This is a very simple plugin for all WordPress blogs! Unlike the traditional Javascript snowflake , all you need to do is:

1. Download the Let It Snow plugin.
2. Upload the let-it-snow folder and its contents to your blog’s plugin folder (wp-content/plugins).
3. Activate this plugin and you’re done!

If you encounter any problems, click here for support.

If you are using Blogger (blogspot) classic template, perhaps you would like to read this for adding Javascript snowflake to your blog.

Let your blog snows, spread the Christmas feel and have a great holiday season. ^^

Although I have Akismet installed, I still can get a lot of spam comments which will be filed under “Akismet Spam” for further manual moderation. Although you can mark the comment as spam to let Akismet learns to identify more spams, it is still quite tiring if you have to moderate all spam comments that looks like this:

Won’t it be just annoying to receive whole lots of such comments in your Akismet spam section? Furthermore, to enable Akismet plugin, you need an API key which can be obtained from creating a free account in WordPress.com. That’s something extra you have to do if you want to use Akismet.

Now, it’s time to also install the WP-SpamFree plugin for your WordPress blog. I’ve been using this plugin for some time and it has captured lots of spam comments and deleted them automatically.

What is WP-SpamFree?

An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin that virtually eliminates comment spam. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog! Includes spam-free contact form feature as well.

Can I use Akismet with WP-SpamFree?

Yes, you can. I have both of these plugins installed, although not necessary. Actually WP-SpamFree can do all the cleaning job. Sometimes one or two comments will be left out and it will be caught by Akismet.

Say no to spam and get WP-SpamFree for your WordPress blog today! Just install the WP-SpamFree plugin, sit back and relax to watch it do all its magical work.

You may also want to read additional information on:

• Uploading plugins to host via FireFTP
• Adding contact form to your blog

There are many Firefox add-ons to enhance your browsing as well as blogging experience. Here is a list of 8 useful Firefox add-ons which I think every blogger should have them installed in their Firefox browser.

One of the important elements in the blogging world is social bookmarks. You can promote your blog posts through social networking sites, share your interest, as well as getting information from others (blog authors), and also it’s one of the source for you to get blogging inspiration. Among all those many social bookmarking sites, I would love to introduce StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us.

So, you must not miss out these social bookmarking Firefox extensions.

[1] StumbleUpon

This is not a stranger in the Web 2.0 world. Sign up a StumbleUpon account and start stumble good blog posts that you think worth sharing or bookmarking. Registration is FREE.  It’s a great site for you to wider your blog network, make new friends, stumble similar interest articles. If your article is being stumbled by someone, it means higher chance for you to gain more blog traffic. Isn’t it just nice?

After installing the StumbleUpon extension, you can customize where to locate it in your Firefox browser. If you like a site, just click on the blue thumb up icon (to rate it, bookmark it) and vice versa. Notice the number in red? That means someone in my contact list is recommending me an article which he or she finds interesting and would love to share with me.  So, by using the same method, you can also recommend your own blog post to your StumbleUpon contact. There are many more features to be discovered by using the StumbleUpon add-on.

If you happen to have a StumbleUpon account, please feel free to add me to your contact as well.

[2] Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is another bookmarking site. Among all the social bookmarking site, I find that Del.icio.us is the best tool to bookmark anything I found useful from the Internet; easy to use, nothing fancy about the interface, straight to the point. You can find out more on why I like to use Del.icio.us as my bookmarking tools.

After installing the Del.icio.us Firefox add-on, you can customize your toolbar to show your Del.icio.us short cut, so that whenever you see an interesting article, you can easily bookmark it by clicking the TAG icon. Oh, in order to use Del.icoi.us, you need to sign up for an account, it’s FREE.

[3] Wizz RSS

It’s a web base RSS reader. I always encourage people around me to use RSS reader to read their favorite blogs. Some argue that they prefer blog hopping, but when your network expand, you may really want to switch to a feed reader. You can really get benefits from using a feed/RSS reader to get any updates from your favorite blogs. If you dislike installing extra feed reader application or sign up for an RSS account like Google Reader, you can try this Wizz RSS Firefox plugin. No registration needed, just subscribe to any feed you like. However, if you read blogs in different computer most of the time, it’s better to stick with a registered RSS reader account like Google Reader.

After installing this add-on, the Wizz RSS will appear on the left panel without disturbing what you are currently browsing. You can make your feed subscription more organized by creating categories by right clicking any where within the Wizz RSS tab and choose “Add Category“.

To add a feed, do the same thing by choose “Add Feed“, make sure you get your favorite blog’s feed URL. You can do that by searching the feed subscription link and right click on it and choose “Copy Link Location“. Next paste the link to the Feed URL field.

At the end you will have something that looks like this. You get a list of feed updates. If you click on any post, you see a summary of the post, for further reading, double click on it, and the content will show on the right panel.

[4] ScribeFire

Say, you want to have something all-in-one. ScribeFire is just for you. With ScribeFire, you can blog anything you find interesting right away within a few clicks. You can also add blogs/articles to your Del.icio.us bookmark. Or even share what you found in social networking sites like Propeller, Reddit, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc…. ScribeFire integrates with several blogging platform, check out a list of supported services to find out more.

