Only 4 people decided to tweet and then post a comment, so only 4 licenses are given out in this competition.

Winners of Slider Shock Giveaway

GD Press Tools 4.0 PRO is the premier WordPress blog management plugin by Milan Petrovic at dev4press.com.

GD Press Tools PRO 4 is a monster of a WordPress plugin, and I will take you through the best features which by themselves make this plugin a must-have in any professional WordPress user’s tool belt.

You will find many of the features in GD Press Tools is covered by a range of other WordPress plugins, but if you were to try to find alternatives for just some of the things GD Press Tools can do, you will be hard pressed to do that with less than 10 other plugins at best.

And that is not including the unique features that set GD Press Tools apart, I will detail them more as we go along.

I love GD Press Tools

I’m an avid WordPress user, in fact my whole business is based on WordPress (and SEO consultancy) and to achieve maximum efficiency I use a fleet of regular WordPress plugins that I always use for new installations and customers who needs a tune-up.

GD Press Tools has been in my toolbox for a long time and the new 4.0 version went straight in to the box.

GD Press Tools 4 PRO Menu

Why?

GD Press Tools PRO allows me to handle extra security measures, manual and scheduled backups, advanced XML sitemap generation, auto tagging, meta tags handling, database maintenance, cron handling, registration management with a lot of nice anti-spam measures, user pruning, file management as well as debugging tools for developement.

Yep. And those are just the main bullet points.

All of these features extends WordPress great, yet limited administration for professional WordPress users. If you run one or several WordPress blogs and take your work seriously, let me walk you through why you need GD Press Tools 4 PRO.

The Frontpage

After installing and activating the plugin, you’ll want to first head to the front page which gives you an overview of your installation’s technical settings, and most importantly you see the current test results of the security of your WordPress installation.

Milan has collected a range of sensible security measures and implemented it in a nice and easy to use interface.
Each setting has a short and simple explanation of the implications of turning things on and off.

Security settings

GD Press Tools checks and makes recommendations for:

• WordPress version
• Administrator username (it shouldn’t be “admin”)
• Files and folders access rights
• Injection and XSS attacks
• User registration filtering
• WP Installation folder browsing
• Commenting without referrer (to filter out a lot of potential spam)
• Limiting access to core WordPress files
• Limitation to length of URL requests on your site (very long ones are usually hacking attempts)
• WordPress version hiding
• Registration and login error displaying
• File upload limitation
• Blocking potential spammers via user agent filtering.
• Change default WordPress CHMOD file and folder creation.

Yep, those changes will close the holes on the major security issues on WordPress sites, as well as adding nice extra features for the extra paranoid.

Backup

Backing up is always important, and GD Press Tools PRO has a couple of features that sets it apart from other WordPress backup plugins.

First of all, you can control which kind of method to use for dumping the MySQL database, via the MySQL Dump command or the manual export option. The first is always the preferred method, but it is nice to be able to change it depending on the individual server configuration.

You can also choose what to backup, the whole database, selected tables only, or just the table structure.

That in itself is nice, but what is really nice and sets GD Press Tools completely apart from any competitor in the backup-area is the Tasks.

Tasks

Not only can you backup your database, but you can actually get the plugin to include files from your WordPress installation as well. This is nice in case you are doing continuous maintenance and improvements to your theme or adding/installing WordPress plugins.

Tasks = Files backup also!

Even better? You can choose to only get partial content, such as

• Just the wp-config.php and .htaccess files
• All of your /wp-content/ folders
• Just your /wp-content/ and subsequent subfolder (except plugins/and themes/)
• All plugins
• Or just all themes.

Okay, that’s great, but how about automizing this?

Well, Milan got this covered also. By using WordPress built-in cron system (you can even use GDPT 4 to add/edit cron schedules) you can set your preferred backup configuration to be run whenever you want it to.

You will of course get an e-mail about a successful backup which are saved locally, and here’s another unique backup feature from Milan.

CDN/FTP support

Not only are the files stored locally, but you can also set GDPT 4 to transfer and store your backups on Rackspace Cloud, Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service), Google Storage or simply just FTP the files to another location.

You can set the files to be automatically deleted locally once uploaded to a CDN or FTP, or just leave them on the local server as well.

XML Sitemap

Yep, a lot of plugins offer this service, even Joost is working on a sitemap module for his popular WordPress SEO plugin.

