I have covered information related plugins and the utmost most important plugins so far. Today I am going to talk about tools that are helpful during the writing process of blogging.

Blog Article Tools

Similar Posts – The ability to relate blog posts to one another is vital in recycling old content that is otherwise sitting there being ignored. This plugin indexes words in your post when you publish it to match it to other blog articles. There are lots of options to tweak in order to get the relevancy right where you want it. There is even the ability to edit the similar keywords on a per post basis for even more fine tuning. Screenshot »

Recent Posts – This is similar to the similar posts above. In fact it was written by the same guy, Rob Marsh. This plugin is self explanatory as it lists the most recent posts wherever you want in your template using <?php similar_posts(); ?>. The beauty of this and the similar posts plugin is they are both cacheable meaning less load on your database. Screenshot »

Postie – You might remember my how-to post about getting Postie setup on WordPress. The ability to post from my mobile phone has been a lot of fun and makes good use of the 400 picture message bundle I pay for every month. It is pretty simple to get going and the ability to post from anywhere I have cell phone coverage is quite a profound idea. Screenshot »

WP-FLV – Posting video on your blog can be daunting if you don’t go through a site like YouTube. Even then, WordPress’ visual editor makes a mess of the embed code. To handle with all the messy details of embedding flash video in my posts I use the FLV plugin. It adds a button to my editing tool bar that wraps a link to an FLV in <flv> tags that get processed later when I publish. The video shows up in a basic flash player and I am good to go. Screenshot »

WP-Amazon – Have you ever needed to link to something on Amazon.comAmazon.com but didn’t feel like opening up another tab and running a search? WP-Amazon lets me do all of that right within my Write Post interface. The little Amazon button reveals a search sidebar that lets me find anything in any category on the whole site. The real use for this is you can drag the link straight into your post and it will automatically insert your affiliate ID to the link so if anyone buys anything after clicking on your link, you will get a cut. Screenshot »

For the fourth and final installment of this series, I will cover syndication plugins that I employ on my blog.

My roommates bought Chinese the other night and I like to just eat the fortune cookies. Ironically this was my fortune…

What can I say? I eat Chinese food and buy lots of products made in China. Fortune cookies are so mystical and all-knowing.

Yesterday we saw my important plugins but today I will take a look at plugins that make it easier to access a wide array of information about my blog in order to track certain patterns and statistics.

Information Plugins

WordPress Reports – This plugin is the equivalent of crack. It adds a new tab in my admin panel called reports and displays Google Analytics data for the last 7 days in nifty bar graph form. Stats include Weekly/Daily visitors and page views, average page views per visit, top inbound links, rising inbound links, popular blog entries, rising blog entries, falling blog entries, top entry pages, percent of new versus returning visitors, and circulation via Feedburner statistics. Be careful with this one as checking my stats is a new obsessive habit of mine. Screenshot »

Adsense Earnings Report – Yup, I have ads on my blog in case you haven’t noticed, but just for individual postings. I don’t expect to earn much money from them but I do like to keep track of my earnings and now I can do it from right inside the WordPress interface. It only shows impressions, clicks, and earnings but what else is there? I have noticed the numbers are a little off compared to actually logging in to the AdSense console but it still gives me a reasonable idea. Screenshot »

Diagnosis – I like to know some of the geeky backbone information about the server running my blog and this plugin makes it real easy to dig ALL of that info up. It mostly tells me what version of PHP/MySQL is installed, the name of the server, what PHP extensions are loaded, and the database load. I mostly use it for the last item to make sure my database is chugging along swimmingly. Screenshot »

WordPress.com Stats – These give pretty much the same information as the Google Analytics reports mentioned above. I just use the WordPress stats for comparison reasons. Two perspectives are always better than one. Screenshot »

TD Wordcount – When you blog pretty much everyday it is amazing to look back and see how many words you have written over the life of your blog. TD Wordcount breaks it all down in a multitude of ways including total for published entries, total for unpublished entries, entry with most words, average words per post, percentage of posts with 300+ words per entry, how many words per author, and number of posts per author. I always get a kick out of these kinds of stats and as of this post I have written 24,820 words! Screenshot »

WP Plugins Tracker – With all of the plugins I needed a way to make sure I was up to date with the latest releases. Plugin tracker does just that by checking your installed plugin version with the current version in the WordPress Plugin Database. Screenshot »

Tomorrow I will take a look at article tool plugins that make my life easier when I am writing.

Over the next couple of days I will share my thoughts on my favorite WordPress plugins that are installed on this very blog. To make things easier, I have divided them up into four sections: the important ones, information aggregators, article tools, and syndication tools. Below are the ones that I feel every WordPress blog should have for a more stable and protected blog.