[5] FireFTP

This add-on is one of my favorites which I think it is an essential Firefox extension for bloggers who have their own domain. It’s very useful when you need to upload files to your host. You do not have to install extra FTP client, FireFTP work the same way like almost any FTP client. Learn how to use FireFTP to upload files to your host.

[6] Web Developer

Very often, when I need to customize my blog theme or helping friends to mod a little here and there on their blog theme, I will depend a lot on this Web Developer extension. Most of the time I use this to view the source code. This plugin is for intermediate user who at least knows more on web development like HTML, CSS, etc.. It’s a great tool for all web developers.

“The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. It is designed for Firefox, Flock and Seamonkey, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.”

[7] Screengrab

Sometimes it’s tedious to take a full screenshot of a page by just using the PrintScreen key on your keyboard. Screengrab can do all the job for you. Who and why need this extension? It’s an essential toolfor those who always make tutorials on the web, when you need to take lots of screenshots to show your reader. I often do that too. Find out more about Screengrab.

[8] ColorZilla

When it comes to customizing the theme color of your blog, you must be digging a list of colors available, searching for it’s 6 digits hexadecimal codes. You can install some free color picker software, but won’t it be nice if you can do it just within your browser? ColorZilla is the answer. After installation, there will be a tiny icon on the bottom left of your browser, click on it to activate and click on any color on the screen that you want, in order to get the 6 digits hexadecimal codes. Click that icon again to deactivate, just as easy as that. Find out more here.

So, that’s the 8 Firefox add-ons which I think is really useful for bloggers. Hope you can benefit from this list.

Happy blogging.

Posting up your email for readers to contact you is the most basic way of letting your readers contact you besides leaving comments/feedback in your blog (comment section or chatbox widget). However, it will be much more easier if you can provide a “contact form” feature in your blog.

This will facilitates your readers to contact you just by filling the contact form.

Why Contact Form?

[1] Readers can contact you easily.

[2] Ensure the message is successfully delivered to you.

[3] Having a more professional feel (impression wise).

Adding a contact form nowadays is not difficult at all. You don’t need to have HTML knowledge to have this done. There are free services or plugins available to help you add a contact form to your blog.

How to Add a Contact Form?

For WordPress user, you can install the Enhanced WordPress Contact Form plugin. Once you activate this plugin in your WordPress blog, you can set the configuration under the “Settings” tab (for WordPress 2.5). The settings is quite straight forward. Take a look at the sanpshot which is quite self explained below.

Then you will have to create a Page, and add in the following code and publish your page.

For more support on this plugin, click here.

For Blogger (Blogspot) user, you can add a contact form to your blog too! No, you don’t need to code the contact form yourself. All you have to do is to sign up for a FREE account at WebFormDesigner. Follow the instructions and you can get a simple yet functional contact form like this:

I will not go into detail on how to generate a contact form like the above. Instead, you can read read this detail tutorial on adding a contact form in your Blogspot blog.

Do you have a contact form in your blog? If you haven’t, try to add one now.

Last Update: 24th September 2008

Although there are several popular CMS other than WordPress, such as Joomla, Drupal, Movable Type, etc.. WordPress seems to be the most widely used platform in the blogosphere.

That derives a new problem. People tend to get jeolous or start to cultivate mischievious ideas when you are getting popular. Wordpress, naturally became the target for hackers. It doesn’t mean that other blogging platforms is far from hackers. WordPress, in this case, has a higher percentage of being targetted by hackers.

Now, a question for you as the title suggested:

How secure in your WordPress blog? (if you are running your blog under Wordrpess)

Quoting what Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress, once said:

The best thing you could do to make sure your blog is secure is to stay up to date with the latest stable version of WordPress.

With the released of WordPress 2.5 last month, I have read some comments from my blogger friends that they don’t wish to upgrade to 2.5, not until it is really stable. On the other hand, few days after the release, I started the upgrade for one of my blogs first (this is the blog which I upgraded first). Before upgrading, to make sure everything work fine, I installed 2.5 in my local machine to test out some of the newly implemented features.

It is really improtatnt to keep your WordPress blogs updated with the latest security fix. Keeping a blog is not as easy as it seems, especially when you start your own domain and host your own blog. Although WordPress is free, it has some hidden cost that you won’t notice until some security issue threaten you.

What sort of hidden cost?

1. You have to update your WordPress everytime there’s an update.
2. You have to update your plugins. This is where security leaks most often. [Check plugin compatiblity for 2.5]
3. You may need to update your theme for compatibility. [Check theme compatibility for 2.5]

In conclusion, you have to pay extra attention on the maintenance costs.