But Milan has all of them beat here as well. Not only can you control the individual priorities and update frequency for all types of WordPress posts, pages, media, taxonomies, categories etc.

You can also control to split up the different types of content into different sitemap files, basically splitting up the sitemap into smaller sub-sitemaps. This is a very handy feature for large sites with big sitemaps.

If you go over the limit (Google’s recommendation is 50.000 links in a sitemap file) GDPT automatically splits into more files.

You can set the search engines to be notified when the sitemap has been updated and you can even handle the automatization of the sitemap creation to a very fine detail.

Not only can you set the sitemaps to be rebuilt automatically when a new post/page is published, but you can set it to be rebuilt automatically using WordPress cron-feature.

This is especially nice for big sites that otherwise might trigger the rebuilding of the sitemap needlesly often.

Auto Tagger

A nice feature, although I do not use it personally. GDPT 4 allows you to use Yahoo’s Term Extraction API, basically you send a lot of text to Yahoo, and Yahoo sends back a lists of suggested tags for that content.

This is handled automatically, and you can set GD Press Tools to process all previously published posts and pages, or just turn it on in the administration widget on the publish post/page interface.

Meta Tags

This is a feature I have previously used a range of plugins to control, then lately I’ve used the WordPress SEO plugin previously mentioned, and now I use GD Press Tools.

Not only can you control individual meta tag settings for each post/page, you can also control the more general configuration of your SEO meta tags.

You can tweak as much as you want, or just go with the default settings.

Along with a couple of other tweaks you can also use this page to enter verification codes from Google, Yahoo and Bing to get access to more details from the search engines about your homepage.

Database

Not to be confused with the backup section, on the Database page you can handle basic database administration, optimize, drop or empty the individual tables or even optimize or repair the whole database.

Cron Scheduler

I’ve mentioned the cron scheduler earlier, and this is the page where you can tweak the different schedules that are in your WordPress installation.

Some plugins forget to remove their schedules when uninstalled, or maybe you’ve created 531 schedules by mistake. (Ahem)

It’s easy to add new schedules, remove schedules or just trigger one straight away if you do not feel like waiting.

File Manager

GD Press Tools comes with a complete file manager, so you do not need to start up your FTP client if you have a quick change you need to make.

It’s easy to navigate like you normally would via a FTP client, and you can edit files, download them, change CHMOD settings or simply just delete files!

Settings

Now, if you thought you were almost done reading what GD Press Tools can help you with, think again.

This WordPress plugin is PACKED with features to fine tune and control your WordPress installation in very fine detail.

Here’s a walk through of the most important features:

• Disable the new admin bar introduced in WordPress 3.1 (we bleeding-edge users know it, and some of us love it, some really don’t like it).
• Add number of postviews to posts and pages, along with the id
• Change the users panel, removing columns and adding more with more detail such as last activity and last login.
• Add ID columns to post categories, tags, media, links and comment pages.
• Allow HTML in descriptions for categories, tags, taxonomies, links, notes for users and even in users biographical info.
• Fix the default “make sure WordPress is spelled correctly”-filter introduced from WordPress 3.0 by Matt Mullenweg.
• Remove different header information, some of them for security, others because it is simply unecessary. You are in control.
• Revisions to keep
• Hide various WordPress administration interface elements
• Disable flash uploader or the post auto save feature.
• Bring back the Delete Permanently feature. A nice feature if you are not afraid of deleting posts and pages immediately with no undo.
• Controlling the default WordPress Dashboard Widgets.
• Track post and page views, filtered by visitors and registered users.
• Track the users as they browse the site, along with their latest login timestamp.
• Maintenance Mode – If you need to make a couple of changes to your website, and you don’t want the whole world peaking over your shoulder while you work. You can also set the header to ensure you don’t get temporarily punished in your search engine rankings.
• Disable RSS feeds
• Delayed posting for RSS feed – Handy feature if you are the kind of person who presses the publish button and then instantly remember a couple of things you want to change. You can set the posts to be published in the RSS feed a little later on. Nice.
• Insert text before and after RSS feed items.
• Enable ZLIB compression for the whole blog. If supported by your hosting, you can push down the traffic usage by implementing compression.
• Url shortening. Simple yet effective, no need to use other URL shortening services.
• And.. Controlling the individual access rights for the different user types on your blog.

