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Most Bloggers blog to get their opinion or perspective across on a particular topic and getting comments on that particular post is definitely thrilling and exciting where someone else might share the same opinion or even provide a better suggestion or even better provide a critical review of your opinion.

Comments Waiting Count WordPress Plugin adds the current number of comments in the moderation queue to your WordPress Admin Dashboard. You can also see the number of comments that have been flagged as spam whether you are using Spam Karma or Akismet or any other anti spam plugin.

Plugin Name: Comments Waiting Count

Plugin Author: James

Plugin Page:

http://www.realitywired.com/2007/03/23/comments-waiting-count-wordpress-plugin/

Download Comments Waiting Count WordPress Plugin

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Popularity: 18% [?]

When WordPress version 2.1.x was released, a lot of people including yours truly jumped in. The reason was that 2.1.x over 2.0.x had some great features like AutoSave, a great new upload manager for images , a complete overhaul of the visual editor among others.

However, one thing I missed sorely was that WordPress version 2.1.x removed the really nice “preview” and “edit” links within Write Post where in the earlier versions as you are writing a post, you could easily jump back and forth between the write post text area and the preview iframe. For those of us who need to see what the post would look you before you hit that Publish button, this is almost a must want feature. So, here you go. A plugin that restores the Preview Post feature in WordPress.

Plugin Name: Preview Post Navigation

Plugin Page:

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Popularity: 9% [?]

Most Bloggers start out with free blog hosting with the most popular of the free services being Google’s blogger where you get a yoursite.blogspot.com address. Now you want to move from Blogger to your own domain. One of the best publishing software is provided by WordPress and the best part is it is free. Importing to WordPress from Blogger used to be a breeze using WordPress’s import posts feature. However when Google moved from Blogger to the new Blogger or Blogger Beta, it became impossible to use WordPress’s import utility.

However, you can now do so with the steps outlined here about Importing Blogger Beta Posts to WordPress

Many users were able to implement this method successfully. Now, we move to the next step. Lets deal with some questions I had so far …

1. What happens to my old blogger blog? Should I just delete it after importing to WordPress?

2. I heard Google penalizes duplicate content. I now have my posts at both my old blogger blog and my new Wordpress blog hosted on my domain. What should I do?

3. You mentioned using the 301 permanent redirect from blogger to wordpress. Can i do it?

Okay … lets deal with these questions first.

1. No, you should not delete your Blogger blog. I am sure you worked hard at it. You might have many subscribers to that blog. The search engines have content indexed to that blog. What happens if you delete your blogger blog is simple … you end up LOSING ALL YOUR TRAFFIC, all your loyal subscribers and visitors simply because they dont know your new address.

2. Yes, Google penalizes duplicate content. How do you deal with this.. well read on

3. When people move from their old website to a new one they use a 301 permanent redirect method without being penalized by the search engines. However, you cannot do this straight up with Blogger because you do not have access to your .htaccess file. So its not a simple plug and play unfortunately because of this.

How to redirect your old Blogger posts to your New wordpress blog posts using a permanent redirect

I wanted to thank Owen Barder for his excellent code to redirect your individual posts from blogger to wordpress. Also, thanks to Tom Sherman. I will try to stick to what these two guys have to tell.

Using the method outlined here, you will be able to

1. Redirect your visitors from your old Blogger blog to your WordPress Blog on your domain

2. Redirect your old posts to new posts on your wordpress blog instead of redirecting them just to your home page of your wordpress blog

3. Do all this in such a way that Google does not penalize you. You also get to transfer your Google Page Rank too. How about that ….. !
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Popularity: 84% [?]

Gravatars are Globally Recognized Avatars. They are usually an image of size 80px by 80px created by a user to represent him online whether in a forum, chat, website, a blog or any other form of online community in which the user seeks to participate and also distinguish themselves from other users.

What this means is that you can create a picture, could be your picture, your Dog’s picture, your favorite QB’s picture whatever which will appear beside your name whenever you comment somewhere online and that blog supports gravatars. Simply, using a Gravator allows a web user, YOU to use a single image to share across the entire World Wide Web.