These are what you can do to secure your WordPress blogs:

1. Secure your /wp-admin/ directory – Lock down your wp-admin folder so that only certain IP addresses can access that directory
2. Make an empty wp-content/plugins/index.html file – This is to prevent others to access to your plugins folder. Creating a blank index.html is very easy. Just open up a new file in Notepad and save as “index.html” including the double quotes (”"), and upload this blank index.html file to your plugins folder.
3. Keep an eye on WordPress Development blog – I know some of you have some plugins installed to keep away those “useless” widget/announcement appear in the dashboard. But it’s always good to keep an eye on the Wordpress development blog or any updates or simply, subscribe to it.
4. Hide your WordPress version - Most WordPress themes display the current version of Wordpress that you used. This tracking code can be found in the header.php. You want to hide your WordPress version, imagine if your blog is not running the latest version and you are showing the version information, it will then be open to hackers. Just open your theme’s header.php file and look for the following line <meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress <?php bloginfo(’version’); ?>” /> and remove the <?php bloginfo(’version’); ?>

Other than those, you can also install a variety of security plugins. Check out the top 10 security and protection plugins for WordPress. I’m going to check out those plugins myself later.

If you want more extra readings on WordPress security, this is a very good one.
[via Metaphorics Lab, JohnTP]

How flexible! This additional piece of codes can benefit both you and your readers.

There are a lot of custom ready made Wordpress plugins available to feed your needs. Here is a list of 16 great plugins which I think is really useful (however some are optional) for enhancing your Wordpress blogs.

[1] Adsense Manager

Control and arrange your AdSense & Referral blocks on your Wordpress blog. With Widget and inline post support, configurable colours. If you monetize your blog with Google Adsense, this is a good plugin that allow you to add your Google Adsense ads using widget.

[2] Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments”. By deafault, this plugin is included in every Wordpress.org blogware. All you need is the WordPress.com API key to activate this feature. Signup an account in Wordpress.com to obtain the API key. Without this plugin, you will receive a lot of spam comments when time pass by.

[3] All in One SEO Pack
Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog. This make it easier for you to introduce SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to your blog.

[4] Anarchy Media Player (AMP)

Plays mp3, flv, mov, mp4, m4v, m4a, m4b, 3gp, avi, asf and wmv hypertext links directly on your webpage. Adds buttons to the post editor for embedding swf movies including Google Video etc. I love this plugin. I found it really useful when you want to insert media content to your blog post. An essential tool for music blogs and video blogs.

[5] CommentLuv
Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog in their comment. Just activate and it’s ready. You must be grateful to your loyal readers. To show your appreciation, why not give them some link love? When your reader enable CommentLuv when they post a comment in your blog, their latest blog post link will be added at the end of his/her comment too.

[6] Enhanced WP-ContactForm
WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. In the message it sends to you it gives the page the user visited before the contact page, as well as the original outside referer. It can be implemented on a page or a post. It would be easier for your readers to contact you by using this feature if you embed it in your blog. The “Contact” page of this blog is an example.

[7] Flexible Upload
Resize picture at upload and make thumbnail creation configurable (like WP1.5), optionally include a watermark to your uploaded images. This is really a great plugin for those who upload their pictures directly to their host via the Wordpress platform. It is really flexible as you can set the resize pixel of your image, add watermark automatically to your images, multiple uploads at once, and many more.

[8] Highlight Author Comment
Automatically applies a distinctive style to comments by the post’s author. This is an optional feature. It helps to differentiate the author’s comments/feedback among the readers’ comments. You can customize how your comment via CSS. Here is an example of using this plugin. Notice the author’s comment is in outstanding pale green background.

[9] KG Archives
This is definitely a great plugin to sort out your archive. It will be really handy when you have a lot of archives made up by old posts. You can configure how your archive page look like.

[10] My Avatars
This plugin allows you to add MyBlogLog.com avatars to Wordpress comments. Yet another optional plugin, but can add some colors to your blog.

[11] Random Redirect
Allows you to create a link to yourblog.example.com/?random which will redirect someone to a random post on your blog, in a StumbleUpon-like fashion. When you have a lot of old posts, it is likely that your new visitors will miss out those wonderful old posts of yours. This plugin enable you to add in the code and let your readers read any random post from your archives. An example can be found in A.P.P.L.E. Click on the to try it out.

[12] Similar Posts
Displays a list of posts similar to the current one by comparing the way they use words. This can bring your readers further to any related/similar posts.

[13] Sociable

Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites. These little color icons make it easy for your readers to bookmark your posts to their bookmarking sites. There is a variety of bookmarking sites icons to add on. It also make your blog more cool.

[14] Subscribe to Comment
Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. This is a great feature so that your readers can receive updates on any new added comments to the post that they have subscribed.

[15] WP AJAX Edit Comments
Allows you and your users to edit their comments inline. Admin and editors can edit all comments. We often make mistakes. Sometimes when I leave comment in other blogs, I make some typo mistake, but I am not able to edit my comment. With this plugin, your commentors will be able to correct their mistakes made in your blog.

[16] WP-PageNavi

Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog. I love this plugin very much. When you have a lot of old posts, it makes it easier for your visitors or even yourself to navigate around your posts.

These are the basic great plugin that you should consider using in your Wordpress blog. Feel free to try them out yourselves.