A Wild Vista

I’ve made a number of tweaks to this blog since it started life as a vanilla WordPress installation a month or so back. I’ve focussed most of my attention on culling unnecessary links and widgets, and adjusting basic page elements such as the footer and single-post page layout.

Other changes I wanted to make fell outside the default features available from a self-hosted WordPress installation. Enter “plugins” — tools to extend the functionality of WordPress.

Two Plugins I’ve activated or added to WildVista.com are listed below, along with a link to a page where you can download the plugin, a basic explanation of what the plugin does, and why it’s useful.

• Akismet anti-spam service for comments. Pretty obvious why you’d want this really. Spam comments on blogs are rife — often disguised as ‘genuine’ comments (e.g. “Nice blog! I’ll be visiting again!”), their real purpose often being to build a network of back-links to the spammer’s site.

  Anything that can save my time by identifying spam comments automatically is worth a look. Rather than force users to complete a CAPTCHA, Aksimet attempts to automatically detect spam comments and places them in a spam folder.

  Plenty of spam has arrived already, and Aksimet has caught it all. No false-positives yet either. Askimet is a hosted service, so if you’re hosting your own WordPress blog (i.e., not on WordPress.com), you’ll need to apply for an API key (free). Even better, Aksimet is automatically installed with the main WordPress software, so you won’t need to download it separately.



The Aksimet dashboard.

• Floatbox Plus is a very well written Plugin that adds support for inline enlargement of images (at least, that’s what I’m using it for — its capabilities extend beyond this). So much nicer than jumping to a blank window with a sorry looking image jammed up in the top left corner — the default unless you do something about it.

  Floatbox Plus is smart too. If the enlarged image is bigger than the screen real-estate available to display it, a single click enlarges the image such that it just fits the screen. A further click then expands it to full size, if that happens to be bigger. Clearly, a lot of thought and effort has gone into this.

  Floatbox Plus is free to use for non-commercial sites, but still requires a license key to prevent an occasional nag message. I requested a key a while ago, but have yet to receive one. I should probably chase that up.

I’ll post again over the next few weeks, with more information about the Plugins I’m finding useful.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Top WordPress Plugins You Should be Using Right Now (socialmediatoday.com)
• What, Why, How – WordPress Plugins (blogmistress.com)