The Important Ones

WP-Cache – This plugin generates static HTML pages to serve up instead of hitting the database on the backend every time a user requests a page. Sending HTML is a lot less resource intensive and will fortify a blog from going under when a massive crowd pounces on the content, also known as the Digg effect. Screenshot »

Akismet – From the same people that created WordPress comes Akismet, the anti-spam plugin. Have you ever recieved a comment that seems like complete gibberish with a ton of scrupulus links? Then you have gotten attacked by comment spam. Akismet uses the wisdom of crowds and sends all of the comments you recieve through it’s barrage of tests to determine if it is real or junk. It’s free for personal use and is a snap to set-up with any WordPress blog. Screenshot »

Bad Behavior – In tandem with Akismet is Bad Behavior which aims to block most malicious spam bots from ever posting on your site to begin with. It says it has blocked 360 spam accesses in the past 7 days but I have no clear idea on what it is doing. All I had to do was install it and forget it so it is worth keeping around. Screenshot »

Tomorrow I will take a look at information aggregation plugins that make it easier to analyze trends with my blog.

Oh those crazy Internet videos and the people behind them. Don’t you just love them? Just think about how dull your life would be without Numa Numa Kid, the Lazy Sunday Video, and Chocolate Rain.

To honor all of those vidz that have penetrated our online culture, Channel Frederator put together a montage of clips featuring the biggest viral videos that have ever passed through our pipes. To top it off, they have all been rotoscoped so it looks like one big animated short which has a catchy song to boot. How many references do you remember?

Shortly after I started college, a man by the name of Hy Kaplan contacted me. Mr. Kaplan wanted to pick my brain about video equipment for a new business he wanted to startup recording valuable personal belongings that the client could keep for record insurance purposes. He found me through the forums at Videomaker.com where I would frequently help answer people’s video-related questions. It was the first time someone sought me out for my specific knowledge.

We met at a local restaurant where he treated me to breakfast. I gave him my honest advice about video gear and gave me some nuggets of wisdom. The one that stuck with me the most was about how being in the middle of competition, no matter what the activity, is just as good as being invisible. Let me break it down further.

There are only three levels of expertise: the best, the worst, and somewhere in the middle. Being the best has it’s obvious benefits. The perks of being better than the competition provides leverage to charge more for goods or services. Our culture is groomed to value the best the world has to offer through the way we worship celebrities to the stock price of the most successful companies; capitalism is built around being the best.

The worst has several non-obvious benefits. There is no point in doing something if you can’t be the best at it. By being the worst, you can easily quit with little to nothing to lose. Being the worst means you can only go up and get better without fear of getting any worse. Life at the bottom offers a broader view of possibilities and paths in your quest to be the best including the option to dump the idea and focus on something else entirely. When you are the worst, the flexibility to move on with no penalty is the greatest asset you have.

Being in the middle is where you get stuck; it’s the toughest spot to shake free from. The middle leaves you the tough choice of pressing on or giving it all up which results in the waste of the time and energy it took to get you were you are. By concentrating on getting out of the middle you pay an opportunity cost to exploring other ideas that might may give you your next big break. But most importantly, being in the middle makes you average, and being average is like being invisible. Which team came in 5th place in the football playoffs last year? What college is ranked 23rd in the nation according to USNews? What is your favorite mediocre blog? All of these questions are hard to answer because they don’t stick out; they are average.

Today I was looking at game footage from EA’s upcoming skateboarding game Skate. This is a game I have been waiting for since Thrasher Skate and Destroy came out on the PS1. Tony Hawk games have been a lot of fun but recently they have gotten more and more absurd. Skate aims to be a more realistic skateboarding experience right down to the controls which require you to actually flick the directional pads to do tricks. If there was ever a game that would push me over the edge into going out to get an Xbox 360, this would be the game.

But I’m holding myself back because of my previous history with video game systems. I would usual play the system for about a month and then lose interest. I already have a Wii which I barely use due to lack of time and limited supply of interesting games. It’s not like I have all the time in the world to play videogames either and deliberately buying something that I know will distract me even more is a little daunting.

So should I get an Xbox 360?

Apparently the two worst shoe fashions have mated creating one super fugly footwear mashup. Birkenstocks and Platforms? No Crocs and Uggs, which are officially called Mammoth’s though I like to call them Cruggs. The creator of these hideous foot coverings wised up to the idea that no one was going to wear aerated plastic shoes in the middle of winter. Expect to see these on the feet of teeny boppers everywhere in a matter of weeks. Ick!

For more ugly shoes, check out Shoewawa.

Incase you didn’t know, this YouTube clip has been viewed just under 9 million times. It appears the Internet is a great tool for sharing your own imitation of what you see on TV. Oh, the power of the Long Tail.

I find the SpongeBob SquarePants remix highly amusing!

Lots of people on the Internet seem to think the new kid show that appeared on Nick Jr earlier this week looks a little creepy. I think it looks like fun and unlike Dora The Explorer or Blues Clues I would actual sit down and watch it. Clearly this is the Sesame Street for the new generation of toddlers featuring monsters, robots, and electronic music. The guests have also been modernized and include Elijah Wood teaching kids how to dance and Tony Hawk showing off skateboarding. It’s like Fraggle Rock but indie!