I left out quite a few major points actually, the ones I HAVE mentioned are the most important ones for my work, but all of the features will definitely come in handy at some point or another though, so they are all very nice to have.

Automating SEO Reporting – Working fulltime with SEO means tracking and monitoring a lot of data for a lot of different projects and clients.

Collecting and gathering the information for just a few projects can be difficult and very time-consuming, but with a few SEO tools, services and investments you can build a system that runs automatically and leaves you time to focus on the more challenging aspects of building SEO strategies.

The investment is worth it

I run several successful SEO projects for myself and a range of clients, and I am able keep an eye on all projects and build SEO strategies based on a lot of updated SEO relevant data, which is gathered automatically for me.

How I do it

I am a fan of the SEO Powersuite package. I purchased the Enterprise package a while ago and I just love it. Best SEO software I have ever worked with!

The SEO PowerSuite (Enterprise edition) is installed on my Mac Mini running as my home server (and entertainment center).

SEO PowerSuite consists of 4 applications and Rank Tracker tracks the ranking position on any search engine you want on as many keywords as you wish.

I have configured it to automatically track the positioning for a range of websites.

The ranking position for each keyword and keyword phrase is updated automatically every week via the built-in scheduler, without any need for me to do anything.

SEO Ranking Reports

For each of these websites a report is generated automatically each week as well, and two things happen.

1. The reports are e-mailed to the customer

First of all an e-mail is sent directly to the customer with the report attached as a .pdf.

The reports generated are well designed and extensive in their detail, providing all the necessary information along with historic data for each and every keyword.

This is a service I offer some clients, and this service helps me maintain regular communication with my SEO customers, and the reports usually also motivates my clients and attracts new business regularly.

2. The reports are stored in Dropbox

The second thing is that the report is stored on my Dropbox account (referrer link), which is then synchronized across my computers and devices.

Dropbox is essential

I could not run my business the way I do without a service like Dropbox.

I have a fairly unpredictable life and my daily life conflicts quite often with regular report generation and tracking. Besides that I also find the repetitive labour horribly extremely dull and boring!

By having my Mac Mini act as an automated tracking and reporting station I am able to monitor a lot of websites for myself and my customers with ease.

Up to date reports

I have Dropbox synchronized on all my devices, so I can easily and quickly pull up the latest report for any customer when I’m working on any laptop or on my iPad when I’m sitting in a cafe sipping coffee.

New clients = 30 minutes

Yep, I can set up a weekly (or monthly) monitoring report for any new customer in about 30 minutes, including time for branding the reports that are dynamically generated.

Controlled from anywhere

With remote control software I remote control my server from anywhere, even sitting in an airport thousands of kilometers away on my iPad.

Backing up Dropbox

Yep, I am a little paranoid, so I’ve configured my Dropbox account to also be backed up to my Time Capsule, so I have several safeguards in case of breakdown or theft.

Restore in no time

I also store the project data files in my Dropbox folder, so should my server fail or be stolen, I can switch another machine and be up and running in about an hour.

Backup paranoia? Perhaps, but I sleep well at night

Hello Barry. Thank you for doing this interview. Please start by telling a little about yourself.

Well, I’m a very, very happily married father of two who is lucky enough to spend most days writing code and drinking coffee. I live on Vancouver Island on Canada’s Pacific coast – but actually I hail from Scotland and I continue to confuse people here daily with my accent.

At the moment I’m pretty wrapped up in WordPress. I make sites using WordPress, maintain and repair sites that use WordPress, create plugins, support other people’s plugins and generally have a great time. Outside of software and WordPress I like to go running over the hills with my dogs.

I’ve been an independent developer for around 6 years and before that I served in the armed forces – but my love of dabbling with computers and seeing how software works pre-dates all of that and goes back to being a small boy with an old Amstrad CPC home computer. That was fun.

What made you look in to WordPress and when?

When I was starting out in this business I barely even considered static HTML sites as a viable option. The benefit and draw of database-driven content management systems was and is too considerable.

Of course, when you’re starting out it’s hard to tell which CMS is “best”. And I still see a huge amount of discussion out there about just that topic: which CMS is best? Is Joomla or Drupal faster? Can WordPress be used as a CMS or is it just a blogging platform? Even now the same stuff is being chewed over.

