On this page I am going to collect wordpress plugins and other resources that I use and like.
Contents
Plugins currently in use
Akismet
This is probably the most important plugin, it protects your blog from spam. It comes with your wordpress installation (also when self hosted) and you only need to request a key. It is really good at detecting spam comments (since February no false positives or false negatives).
Email Subscribers
After some time I thought it would be good to provide email subscriptions. I tried some plugins (unfortunately I don’t recall the names) until I found this. I am still not really satisfied since it is not possible to have more than one subscription form (would be useful since I blog in German and English and also about completely different topics). Also the handling with creating groups is a little bit weird (you can not create new groups directly, you need to create a user and add him to a new group). I would be happy about suggestions for a better tool.
MathJax-LaTeX
This plugin is a must have if you want to write \(\LaTeX\) formulas. The syntax is exactly the same as in normal \(\LaTeX\), the only difference is that you need to use $$ instead of $, because a single $ is reserved for something else.
$$p(x) = \frac{1}{\sigma \times 2 \pi} \times e^{-\frac{(x-\mu)^2}{2 \sigma^2}}$$
Table of Contents Plus
Some of my posts tend to get really long, which looks even more so because of the very narrow design I use. “Table of Contents Plus” has really many settings (how many headings there should be at least, whether to insert in posts and/or pages, how many levels of headers it should contain, how it should look, …) and I think it is really cool that it gets included automatically into pages/posts that fulfil the criteria defined in the settings. I use mainly default settings and now it looks very similar to the Wikipedia table of content. But see for yourself on top of the post 😉
WordPress Related Posts
In other blogs I like it when they link to related posts or even better to related content somewhere on the web. For that purpose I installed “WordPress Related Posts” which detects (in an intelligent way) posts from your site that are relevant to the new post (and you can change them). It also finds posts over the web that seem to have similar content than your new post or seem to be somehow related. Currently I am not so happy with the second feature, because most of the time they are only very slightly related to a my post (share only one keyword).
It looks like this for related posts (the other feature I don’t use):
WP-Mail-SMTP
This plugin is only required if you have a self hosted wordpress blog. When I was looking for the “Email subscribers” plugin, I first thought none of the plugins was working, but then I found out that I needed to install an SMTP plugin. It’s very simple, you only need to add information about your mail server (gmail in my case) and then it works.
WP Code Highlight
This plugin is pretty ok for languages it knows like XML (but only since I changed the ugly pink/red line color to gray).
Unfortunately most of the time I write R code and then it does not know how to deal with it. I assume it should be possible to modify the css yourself but I am not sure if I will ever find time or just hope that a better plugin (with R support) comes along. Sidenote: I recently downloaded WP Codebox and I think it will work better with R code, but I currently don’t have enough time (The old posts also require updating then).
Twitter acounts worth to follow
- WordPress Beginner: Gives useful tips, not only for wordpress beginners. Their website also has a rich collection of resources.
- WP Clipboard: Gives useful wordpress tips. Their website contains a lot of articles about wordpress related things.