Gravatar Plugin for your WordPress Blog

We are going to use the Gravatars 2.0 WordPress Plugin to help you set up Gravatar for your blog and allow people commenting on posts on your blog to use them.

Plugin Name: Gravatar

Plugin Page: http://site.gravatar.com/site/implement#section_2_2

Download Gravatar plugin for Wordpress

http://site.gravatar.com/plugins/wp_gravatar.zip

Set up Gravatar for your WordPress Blog

Step # 1: Sign up for a Gravatar. Associate your picture with your Email address. If you already have a gravatar account skip this step
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Popularity: 12% [?]

What is a gravatar?

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums and allows you to create your Identity online.

How Do I create a Gravatar?

Signing up for a Gravatar is simple and above all FREE. All you need is to associate a picture with your Email address. This would be the email address you enter while commenting. It is important that this email account is legit. My suggestion, associate your Blog’s email account with your Gravatar account.

Step # 1: Sign up for your Gravatar account

You can signup here to Get your Own Gravatar

All you need is your email address! You will then receive a confirmation email including a link that will activate your Gravatar account and allow you to set your password.

Step # 2: Set up a password.

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Popularity: 23% [?]

Most of us have our own Blogs and almost everyone has a favorite blog or blogger beside youself. You know what topics they write on, you might even know their backgrounds, their work, their history.. but how much do you know about people like yourself with interests similar to you visiting your favorite blog? Well, you don’t know anything besides the off comment on a post here and there.

The Internet today is one big Global village with everything interconnected. MyBlogLog is the service which helps bridge this divide between you and other people on your favorite blog besides also helping you connect with the blogger of that particular site. You can connect with other readers, know more about them, read their blogs, the communities they are in, even check out their MySpace or Friendster profiles and also their Flickr photostreams. MyBlogLog also helps out the authors know more about their readers both individually and as a group… what their interests are, what they like or dislike, what else is going on in the blogosphere, what are they reading etc.

Install MyBlogLog Plugin for your WordPress Blog

Plugin Name: MyBlogLog

WordPress version supported: Version 2.0 and above

Download MyBlogLog WordPress Plugin:

http://www.mybloglog.com/zip/mybloglog_wp_2.zip 

Installation Instructions

Step # 1: Download and install the Sidebar Widgets plugin from Automattic. You can skip this step if you already have the sidebar Widgets plugin installed and running

Plugin Name: Sidebar Widgets plugin

Plugin Page: http://automattic.com/code/widgets

Download Sidebar Widgets plugin
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Popularity: 13% [?]

Everyone who owns a blog or publishes content to a blog or a website provide their users some kind of an RSS option. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication used to publish frequenty updated digital content such as blogs or news feeds.

Users of RSS content use software programs called “feed readers” or “feed aggregators”. The user subscribes to a feed by entering a link of the feed into the reader program. The reader can then check the user’s subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user.

FeedBurner is the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. If you long for creative ways to attract an audience, see where your content goes once you publish it and generally add a lot more value to your feed, then “feedburning” is for you.

You used Feedburner to get a feed and then used the FeedBurner plugin for your blog. What’s next? Well, you need to promote your feedburner feed and get people to subscribe to your blog and turn them into loyal and regular visitors to your blog.

Step # 1: Log into your FeedBurner account. Click on the Publicize Tab in your FeedBurner Dashboard

Step # 2: Click the Chicklet Chooser Service on the left hand side. A Chicklet Chooser allows you to promote your FeedBurner feed directly on your website and allows your users to easily subscribe to your feed.  Once you select Chicklet Chooser, you are given a list of options to choose your standard feed icon. I would recommend choosing the default feed icon with the larger sized icon.
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Popularity: 13% [?]

MySpace recently launched a new news aggregator service called MySpace News which looks to be a mashup of Google News and Digg combining both algorithms and user rating features.