So anyway, all those years ago I was reading these comparison articles and testing things out for myself. I knew I wanted one of the popular CMSs running on the PHP/MySQL stack and my experience was simply that I could go from flash to bang a lot faster with WordPress than I could with, say, Joomla or Drupal.

I dabbled with Drupal and ModX in particular for a while (before ModX Revolution really got going) and even completed some projects with both of those – but for a variety of reasons both seemed to confuse my clients more than was the case with WordPress and both I found to be a little more restrictive for the client if they wanted to go off and manage things by themselves. Giving the client free reign is a double-edged sword, of course, but it’s also a good selling point.

You joined the Shopp team (a well-known WordPress E-Commerce shop plugin) in June 2012. How has that experience been for you so far?

Yes – and actually I was working with Ingenesis, the company behind Shopp, before that as a member of the support team. Right now I’m a volunteer so the amount of time I can spend on it ebbs and flows, but it’s been a great experience.

On the support team there was no shortage of opportunities to troubleshoot and work hands-on with a huge variety of different hosting environments and WordPress installations, each quite unique. That alone has been massively useful. On the development team, it’s been fantastic to have a chance to work directly with project lead Jonathan Davis and to kick ideas around with him – and just to engage with the community at large.

E-commerce is a quite gigantic field and no software package I know of covers every aspect – so being a part of the Shopp ecosphere has also been great from my perspective as an independent developer: I am regularly approached about building bespoke customizations or extensions where the core plugin itself doesn’t provide coverage, which can throw up lots of interesting and unique challenges.

Are you working on PC, Mac? What kind of software do you use? Notepad?

I’ve been a long time fan of Ubuntu but I always kept Windows in the wings because of the great tools that exist for that operating system. Recently though I’ve switched entirely to using Ubuntu, I just love it.

In terms of software, I use IntelliJ IDEA by JetBrains as my primary IDE and I can’t envision switching to anything else, except for those languages that IntelliJ doesn’t support directly – like C#. The majority of my time is probably spent flipping between that (IntelliJ) and Chrome. I’m a big fan of IDEs and like many others I’ve experimented with quite a few – Eclipse, Netbeans and PhpEd (which I’d mark out for especial praise, though it’s Windows only so I no longer use it) all come to mind.

A special mention should also go to XDebug. I don’t just debug to troubleshoot when problems arise, I use it as a means of familiarizing myself with software. A good debugger makes it so, so easy to take applications apart and see how they tick under the hood. Debugging is simply fantastic.

You develop in PHP, C# and .NET. Do you think it makes you a stronger developer, or is it better to focus on a single language? 

I think it does have an impact on how I write. If I’m writing in PHP I do often miss strong-typing, for example, and find myself working around that. Is it best to focus on a single language? Possibly, yes, because when you take a language together with its standard libraries there is a lot of richness and depth that is hard to master if you are constantly flipping between different languages.

Of course focusing on one language isn’t the same as using one language exclusively and I can’t imagine there being too many plugin authors, for instance, who don’t also know at least a smattering of SQL or JS.

What kind of testing do you have/use for your WordPress development?

It depends on the project, how quickly I need to get it out the door and the scale of the thing. I’m not a unit testing zealot and should probably do more of it. That said, unit testing isn’t a silver bullet and it all hinges on the quality of the tests themselves.

For instance, I’ve seen unit tests that check to see if a template-tag style function returns a string – and the test will pass even if the string is empty. I don’t think that is particularly helpful and sometimes it looks like an exercise in code coverage without considering why that coverage is needed.

WordPress as a platform. What do you consider the advantages and disadvantages of WordPress?

It’s ubiquitous. That’s a big advantage for everyone, developer and end-user alike, because – with such a big community and lots of developers in the ecosystem – extensions, services, learning and support resources are all plentiful, as is the capacity for a site owner to move from one developer, agency or web host to another. It’s also free and open source, which means it gets extra points in my eyes, and doubtless that has also been instrumental in its rise to greatness.

I do take issue with what I think is a well trodden argument that WordPress is easy to use. I don’t think it is all that easy to use for everyone. The dashboard for instance is a busy, busy place and a lot of it is filled with distracting content that many people have no use for, at all.

Also, for some time there’s been debate about the division of responsibility between plugin and theme – often centred on themes that pack an astonishing number of features, not all related to site presentation. So I think a further weakness is that themes and plugins are unable to declare a list of dependencies (other plugins, for instance) that could help to alleviate this cross over of concerns. This isn’t a trivial problem to solve but I do think a form of package management would be a step in the right direction here.

