently, one of my friends posted a list of plugins you can use to optimize your 404 page. In case you don’t know what a 404 page, its the page that shows up if the URL requested by the user don’t exist. He listed eight plugins to do this. And since I am working on the Plugin Killer series, it got me thinking – is it possible to do it without using any plugins?

Turns out, its easy. As long as you know about the Google’s 404 Widget. It adds a search box for your site with appropriate search suggestions and tries(and unfortunately, often fails) to provide alternatives to incorrect URLs.

See it in action here – http://www.bin-co.com/perl/perl_tk_tutorials/. The correct URL is http://www.bin-co.com/perl/perl_tk_tutorial/ – which the user finds and shows.

Enable Google 404 Widget in your Site

• First, create the code by following the steps given in the 404 Widget page.
• Then open the 404.php file of your wordpress theme and paste the code you got into it. Save and upload – you’re done.

This is the last of my plugin killer series. Just to balance things out, I’m thinking of doing a Plugin week(yes, a second plugin week) next week. Let me know if any of you are interested.