I discovered a new use for the excellent Hum link shortener WordPress plugin (provides entirely local short-links). I have a BuddyPress activity stream on this site. While I do not know if this would be the case for every activity stream set-up, especially when used with themes designed with BuddyPress in mind, long URLs (or even regular-length URLs) do not look good in posts here. However, Hum-short URLs work well, so that makes it much easier to include links to new posts (or New Leaf Journal posts) in activities.
Tag: wordpress plugin
New Guestbook System
I had been planning to use the Gwolle Guestbook plugin here (I cannot use it on The New Leaf Journal because it relies on JQuery, which I disable over there). However, I decided that it was too heavy for what will probably be a light use-case. Over on The New Leaf Journal, I had briefly tried a comments-based Guestbook with an open source spam blocklist. However, we did not get any legitimate entries in that Guestbook before I shuttered it on account of the fact that a small number of spam comments were somehow showing up as published despite my requiring moderation in the WordPress settings. Wanting a Guestbook, I decided to give it a try on both sides while adding Antispam Bee, an entirely local anti-spam plugin, to my set-up. I also added a Block List Updater from the same developer to keep the open source-sourced blocklist up to date without my manual intervention. Finally, I use a plugin called Plugin Load Filter with allows me to explicitly limit Antispam Bee to specific pages. For example, this means that Antispam Bee only functions on the Guestbook page of The New Leaf Journal at the moment. We will see how it goes. But the way, while this site’s Guestbook looks solid (if I do so humbly submit myself), take a look at what I did on The New Leaf Journal side of things.
Thoughts on the Most Popular WordPress Plugins
This is a little negative-nancy-ish, so if you aren’t feeling that right now — just close this tab 😜. It struck me recently how this list of plugins I saw in the 2023 Annual WordPress Survey wasn’t full of fun and interesting plugins that do interesting and unique things, they mostly just fix boring problems […]
In November 2023, Chris Coyier published his thoughts on the 20 most popular WordPress plugins as of July 2023. I run two WordPress sites: this one and The New Leaf Journal. Between the two, I use a good number of plugins. Surely I must have thoughts on the list! Well first, let’s see the plugins:
- Yoast SEO
- Monsterinsights Google Analytics
- WordPress Importer
- All-in-One-WP-Migration
- Wordfence
- Contact Form by WPForums
- Elementor Website Builder
- Duplicate Page
- Akismet Spam Protection
- Contact Form 7
- WooCommerce
- Classic Editor
- Google Site Kit
- Yoast Duplicate Post
- Really Simple SSL
- WP Mail SMTP
- All-in-One SEO
- UpdraftPlus
- Jetpack
- LiteSpeed Cache
I only use two of these plugins. I use UpdraftPlus on both this site and NLJ (see my post on using it for migrating to a new host). I use the Classic Editor plugin on this site but not on The New Leaf Journal.
There are a few that I used a long time ago. I used Yoast SEO from summer 2020 through the end of 2021 before switching to the lighter, more performant, and less annoying The SEO Framework in 2022 (see my post on its humane site maps). I shamefully used Monsterinsights Google Analytics four about two months in 2020 (before I knew better) before switching to the local and privacy-friendly Koko Analytics in 2020. I discuss my Koko Analytics stats in every edition of our weekly newsletter and in The New Leaf Journal’s year-end article rankings (see 2023). I accept an invitation from another post to give it my high recommendation. I briefly used Wordfence in 2020 before quickly moving away from all-in-one security suites. I will note separately that neither Monsterinsights nor Wordfence cleaned up after themselves well, leaving a ton of options behind. I believe I also used Realy Simple SSL for a time early on before figuring out how to set the requisite headers in my site’s .htaccess file (hat tip to Jeff Starr and his myriad free resources at Perishable Press). I never tried the other plugins. I will note with regard to caching that I have used WP Super Cache since late June 2020 and have been consistently impressed by it.
Testing New Activity Pub Plugin Set-Up
I installed the Hum link shortener on The New Leaf Journal and I like it thus far. Now I just played around with the ActivityPub WordPress plugin settings so I am trying this post to see how it looks from Mastodon. Don’t mind me. (I should also figure out why my New Leaf Journal posts stopped showing up through the AP plugin but that’s another matter.)
Koko Analytics and Relevanssi
It’s possible to integrate all kinds of external data to Relevanssi weights. Koko Analytics is a great analytics plugin. It collects stats about your visitors and stores them in the local database, which means those stats are available for Relevanssi. For some sites, this makes a lot of sense. For...
I have been using Koko Analytics on The New Leaf Journal since 2020 and I also use it on this site. Moreover, I use Relevanssi Light to improve on WordPress’s (sub-standard) default search after having briefly used the much heavier and more robust Relevanssi plugin. While I plan to stick with Relevanssi Light because it is good enough for my search-improvement purposes, I was still interested to read a 2022 post by the developer of the Relevanssi plugins about “[i]ntegrating Koko Analytics stats as a factor in the weight calculations [fior Relevanssi Premium].” In short, he demonstrates a PHP snippet that would allow Relevanssi Premium users to slightly favor popular posts in searches. This is very neat and I would definitely try it if I were running Relevanssi Premium. For those of you with less intense search needs or limited resources, however, I recommend giving Relevanssi Light a try — it is as good as it is simple.
Follow Minds Social From WordPress
If you have a WordPress site, you can subscribe to yourself on Minds and Minds will recognize your WordPress account as a follower. In order to this, you need the ActivityPub and Friends plugins, both available in the regular WordPress plugin repos
After both are configured, go into your Friends admin menu and add a new friend. Add your Minds account in the following format:
@[username]@minds.com
From the WordPress side, you can “subscribe” to your Minds account. I checked from the Minds side and it recognized my WordPress site as a new subscriber/follower.
Caveat: There is a quirk with multi-user WordPress sites. I set my default user on my site to my administrator account (not hidden in this case so not a big deal) and subscribed with my user account. From the Minds side, it recognizes admin account as subscriber even though from the WordPress side I subscribed as user.
Review of Show Pages ID for WordPress
Description Show Pages IDs is a plugin that will show allow you to view the IDs of pages and posts in wordpress. With Show Pages IDs plugin you will be able to views the pages and posts IDs in the top admin menu bar and in the back-end admin panel as well. Show Pages IDs Plugin Features Reveal pages...
I use YYDevelopment’s free (including of cost) and open source WordPress plugin, Show Pages ID, both here and on The New Leaf Journal. I received a dismissible banner on my plugin page asking for a WordPress review. What about an on-site review? Show Pages ID is a very simple plugin that adds a field to the WordPress admin screen for posts that shows the post’s numerical ID. It also covers pages and custom post types. Not every site needs to know post IDs, but I have at least one plugin on both of my WordPress sites for which I need post IDs. The plugin is lightweight (only adds one option to the site) and written in pure PHP (see details). I recommend it if you need an easy way to see post ID numbers as of December 7, 2023.