What good tricks do you have for other WordPress authors? Ways of working, tips and tricks, etc?

Talking to people – other authors – and finding out why they did something or solved a problem in a certain way is invaluable, whether you agree with their approach or not. Involving yourself in the community and helping out with other people’s code besides your own is also a massively useful learning exercise.

What could be improved in WordPress, speaking from a developers point of view?

Package management! Plugins and themes should be able to say, “We depend on Plugin X!” and the installer should magically take care of it all. We’ve covered that already a little and it’s unlikely to be an easy problem to solve. Beyond that, better control of the dashboard – turning it into something useful and clearing out the chaff would be a good move.

What kind of future do you see for WordPress as a whole?

It’s definitely growing and adding features, but there seems to be something of a counter-movement aimed at keeping it simple and not letting it grow too unwieldy. It’s going to continue to be a strong CMS for many years, I’d imagine, but beyond that it’s difficult to say.

What are your plans for the future?

Right now I mostly work on self-hosted sites, or write bits of code that people can use on self-hosted sites. I’d like to spend more time looking into creating web services that standalone, though, and perhaps engaging my brain in a project that uses a quite different language or set of technologies from those I am used to. That’s partly because I get bored easily, but also because I just love exploring the software universe.

I suspect I’ll keep returning to WordPress as a familiar stomping ground, though.

Included in the rating plugin are several widgets and code examples you can use and Milan included has several pieces of code and lots of examples on his website.

If you just want a simple piece of code that lists the top 20 posts by combining user and visitor votes, here is a simple piece of script.

I used the code to put in a page template for a drinks website. The page lists the most popular drinks (as by voted by users and visitors) and it is always up to date.

The most popular drinks sorted by ratings

Here is the code you can put in a custom page template:

<?php
global $wpdb; // include the $wpdb
$query= "SELECT p.ID, p.post_title as title, visitor_votes + user_votes as total_votes, visitor_votes, user_votes  FROM  `".$wpdb->prefix."gdsr_data_article` da INNER JOIN $wpdb->posts p ON da.post_id = p.ID order by total_votes desc limit 20";
$results=$wpdb->get_results($query); // run the query on the database
if ($results) { // if we have any results
	?>
	<table><thead><tr><th>Position</th><th>Post</th><th>Points</th></tr></thead>
	<?php
		$position=0; // we set the position as 0, as we start every loop with increasing it by one
		foreach ($results as $toppost) {
			$position++; // see, I told you, we increase by one, so the first post will get position #1
			echo "<tr><td>#".$plads."</td><td><a href='".get_permalink($toppost->ID)."'>".$toppost->title."</td><td>".round($toppost->total_votes)."</td></tr>";
		}
	?>
	</table>
	<?php	
	}
} // Thats it, easy, eh?
?>

Put that piece of code in a custom page template and you can have a top 20 list that is always updated with your most popular content.

Note: In this example I have given registered users and visitors votes the same weight. If you wish to give registered users more weight you can tweak the mysql query.

Slider Shock is a new slider plugin for your WordPress websites, and it helps make it easy for you to show content from external data sources such as Instagram, Flickr, Youtube, Twitter, any RSS feed. You can also use the built in slides with even more control over the layout and content.

Many content sources

Skins and styling

There are many skins included with SliderShock, that should fit most WordPress theme layouts.

Many skin options

In case that is not enough, you have a lot of customization options.

Customize your slider any way you want

Once you have chosen your content and layout, you scroll down to the bottom of the plugin page and copy-paste the shortcode code directly in to your post or page.

Spam urls you hate to see on your website.

One thing is cleaning up the hack, removing all the bad code and securing your website for future attacks. But what about the spammy urls?

I use the Redirection plugin by John Godley at urbangiraffe.com when I need to handle redirects. I have used it for years, its easy to use, stable and flexible.

The problem is when you have been hacked and have thousands of bad urls you want to redirect, it is a hassle to do manually.

So, I decided to create a solution that automatically creates a 301 redirect for 404 pages.

There are several ways this can be implemented, I created a 404.php page in my theme folder to contain this code.

This means the first time a visitor (or robot) visits the url, the 404 page is presented, as well as a 404 http status. On any future visits to that url, a 301 redirect is sent to the url of your choice.

