Using Wordpress Plugins

If you ever wondered what is under the bonnet here on Sciencetext, then wonder no more. There are a few goodies that I hope make the site a better experience for you the readers. Of course, the site is a Wordpress site, running a customized version of the Cutline theme with several essential and several not quite essential plugins to make it all tickover properly.

Okay, so here is a quick summary.

• Akismet - antispam plugin to protect Sciencetext from the deluge of comment spam commonly known as a crapflood.
• WP-Backup - Does what it says on the tin, a quick and easy way to make a backup of your blog posts, comments and other bits and pieces held in the Wordpress MySQL database. Actually, WP-backup is redundant if you are using hosting with cPanel as you can simply create a password-protected link to the MySQL command to backup each database and have it on your desktop.
• Google Sitemaps - quickest way to build a keyword-rich index of your complete blog and submit it to the appropriate section of Google in one fell swoop, whether or not that has any significant benefits for a site that is fully spidered anyway, I don’t know.
• Contextual Related Posts - a neat way to offer you links to other posts you might be interested in reading once you have finished the current one.
• Show Top Commentators - a generous way to reward readers who comment on posts the most frequently, by automatically giving them a free text link on the homepage.
• Head meta description - meta tags are still relatively useful, although not so much for SEO purposes these days, they still provide behind the scenes data for indexing purposes
• Landing sites - for readers who find the site via a search engine, this plugin provides you with some useful initial background and offers you links to posts directly related to your search as well as displaying the particular post offered by the search engine.
• Popularity Contest - allows me to see which posts are getting the most visits but also allows me to produce a Top Ten posts page to share that information with you
• StumbleCrumble - grabs the RSS feed from my StumbleUpon account and lets you see what I’ve been stumbling across recently.

  There are one or two under the bonnet plugins running, that are pretty boring to do with widgetizing your blog and a quick way to run php in blog posts, things like that. If you know of any great plugins that I am probably not using, let me know, there is always room for improvement.