The iAssistant is an AssistU trained virtual assistant who also writes instructional ebooks about WordPress plugins.
Archive for plugins
Spammers, Contact Form 7, And You
Posted by: | CommentsThose spammers, what do they think they’re going to accomplish by bombarding us with emails? Here’s how to prevent spamming through your online forms that you’ve created with Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7 gives you three options to control spam: CAPTCHA, quizzes, Akismet, or even a combination of the three. Today, I’m going to talk about Akismet. I’ll cover the other two in the next two posts.
Akismet will prevent human spamming. It doesn’t work as well with forms as it does with blog posts, but it is worth using. Akismet will look at the name, email, and URL and make the decision: is or isn’t it spam? Once that decision is made, the site visitor is notified with one of the messages below.
So, that’s one more barrier those spammers have to crawl over to get to your inbox! 
To learn all about Contact Form 7, take a look here.
Tweet Button For WP Posts
Posted by: | CommentsHave you ever seen those big Tweet buttons on the posts of the people you like to read and follow? It is so simple to have one of those on your posts. Look to the right of this paragraph for an example.
To get started:
Search the great WordPress repository for “Big Tweet Button”. This is the plugin website: Big Tweet Button.
Once installed, this is how it will appear on your WP backend plugin page:
The plugin developer, Scott Carter, provides three views to choose from:
That last view that doesn’t show how many times the post has been tweeted comes in handy for posts like mine that haven’t been tweeted much. How about a tweet somebody? *SMILE*
And, how it looks on my blog posts:
A really great, simple, powerful plugin!
Think Outside the WP Box
Posted by: | CommentsSomehow, I’ve always thought that any plugin that went into WordPress had to come from the WordPress Repository, or at least be designed specifically for WordPress. After figuring out how to use the ShareThis plugin on my website, I realized that other plugins could work on a WordPress site.
Take a look at this screenshot:
Have you ever seen this widget on a web page and wondered how it got there? Go to Twitter Goodies, click on “Widgets”, and then “My Website”. You will have a choice of four kinds of widgets: Fave, List, Search, and Profile. The one displayed here is a profile widget that displays my latests tweeps.
It is very easy to do. Even though it looks like nothing is there, click on “Finish & Grab Code”. When you see the code, highlight and copy it.
Then, go over to your WP Dashboard, open “Widgets”, locate the place in your sidebar you want it to display, drag a text widget over there, and paste the code in. There it is!
The widget code didn’t render the correct width to work in my theme, but I changed the width a few times, and it worked just great at 170 pixels.
Why do we love WordPress? Do you have to ask?
If you enjoyed this post, and if you learned something about WordPress plugins, please Tweet it! Thanks!
Sociable WP Plugin
Posted by: | CommentsYes, I did work on the podcasting plugins, PowerPress and podPress, for quite a while. To be honest, I never got the feed/subscribe thing right. So I stopped.
I stopped going off on tangents and not finishing what I’d started. I stopped doing things that weren’t on my list. I stopped being busy and not accomplishing anything. So, I’m back on the social media plugins and back to working on my ebook.
Here’s a sneak peak at the Sociable plugin WP backend. It is very easy to use. It is ideal for the beginning WordPress plugin user. The hardest part is deciding which social networks to join, take a look at this:
Who knew there were that many? Just check the ones you want to display, and then drag and drop where you want them. And, if you need one that’s not listed, you can request it to be added. Sociable doesn’t have much support except in the WordPress forum, but then, you won’t really need any. It’s a smooth running plugin.
WP Podcasting Adventure
Posted by: | CommentsHi Everyone!
I know I said I would be working on an ebook entitled” The Easy, The Hard & The Impossible” about the Sociable, About Me 3000, and Share This WordPress plugins, but I got sidetracked today. Do any of you get sidetracked?
Someone asked me today if I knew how to podcast. I replied that I’d been wanting to learn. To be honest, part of me is scared. I don’t have an iPod, my husband does. I had iTunes installed on my computer but uninstalled it because I never used it. Never one to let technology beat me, I plunged right in.
First, I decided I should figure out exactly what a podcast was, yep, that’s where I was. Wikipedia had an excellent article on podcasting. Basically, podcasting is different from a plain mp3 file because it can be delivered by RSS.
A sidenote here: RSS is handy if you want to avoid email spam, but it doesn’t have the intimacy that having something delivered to your inbox does. RSS is read through a web browser, for those of you who were once like me and had no clue.
So, now I’m working with two WordPress plugins to insert podcasts into blogs. I have to say, it is one of the harder plugin functions I’ve investigated. 
First, I’ll learn podPress (Mighty Seek) and then I’ll graduate to Blubrry Power Press. Power Press is an upgrade from podPress.
I hope I’ve provided some useful information here. There will definitely be more to come!