First visit to http://domain.com/buy-pills-of-some-kind.html :

A 404 page is presented, and the code below creates a redirect that is then handled by the Redirection plugin in the future.

Second (and following) visits to http://domain.com/buy-pills-of-some-kind.html :

A 301 redirect to the url of your choice.

Enough with the disclaimer, here is the code. If you do not have a 404.php file in your WordPress theme, create it.

$redirectto='http://cleverwp.com/'; // This is where the redirect will go, change as you see fit.
 global $wpdb;
 $newpos='';
 $badurl='';
 $redirtable=$wpdb->prefix."redirection_items"; // The table containing the redirects...
 $oldpos=$wpdb->get_var("SELECT `position` FROM `$redirtable` ORDER BY `position` DESC limit 1;"); // for finding the HIGHEST number...
 if (!$oldpos) $oldpos='0'; // set to 0 if its the first redirect ever done!
 $newpos =$oldpos+1; // Found the old one, let's add 1.
 $badurl= $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]; // This is the bad url, the current one.

if (($newpos) AND ($badurl)) { // Only run if we have the bad url and the next redirect number
 $blogtime = strtotime(current_time('mysql')); // Get the time
 $mysqldate = date( 'Y-m-d H:i:s', $blogtime ); // Proper formatting of the time
 $result=$wpdb->query("INSERT INTO `$redirtable` (`id`,
 `url`,
 `regex`,
 `position`,
 `last_count`,
 `last_access`,
 `group_id`, `status`, `action_type`, `action_code`, `action_data`, `match_type`, `title`)
 VALUES
 (NULL, '$badurl', '0', '$newpos', '0', '$mysqldate', '1', 'enabled', 'url', '301', '$redirectto', 'url', NULL);");
 }

Remember to change the url in the first line ($redirectto) to your website. Otherwise you will redirect your visitors to cleverwp.com

Important technical detail: The Redirection plugin runs and handles redirects before the 404.php template is called.

Spammy urls automatically redirected

Under normal circumstances I would have had to create redirects manually for the spammy urls above. By using this code the redirects was created automatically.

A few technical notes

Notice the last_count column? The ones that has “0″, means the redirect has been created, but no subsequent visits made to that url.

The ones with “1″ means the page has been accessed twice. The first time just creates the redirect and presents a normal 404 page. The second time the redirect kicks in, and the “last_count” is updated. All of this is handled by the Redirection plugin… Thank you John for the great plugin

Cleaning up old redirects

As you can imagine, there can quickly be a lot of redirects filling up in your database. The Redirection plugin monitors not only the number of redirects, but also when the redirect was last accessed.

This means we can create a small piece of code that checks and deletes all redirects more than x days old.

I think 21 days (3 weeks) is a fair limit. The code below checks if there are any redirects that have not been accessed/used in more than 21 days, and then just remove them.

$oldredirsagelimit=21; // How many days before we delete from the redirection table.
$oldredirscount=$wpdb->get_var("SELECT count(*) FROM `$redirtable` WHERE DATE_SUB(CURDATE(),INTERVAL $oldredirsagelimit DAY)>last_access; ");

if ($oldredirscount>0) { // old redirections, not accessed in x days
 $wpdb->query("DELETE FROM `$redirtable` WHERE DATE_SUB(CURDATE(),INTERVAL $oldredirsagelimit DAY)>last_access");
 //echo "Deleted $oldredirscount redirects that has not been used for over $oldredirsagelimit days.";
}

I have put the code that cleans the database table in the 404.php template file as well. Both pieces of code run very quickly and puts very little pressure on the server.

Enjoy.

SoreThumb is a new plugin by Brennen Noble I saw on warriorforum.com, and the plugin makes it very easy for you to add animations to draw attention to any element on your website.

Sitewide aimations

You can use a general implementation that works on every page on your website (up to 4) and that runs in a loop.

I have a signup box in my sidebar, and I have set up a small animation once in a while. This helps draw user attention, without being too annoying. (I hope).

The signup box wiggles and draws attention.

It is too early to say if the wiggle animation have increased signups, but it seems to be working in getting attention.

Another element I am currently testing is the sharing buttons in the footer of each blogpost. As you scroll down and finish reading the post you are on, the sharing box will come in to view and will draw attention to you for sharing the post with your network. (Please do

The sharing buttons in the bottom pop out and draws attention.

