My most recent diabolical plan was to automatically update my Facebook “wall” with my blog posts. My friends on Facebook would increase my blog audience by, well, hopefully more than 0. Anyway, there were some technical difficulties with the plugin or the user, but I’m willing to concede it was probably caused by cosmic rays if the plugin author is. Basically when I configured the FT FacePress II Plugin I entered my Facebook mobile account in both the Profile and Page update areas. That did not work. According to Alan who is the super helpful author of the plugin (Thanks Alan!). I can’t use the same account in both places. I’ve update the settings and if nothing else is wrong you should see this blog post on my Facebook page. I need to send a follow up e-mail to Alan to have the property edits prevent the user from using the same Facebook mobile e-mail twice. Either that or he could read this post? Yeah, I may go with that. Here’s hoping you see me (or more specifically this post) on Facebook!

Since lots of folks I know are on Facebook I decided to update my blog to automatically show my posts on my Facebook page. Cool right? Truth is I just wanted to see if I could get it to work. For you Facebook guys and gals please excuse the geeky posts that are sure to follow. For anyone that actually has an interest in web development, enjoy.

In the event that you “care” the blogging software I’m using is WordPress and the Plugin is called FT FacePress II, hence the name of this post. This is the second one that I’m trying as the first crashed and burned!

WordPress is a great blogging platform, but out of the box there are many neat things that it does not do. Enter WordPress Plugins to close the functionality gap and make for happy users. This list is a revisiting of my favorite WordPress plugins. All of those listed are ones that I take advantage of on my blog. Here is the short and sweet list.

• Akismet – A spam blocker that traps comment spam and traceback spam before it gets published to your blog.
• Bad Behavior – A link spam blocker. I run both Bad Behavior and Akismet because I despise link spam bots.
• Browser Detection – This plugin was created by me to do simple browser detection. The code was mainly taken from the web, but I have been unsuccessful thus far at finding the original author or site so I could provide proper credit.
• Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin updates major search engines to new entries on your blog. If you are ready to get serious about SEO this is the tool to start with.
• Graceful Pull-Quotes – Pull Quotes are a great way to add professional polish to your blog. This plugin is super easy to use to get your pull-quotes going.
• SexyBookmarks – My newest plugin addition. Sexy Bookmarks allows you to easily add Social Bookmarking Icons to each post.
• WP-Syntax – Powerful syntax highlighting using GeSHi.

Although that’s all the plugins I use, there are hundreds of useful plugins available for you to try. If you are still interested in other great plugins you should read the blog post 20 Must Have WordPress Plugins for Every Website by Amber Weinberg. This is a pretty good list to give you an idea of the amazing variety of plugins available for WordPress

Enjoy

I wanted to add pull quotes to my blog posts for added impact. I was taking a break from doing research on the topic when I just happened to come across David Walsh’s post entitled Better Pull Quotes with MooTools. I’m not a MooTools user, but David’s post mentioned that his effort was based on Chris Coyier’s post on CSS-Tricks titled Better Pull Quotes: Don’t Repeat Markup. I checked out the post and it seemed easy to implement, so I decided to give it a go. As Chris says, “Pull quotes are wonderful.“

I’m not certain that I’m ready to go that far, but they do add a nice touch to the presentation of your blog. I managed to get it working, but I found that I had to modify my WordPress Welcome theme to the point where it was no longer generic. I went back and read the comments on Chris’ post and I noticed one by Stephen Rider who is the author of the pull-quotes plugin for WordPress. Stephen mentioned that he liked Chris’ technique and that he was interested in “borrowing” it. Since the post was over a year old I assumed that might have already happened.

I decided to drop all the custom code from my Welcome theme and start over. I found Stephen’s Pull-Quotes WordPress Plugin’s Page and downloaded the latest copy of his plugin. As usual with WordPress plugins it was trivial to set up and configure and in a matter of minutes I had quotes working on my site. I decided I was happy with one of the default themes (Modern) so no additional formatting was needed.

I think the real trick for me is going to be knowing when I should use pull-quotes. Overuse them and they just become noise. Under use them and you miss an opportunity to draw interest to an important post. I’ll have to let my audience (all 3 of you) be the judge of how successful I am in my latest blogging endeavor.