The feature list, via Terry Heaton:

*MySpace News takes News to a whole new level by dynamically aggregating real-time news and blogs from top sites around the Web
*Creates focused, topical news pages that users can interact and engage with throughout their day
*MySpace is making the news social, allowing users to:
-Rate and comment on every news item that comes through the system
-Submit stories they think are cool and even author pieces from their MySpace blog
* MySpace users previously had to leave the site to find comprehensive news, gossip, sporting news, etc. With MySpace News, we bring the news to them!

Mashable thinks that this could result in a boom for celebrity blogs since most of MySpace demographic prefers such news just as Digg’s users adore Apple, Google and Digg.

However, all things apart, this could be an excellent opportunity for bloggers like you and me to bring in MySpace traffic. MySpace gives you a form page to submit your Blog or WebSite

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Popularity: 14% [?]

My firm is in charge of managing my forums, some of them very successful both financially and performance wise. This combination is very hard to achieve and even if we managed to do this, we might be flirting with some Google AdSense rules.

For any successful Forum, there are two things to keep in mind, Ad optimization and keeping the user experience at a high level. Because of the very nature of a forum where the topics discussed are broad, it becomes hard to achieve good ad targeting. Based on our experience and with suggestions from Google, these are the five tips you need to follow in order to achieve AdSense Nirvana. If you have a website or a blog instead of a forum, you might want to check out these AdSense optimization tips for a website or a blog.

Before I offer my insight, let us check out the Six Adsense optimization tips for forums from Google. These six tips are:

1. Format is important for multiple ad units

2. Display your ad units where repeat users will notice them

3. Place a leaderboard immediately after the last post

4. Use horizontal link units

5. Opt-in to image ads

6. Be sensitive to your forum community

Besides the above mentioned tips, Google also gives us a heatmap they use to visualize effective ad layout on forums.

These are all great tips. However, we will analyze some of these in more depth besides providing you with additional insights to help make a better decision on optimizing the ads on your forum.For any successful Forum, there are two things to keep in mind, Ad optimization and keeping the user experience at a high level. Because of the very nature of a forum where the topics discussed are broad, it becomes hard to achieve good ad targeting. Based on our experience and with suggestions from Google, these are the five tips you need to follow in order to achieve AdSense Nirvana. If you have a website or a blog instead of a forum, you might want to check out these AdSense optimization tips for a website or a blog.

Ad Placement Tips for Forums 

Eye tracking studies like the ones cited here have shown that people tend to look at the top left or top center of a site first, then track to the right and down the right side, slanting back up across the page to just below the upper-left corner and down the left side … all in an instant.

Based on these eye tracking results, suggestions from Google and my own personal experience, I will tell you the five best spots to place your Google AdSense ads on a forum. The list shown below is not necessarily in order of importance. Again, each forum is unique. Experiment , experiment and experiment but keep the suggestions below in mind.

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Popularity: 93% [?]

Everyone who owns a blog or publishes content to a blog or a website provide their users some kind of an RSS option. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication used to publish frequenty updated digital content such as blogs or news feeds.

Users of RSS content use software programs called “feed readers” or “feed aggregators”. The user subscribes to a feed by entering a link of the feed into the reader program. The reader can then check the user’s subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user.

FeedBurner is the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. If you long for creative ways to attract an audience, see where your content goes once you publish it and generally add a lot more value to your feed, then “feedburning” is for you.

Luckily for us, we have a Feedburner plugin to help us in our RSS feed aggregation.

Plugin Name: FeedBurner Plugin

Plugin Author: Steve Smith

Download the FeedBurner Plugin

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/products/feedburner_feedsmith_plugin_2.2.zip

Using some WordPress plugin magic, and user-agent detection, this plugin simply forwards all your feed traffic to FeedBurner. The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.techcounter.com/feed/ or http://www.techcounter.com/comments/feed, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.

How to Install the WordPress FeedBurner Plugin

Step # 1:  Download the plugin from the link given above. Extract the zip file.
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Popularity: 7% [?]