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Vagator, Goa, 2011.
Month: November 2013
Categories
My 6 Basic WordPress Plugins
I make a living working on WordPress. And this blog is on WordPress. And at the risk of sounding repetitive, I’ve been on WordPress for 4-5 years now. One of the most important things in the install workflow is selecting and installing the plugins you’d need. While the exact set of plugins varies from project to project, and depends on the intended functionality of the site, there are a few basic ones that I make sure to install on every site I deploy. The exhaustive list is too big, but here’s my top six, which you may find useful.
- Akismet: Automattic’s own plugin which saves me a lot of time & energy in filtering out the comment spam, done by SEO bots mainly.
- Google Analytics: Any GA plugin will do. But most loved by us is the one by Joost de Valk. Why do you need this? You do want to know the details of the traffic you get, don’t you? And then you can export that data, import it into your spreadsheet software, and soar into the dreamy world of pivot-tables.
- YARPP: Remember how you forgot to leave Amazon the last time you went there, because you kept clicking on the “the people who bought this also saw this” products? Well, why not use the same tactic for your blog? Increase the stickiness. Increase the meaningful interlinks. Increase SEO juice. There are plenty of related posts plugin, but I favour Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. Why? Is the name not enough?
- BWP Google XML Sitemaps: Sitemaps are important. Sitemaps let crawlers know where all your content is. It’s like the related posts for robots. Must for improved search rankings, and findability. Preferred plugin: BWP’s.
- Regenerate Thumbnails: How many times during development have you realised you need a new size of an image, and found that WordPress is either giving you too small or too big an image? And then after registering a new thumbnail size, how many times have you wondered if you need to delete and reupload the images already in the library, so that the thumbnails in the new size are created for these images? If you have come across such questions, you need to install this plugin, which regenerates thumbnails for all the images already in the library.
- Smushit: Have lots of images making your blog heavy to load? Install this plugin, so that every image you upload is passed through Yahoo!’s smush.it service and losslessly compressed.
Which plugins do you recommend as the bare necessities when installing a fresh WordPress setup? And do you have alternatives to the ones mentioned above?
Share them in the comments.
It was day 3 of our trip if we count Karnal/Chandigarh as our base. We were trying to make up for lost time, and (touchwood) the slowest of the lot, which would be yours truly, was doing really well in terms of speed & time.
I reached Sarchu ahead of every one else, in the late afternoon, and was raring to go further. But we decided to stay the evening and night here. Much relaxation, much plates of maggi and biscuits, much cups of tea, much photographs, and much sleep.
Categories
Cloud, Workflow & Backups
My system hard disk failed today. BAD_CTX error. The 120GB Intel SSD now declares to everybody who listens that it’s 8MB now.
So my previous Mountain Lion installation has vanished into thin air. But my data is safe, of course because the drive that died did not contain this data – it was stored in a regular 5400rpm WD drive. But the reason I wasn’t overly worried about the data is that my data is backed up. Despite me being me.
We all know that we need backups. We need regular backups. And we need reliable, redundant backups.
If you’re anything like me, you keep forgetting your backup schedule, keep forgetting to connect the external hard disk to your machine at regular intervals (I once went close to 2 months without a Time Machine backup, and the current backlog is close to 4 weeks), and generally find yourself too busy for backup routines.
You can do backups with hard disks, pen drives, optical drives, FTP, and the cloud.
You can set up copy schedules, Time Machine, or set up scripts. Or simply use this technique I’ve been using for the last few months.
I maintain a Time Machine backup, which is automated, except for the fact that I need to plug in the big 2TB hard disk to the laptop and the power source. Which, as I said earlier, happens rarely. But there is a low-cost (free for most cases) method which gives me instant redundancy automatically:
- Sign up for a cloud storage service, like Dropbox,
Copy,Ubuntu One,SkyDriveOneDrive, or Google Drive. - Install the desktop client for the service, sign in, and create its base folder on your local drive.
- Copy or move your entire work folder to this new folder.
- Over the next few hours or days, depending on the size of the folder and your internet connection speed, your work will be replicated to your cloud account in the background while you deal with other more important things.
It’s a pretty simple process, but after this, whenever you update any of your files, it’s automatically updated on the cloud as well. Instant backups!
Whether you lose your computer, or your hard disk crashes, or the computer gets damaged or stops functioning, your data is safe up in the cloud. Oh, and the bonus: both Dropbox and Copy also maintain basic file versions.
And you can access it using the web interface of the respective service.
What do I recommend: you can take your pick between the more popular Dropbox and the whoa-I-started-with-15GB Copy.
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And Happy Diwali 🙂