I’m very excited about this one! My web development team have been working with Wordpress for the past few years but mainly for private clients. Lately we’ve decided to create plugins that would be released more publicly and not just for exclusively for single private clients anymore.

This is the first free Wordpress public plugin that we release – so I’m looking forward to the feedback – even if it means it’s bad feedback so we can improve on the next ones we release .  Check it out here.

Basically this plugin will save you time and effort by allowing you to quickly and easily insert screenshots into your blog posts / pages and also give you a cool feature of being able to give your visitors a preview of webpages (internal or external) before they click on a link!

There have been different discussions and plugin to address this topic on how to turn your Wordpress blog into a mobile-friendly site. Some only did general mobile-friendly version, some only did Iphone. Some were complex to implement. The simplest I’ve found is MobilePress. You just install the plugin as any other plugin and activate. There’s an iPhone version and a mobile version.

Features:

-Ability to specify a custom title & description when viewing the mobile versions

-Ability to have your own themes

-Ability to enable analytics and ads via Aduity which seems to be in testing stages for now, so you can’t use that feature just yet.

-Ability to view full version for those that don’t like the mobile version. I personally love this for the iPhone, i hate when i’m forced to view the mobile version and i want to view the full version because something is not available in the mobile version.

Here’s what the settings page looks like:

The thing with a Wordpress blog is that they can sometimes just seem like…well… a blog. I think it’s important in some cases to make it more like a website that has a blog component. But how do you do that when everything looks the same.

Sure there are some themes that offers specific page templates, which allows you for example to remove the sidebars and have a page the full width of your theme but still, the urls still gives it away that it’s just a regular ol’ Wordpress.

Sometimes it would be cool to add .html to Wordpress pages so that it looks more like custom website that has a blog component. Sure, there’s permalinks you could do to have everything have .html appended but if you want to keep the blog posts looking like blog posts and the pages looking like separate static pages, then you’ll find this plugin useful.

Click here to go to the download page and download it. To use the plugin, it’s pretty simple actually, you just upload the plugin as you would any others and activate it

For the tweakers out there, I’ve successfully modified this plugin myself to append something else than .html to pages (.php for example) or whatever else you want to append to make it look custom and distinguished from other Wordpress blogs out there. So if you want to tweak it, you can do that easily, open the file and it’ll be obvious where to change the appended extension.

>> Get it here <<

Cloaking your affiliate links means hiding the real affiliate url by using a redirect. So if you were to click on this link of mine, http://francofrenette/GoDaddy it actually redirect you to my GoDaddy affiliate link and if you bought something, I’d be credited for the sale and make a commission. Why would you want to cloak your affiliate links? Well because if you give the real URL, someone can just copy the url, past it in their address bar, strip out your affiliate ID and you don’t get credited for the referral even though you did refer them.

There’s another reason that I do it personally though. And I also cloak non-affiliate links too, not just affiliate ones and that is to track how many people click on my links. There’s a few ways to cloak affiliate links and there are different solution to do this. The simplest way is probably to use a free URL shortener like Shorten.IM . The thing with that though is that it’s not branded to your name / company and also, you’re relying on a 3rd party service that could shut down or have technical issues at any time, leaving you without working links.

I’ve searched a while but found a great plugin that does everything that I need and then some. Best of all, it’s completely free.

Social this, social that. That’s all we hear these days and with reason. It’s also not going anywhere so get used to it

Here are some great plugins and tips to “socialize” your Wordpress.

1. Add a “Like” Button To Your Wordpress Posts.

There’s a few ways to this actually but I’m featuring here what I think is the best plugin so far to accomplish this.

Features:

-Choose form 2 layout styles
-Show faces option
-Control width
-Choose to use “like” or “recommend” as the text
-Choose font
-Location settings – above or below posts, then to show on index page, single pages, single posts

Screenshot of settings area: