Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

If you’re looking for an image management solution for your WordPress blog, you may want to give NEXTGen by Alex Rabe a try. It features sortable albums, watermark function, support for popular image effects, multiple CSS stylesheets, slideshow and a sidebar widget. Here’s a live view of this image gallery plugin.

Making all external links on your blog open into a new window is easy with the help of the SEM External Links plugin for WordPress. This plugin will also change your links to rel=”nofollow” or add an external link icon.

Photos from Picapp have been collected from major companies and ‘cleared’ for free use by the public. A very useful feature is that you can search ‘creative’ for generic pictures of a turkey dinner for example, or search ‘editorial’ for news related pictures, which brought up our troops in Iraq eating a turkey dinner. You can choose the size of the picture and also get a thumbnail. Picapp recently added a plugin for Wordpress that let’s you choose images from within your admin.

The downside is that code you get from Picapp automatically includes a link named ‘Gallery’ which takes your visitor away from your site for more related pictures. The related pictures are presented on a page with a short snippet about the picture and advertising:

The editorial search for ‘turkey dinner’ yielded this photo:

A creative search for ‘turkey dinner’ brought up this picture:

Seek out social comments and mentions from places such as Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, and YouTube and display them in real time alongside your comments with Disqus. Users can sign in with Facebook Connect, OpenID, or Twitter Sign-in and can also manage and track all their comments through the system.

There are other related posts plugins for Worpress, but Mitcho’s Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) has a lot of configuration options, including thresholds for titles and content, disallowing certain tags and displaying related posts in your RSS feed.

Key features of Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) are:

- An advanced and versatile algorithm: Using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, and categories, YARPP calculates a “match score” for each pair of posts on your blog. You choose the threshold limit for relevance and you get more related posts if there are more related posts and less if there are less.
- Templating: A new templating system puts you in charge of how your posts are displayed.
- Caching: YARPP now caches the related posts for all the posts and thus has significantly improved performance over versions 2.x.
- Related posts in RSS feeds: Display related posts in your RSS and Atom feeds with custom display options.
- Disallowing certain tags or categories: You can choose certain tags or categories as disallowed, meaning any page or post with such tags or categories will not be served up by the plugin.
- Related posts and pages: Puts you in control of pulling up related posts, pages, or both.

One of the best image gallery plugins we’ve seen – the NextGen – Gallery plugin – can by downloaded at AlexRabe’s blog. This image plugin, which is distributed under the GNU General Public License is very versatile and offers:

- Sortable Albums : Create your own sets of images
- Upload a Zip-File with pictures : Upload pictures in a zip-file (Not in Safe-mode)
- Watermark function : You can add a watermark image or text
- JavaScript Effect: Use any available popular image effect : Thickbox, Greybox or Lightbox
- Multiple CSS Stylesheet : Use a nice shadow effect for your thumbnails with your own CSS file
- Slideshow: Full integrated flash slideshow
- Sidebar Widget : Show a random picture at your sidebar

Get free Wordpress themes with ‘premium-like functionalities’ at DesignReviver. Site also offers design tutorials.

One way to work around reducing ‘ads blindness’ in your blog is to add the Adsense Injection plugin for WordPress which randomly inserts Adsense ads into your blog paragraphs.

Designing a new WordPress theme from scratch takes a lot of time, but it’ll take a lot less time if you use the free WordPress theme generator. The generator is especially useful for simple themes. You can create your own custom unique WordPress theme without any need for HTML, JS, PHP, or CSS knowledge. “Change the colors, settings, layout, preview live, click “save” and download your unique Wordpress theme zip-file. Extract, upload, set, and you are done!”

If you are using WordPress you can find out where your visitors were referred from with the referrer detector plug-in. This plug-in also lets you display a greeting to users who come from various referrers. For example, you may want to welcome Diggers with a message that reminds them to digg your story, or you may want to ask Del.icio.us users to bookmark your post, and so on.