[Tips & Tricks] Useful WordPress Plugins and Third Party Apps

WordPress is one of the best and free Content Management System in the market and with the use of some specific WordPress Plugins & Third Party Applications, you can squeeze/add more power/functionality to your Self Hosted WordPress Blog

In this post, we’ll check out some very useful, yet uncommon, WordPress Tips and Tricks which can be deployed by any WordPress User by means of certain WordPress Plugins and Third Party Applications.

1. Exclude particular Post/Page from appearing in WordPress Blog Homepage and RSS Feeds

Case may arise, when you want to exclude specific WordPress Post from appearing in your Blog’s Homepage as well as RSS Feeds. This can be easily achieved by means of Stealth Publish WordPress Plugin. The Plugin adds and assigns a value of 1 to custom field stealth-publish for a particular post, so that it doesn’t appear either in the FrontPage of the Blog as well as in the RSS Feeds. Once you have added Stealth Publish Plugin to your WordPress Installation, a small checkbox will appear in the Right Sidebar of Add New Post Page:

If it’s checked, then that particular post will never appear on the FrontPage of the Blog as well as in the RSS Feeds. In case, you have also included WordPress Pages in the RSS Feeds, using plugin like RSS Includes Pages or manual modification, than this plugin will override that function and the specific Page will not exist on FrontPage as well as in the RSS Feed of Blog

2. Add Hyper Link and get Free Backlink from RSS Feeds of your Blog

By using RSS Footer WordPress Plugin, you can easily add a line of content at the top or bottom of every post which appears in the RSS Feed of your Blog. This additional line of content can be a personalized message written for your Blog Readers or Hyper link(s) to your Original Article/Homepage/any other Webpage:

There are many websites bots which crawls and publishes posts from your Blog’s RSS Feeds on their own website. In this case, adding suitable Hyper link(s) in every post of RSS Feed will give you Free Backlinks coming from those Websites! On the Settings Page of RSS Footer in your WordPress Dashboard (Settings >>  RSS Footer), just add any additional content line as per following format:

• %%POSTLINK%% : A link to the post, with the title as anchor text
• %%BLOGLINK%% : A link to your site, with your site’s name as anchor text
• %%BLOGDESCLINK%% : A link to your site, with your site’s name and description as anchor text.

And the Plugin will insert those lines/links to all posts in the RSS Feed of your Blog. You can also customize the position of this Additional Message from the Plugin Settings Page. For example, following line of code in the Settings Page of RSS Footer:

This Post: %%POSTLINK%% was originally made on <a href=”http://mrintech.com”>MrinTech</a>

Resulted in following message in each and every post which appears in the RSS Feed of MrinTech:

* Note: If even after installing the Stealth Publish and RSS Footer plugin, your FeedBurner Feed (assuming your Blog uses FeedBurner for managing/delivering RSS Feeds) doesn’t show any changes, than you may want to Ping Feedburner for immediate update or ReSync FeedBurner, so that it clears the Feed Cache and start building the Blog feed again from scratch!

3. Optimize Images for WordPress Posts and Pages

Optimizing Images for your WordPress Blog Posts and Pages includes the following:

• JPEG Compression
• Removing Meta Data from Images, easpecially from JPEG Images
• Removing Unused Colors from Images
• Suitable conversion of certain GIF Files to PNG Files

Above optimization techniques not only reduces the file size of images, but also retains the quality of original image. Above optimization techniques are completely lossless, hence your resulting images will retain its original color and visual quality.

All the above optimization techniques have been integrated into a WordPress Plugin called WP Smush.it based on the concept of Yahoo! Smush.it. Just install the plugin and all images which you are going to upload after the plugin installation will be optimized using the above mentioned lossless optimization techniques.

Old images, which you uploaded before installing this plugin, can be optimized by clicking Smush.it Now link present just below every image in the Media Library (See Screen shot above)

4. Install WordPress on Windows/Linux/MAC OS X/Solaris based Computers for Offline Usage/Testing

WordPress can be easily installed on your Local Machine if it’s currently running Windows, Linux, MAC OS X and Solaris. The main advantage of installing WordPress on your computer is that, you can make use of it in Offline Mode or can carry on various Testing Processes like Theme Testing/Development, Plugin Testing/Editing etc. without altering the original files on your website server.

WordPress can be installed on your Local Machine either by using Microsoft WebMatrix or XAMPP. While Microsoft WebMatrix runs only on Windows Operating System, XAMPP works on Windows, Linux (SuSE, RedHat, Mandrake and Debian), MAC OS X and Solaris based computers

Apart from Core WordPress Installation Files, these platforms also includes Core Components for running WordPress like MySQL Database, PHP and other Operating System dependent components like Apache, MySQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL Server, ASP.NET, .NET Framework etc.

You have to download all the required components for WordPress within Microsoft WebMatrix/XAMPP User Interface. Once downloaded and installed, you can start using WordPress in Offline Mode on your Local Computer instantly

5. WordPress Blog Security using CloudFlare’s Globally Distributed Network

You can enhance your WordPress Blog Security by yourself using Plugins like WP Security Scan, , but still it’s not sufficient for your Blog Security! As Attackers and Bad Bots are constantly developing New Methods of attacking WordPress Blogs

Than the only option left is to opt for Free Cloud Based Security provided by CloudFlare for your WordPress Self Hosted Blog. CloudFlare make use of data from Project Honey Pot, which is a Distributed SPAM Harvester Tracking Network, to make your WordPress Blog safer from Hackers/Attackers, Malicious IP Addresses and Bad Bots.

Not only CloudFlare offers Cloud Based Security to your WordPress Blogs, but it also acts like a Free Content Delivery Network (CDN) for your WordPress Blog. CloudFlare has got many Proxy Servers located at various parts of the world and your site will be very fast to visitors, as the visitor will see a cached copy of your Website from the nearest Proxy Server of CloudFlare in his/her Browser.

Anyone can make use of CloudFlare Services either by Changing Domain Name servers provided by CloudFlare after Signing Up OR simply by using CloudFlare WordPress Plugin

Limitations of CloudFlare

Currently CloudFlare is in Beta Stage and following are the limitations in case you are going to use it for your WordPress Blog:

• CloudFlare may affect internal statistics programs which are dependent on Apache Logs – The positive site here is that, your Web Server will get less load due to very few requests directed towards Apache
• CloudFlare delivers static Website content to your Visitors by means of its various proxy servers located around the World. Under this if you make any changes to your WordPress Blog, then the changes may take some time to get reflected in every part of the World
• If CloudFlare detects any user using Malicious IP Address or with Infected Computer, he/she have to enter a CAPTCHA, powered by reCAPTCHA, before he/she is granted access to the Website

But No Doubt, CloudFlare is currently offering Top-Notch and Free Protection, if it’s used with any Website/WordPress Blog

Hope these tips helps a lot of WordPress Users around the World. Feel Free to share your own tips/views on this article in the Comments Section below.

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