Many of you have already seen how Digg and Reddit.com work. These sites aggregate stories from around the web and let their visitors vote stories up and down. That makes it easier for their visitors to find stories that are worth reading, with the help of the community behind those sites. Adding a similar functionality to your own website wouldn’t hurt your cause. At the very least, you can help your visitors make their thoughts known about each and every post on your blog. If you spend enough of your time to make sure your posts are of high quality, you shouldn’t be too worried about the votes you get on your posts.
Vote It Up is a cool WordPress plugin that adds a 2 way voting system to WordPress. Your visitors can vote stories up and down. It provides you with the opportunity to modify its skins to change the look and feel of the buttons on your website.
Foursquare is one of the most exciting local social networks around. It makes it so easy for small businesses to reach out to their community and for people to explore their cities more effectively. Regardless of what you think of Foursquare, there is no question geo-location services are here to stay. So why not take advantage? This community has its advantages for business, but you don’t have to be more than just a user to start sharing your experiences with your friends and the world through your website.
If you are looking to integrate Foursquare into your website one way or another, these Foursquare plugins can make your life a whole lot easier:
FourSquare Integration: enables you to integrate Foursquare into your WordPress blog (inside your posts or in your side-bar). It’s customizable too.
My Foursquare: display your Foursquare badges and mayorships on your WordPress with this awesome plugin. You probably need to be a bit active in Foursquare to take full advantage of this.
gPress: a powerful WordPress plugin that lets you add geo-layers to your website. Can be integrated with Foursquare and BuddyPress. (more…)
Chat-rooms may be old, but they can still make your blog more interactive. Besides, nothing replaces having the ability to communicate with your visitors in real time. Envolve.com is an innovative chat solution that sits on the top of your website and lets your visitors browse through your pages without leaving your chat. All you need to do is grab the appropriate code from Envolve.com, and you are on your way.
The plugin’s back-end is pretty straight-forward. If you do not want to touch your code, you can use the plugin to enter your code in the back-end. Once you have done that, a small footer-bar is going to be added to your website, which you can use to open up a new chat room.
Webmasters are constantly on the lookout for ways to increase traffic to their websites. One of the oldest and proven ways to do that is by submitting articles to top directories. These directories can not only bring you a good amount of traffic (if you play your cards right), some can give you Yes-Follow back-links, helping your search engine rankings too. EzineArticles is one of the most popular article directories around. It can get your articles a lot of action for a long period of time. EzineArticles WordPress plugin is a cool solution for those of you who want to submit your top blog posts to EzineArticles and keep track of their status too.
Once you install the plugin, EzineArticles’ box will be added to each of your posts. If you are a premium member, you can schedule your articles too. For free members, you can change the category, define tags, and tell EzineArticles where to grab your tags and article title from.
Have you ever wanted to give your visitors a chance to give your content a thumb up or thumb down? There are plenty of scripts out there that only focus on positive or negative votes but don’t provide both. LikeBot is a simple to implement solution that adds thumb up/down buttons to your blog posts and lets your visitors give your posts votes of confidence or show their dismay with them.
What’s nice about this de-centralized service is the fact that it does not require your visitors to sign in or register on your blog or anywhere else for that matter. They can just vote on your post whenever they feel like it without all the mentioned hassles. The service gives you the chance to change the style of your buttons, which is a nice feature.
WordPress is a great platform for blogs and portals. A ton of people use this platform to bring their content online and share it all with the world. Unfortunately, that means you are going to have to deal with hacks attacks more often than those who are using an obscure platform. While the WordPress community is vigilant and on the top of major attacks, it can’t stop them all. That’s why all WordPress webmasters should take time to secure their blog to reduce the chances of their blog being hacked. You can’t stop all attacks, but you can surely make life difficult for hackers.
Secure WordPress is one impressive plugin that takes care of those small little details on your blog and lets you focus on more complex measures. For starters, it gets rid of tool-tips and those little error messages that hackers look out for. It gets rid of WordPress version information as well.
The iPad is one of the most popular gadgets around, and it is going to stick around for some time to come. Millions of people will be using these tablets to surf the Internet and do all kinds of things when they are on the move. You may not get a lot of traffic to your website from iPads these days, but that’s not going to be the case forever. Unfortunately, not all themes and sites are compatible with iPad. The last thing you want is people getting to your site on these tablets and abandoning it right away. That’s where PadPressed comes into play. It’s a cool little plugin that makes your WordPress site look like a native iPad app.
PadPressed is more than just a simple plugin. It has everything you need to offer your iPad visitors the best experience possible. For starters, it lets you pick and choose your featured stories on iPad. It also has a built-in social sharing feature that gives your visitors an easy way to share your stories with their friends and followers.