As the sharing buttons and the signup widget in the sidebar are usually far apart, I decided I could keep the two different animations without annoying people.

Single page triggers

SoreThumb also has options on a post/page-level, meaning you can add triggers to elements only on a specific page or post.

Lots of options for individual posts

Setting a trigger in a single post means you can turn on animations to various elements such as images or links that “trigger” the moment a user scrolls a particular point into view or moves the cursor out of the window.

Do not annoy your visitors

The SoreThumb plugin has the potential to annoy the living daylights out of your visitors if you do not control yourself. It is easy to just add animation to any and all elements or to make the animations run constantly.

This can and will most likely result in a negative experience for your visitors, and they will leave your site as a result.

SoreThumb is a new and refreshing approach for the banner blindness that advertisers have to deal with. It is a powerful tool, but it can also be abused.

Video Walkthrough

Check out the video that Brennen made:

Go take a look on the WarriorForum thread if you want to read more or buy a license.

Disclaimer: I have not been asked to write this quick review, nor are there any affiliate links in this post. I just think it is a nice idea.

What do you think? Is this a new and effective approach for handling banner blindness?

The plugin allows for easy tracking of your feeds in your WordPress installation via different methods. Not only that, but you can also insert custom content before and after each post in your feed. There are many plugins that does this, but it is nice and practical to have it in the same place.

Most notably and propably the reason why most people will install this plugin is the included chicklet. This little chicklet displays the amount of feed subscribers you have, and there are two ways you can show the chicklet.

Here’s mine embedded via one of the two shortcodes:

There are also two PHP functions to embed directly in to your theme if you wish to place the feed subscriber count chicklet somewhere in the theme layout.

Jeff explains he made the plugin because he wanted an open-source alternative to FeedBurner.

Your feed subscriber count is most likely different from the number you get from FeedBurner, but Google does not provide details on exactly how they calculate the number of feed subscribers. This plugin does not make any assumptions and the subscriber count is therefore more accurate.

The FeedBurner API has been closed down in October 2012. This was announced in 2011 by Google, but without a fixed date for when this would happen.

Different Tracking Methods

A very nice feature Jeff has implemented from the beginning, is different tracking methods. Although the recommended, default tracking method works in most cases, it is very nice to have alternatives for when you are working with custom solutions.

This simple feature allows you to use the tracking even on WordPress sites where you have created your own custom feeds.

The plugin has only been installed a little while here and on a few other WordPress sites, so it is too soon to give detailed feedback on how it operates long term, but every part of the installation and customization was very easy and worked straight away on each website.

This is obviously good for you and your website, but adding social media buttons can also increase the loading time of your website, adding frustration to your visitors. This can also be a negative factor for your SEO efforts, as page speed is an important factor for your rankings on Google and other search engines.

Using asynchronous loading buttons you can reduce the load time significantly, at least the feeling of load time.

The normal implementation of these buttons (the currently most predominant are Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn) would mean extra code and loading scripts from other domains while loading your website.

Socialite.js for the rescue!

Socialite.js is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to embed code that loads the social media buttons once the page itself has finished loading. This makes the loading seem faster.

Socialite.js currently has support for the following social media: Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Spotify.

David Bushell has made it very easy to embed these like and share buttons and it is also cross-browser compatible.

How to use

Here is a simple example. First you need to go to Github and download a copy of the library and then embed it in to your WordPress site. In this example I embed the JavaScript library in the header.php file of the theme.

wp_enqueue_script('socialite', get_template_directory_uri."/js/socialite.min.js");

Not that difficult, is it? The single line enqueues the script, which is placed in the /js/ folder. Since we are looking for speed, I use the minified version of the script, “socialite.min.js”.

The library itself has examples on how to embed, but here is an example that works with internal WordPress functions:

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=<?php echo get_permalink(); ?>&amp;t=<?php echo urlencode(get_the_title()); ?>" class="socialite facebook-like" data-href="<?php echo get_permalink(); ?>" data-send="false" data-layout="button_count" data-width="60" data-show-faces="false" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
<span class="vhidden">Facebook</span>
</a>

Note: Loading social media buttons asynchronously can be beneficial to any website, not just WordPress websites.

Note: Although I prefer to embed Socialite.js manually, Tom Morton is developing a WordPress Plugin if you prefer.