After recently moving to my new theme I thought I'd take a minute and throw out some links for the plugins that currently help the site work.

1. Akismet: If it's good enough for WordPress.com it's good enough for me. Since installing Akismet it's successfully blocked 16, 417 pieces of spam. That's roughly 36 pieces of comment spam for each of my 500ish posts. Good Job Akismet!
2. doFollow: A recent trends among blogs has been the removal of the 'rel="nofollow"' tag from comments. It's a great way to encourage more comments and I'm totally behind it. From here on out if you leave a comment on Bill2me Dot Com you'll get an automatic link back to your site.
3. Feedburner Feed Replacement: This one is one of several givens. It's a great plugin for anyone using Feedburner along with their WordPress blog.
4. Google Sitemaps: The Google Sitemap generator is an absolute must have for anyone who wants to have their site indexed by Google and other search engines.
5. Landing Sites: I started using Landing Sites awhile back and it's absolutely great. The plugin basically sniffs for incoming search engine traffic and then serves up special code for any visitors coming in from them. Once it identifies a Search Engine visitor the plugin serves up a list of posts related to the search engine query. It's great for cutting down bounce rates and pushing users deeper into your site.
6. Script Enabler: If you regularly put Javascript in your posts, like when you're posting videos from sites that require it be served with Javascript, Script Enabler comes to the rescue.
7. Simple Tagging: Wow! This plugin is absolutely fantastic. I'd been using Jerome's Keywords for awhile but it appears abandoned now. Simple Tagging imported all the old keywords and offers added functionality like a "Related Posts" function which lists postsbased on how they're related to keywords in any given post. Absolutely great!!
8. Text Link Ads v2: This is pretty much a must have for anyone who wants to sell text link ads on their site.
9. Via: While I was recently able to move most of my "toolbox" plugin to functions.php this was the exception. Via puts a dialoge on your Write Post page which allows you to create a "via" link in your post meta. You can see them all throughout my site.
10. WordPress Database Plugin: Here's another must have. Every couple days I use this to backup my site and guarantee the database isn't lost.
11. WP-Amazon: I've written about WP-Amazon before. It's one of the best plugins I've found for incorporating Amazon Associate links into your post text quickly and easily. I should warn you that it doesn't appear to work with WordPress 2.1.2 yet,at least not for me.

Thanks to all these plugin authors for their great work. They've made running this site an absolute blast!

When I first started doing webpage design I stumbled on an article at A List Apart titled "The Perfect 404." The article, written by Ian Lloyd, discusses the importance of building a 404 page that goes above and beyond the traditional (rather bland) template.

Since reading that article my 404 page has been at the center of much tinkering. Every couple of weeks when I review my template, and think about optimizing it, I wander back to my 404 and try to figure out what I can do better. At this point I've incorporated most of the suggestions from the A List Apart article but I've also added a few extra things.

Cutting out AdSense

The first thing you should do when setting up your 404 page is block any AdSense code from appearing. One longstanding point in the AdSense TOS restricts publishers from displaying ads on any error pages - which can be problematic depending on your publishing platform. If you're using WordPress and need to get control over your 404 pages don't fear, check out this post which covers using conditional tags to keep AdSense code off your 404s.

Special Content for Search Engines

While many 404s can be the result of mistyped addresses a lot of times content just goes poof. Maybe your permalink structure changed, maybe you deleted an old post, maybe something just happened. Google is usually pretty good at removing 404 pages but sometimes a visitor can end up on your site at a broken or removed address. Awhile back I started using the Landing Sites plugin by The Undersigned, a WordPress plugin that I find incredibly useful. Right now I've got the plugin on my index page and my 404 page - it detects incoming traffic from Google and provides a list of related links.

On the 404 page this is great because it looks at the search query and then applies it to the rest of your content. If a user runs a search for "Scrubs" (I'm watching it right now,) and they land on a 404 page, Landing Sites will create a list of posts from your site which refer to "Scrubs." What's great here is that it gives your visitors a list of content that may fill they're search query.

More to come...

You can read the secon part of this series at In Search of the Perfect 404 pt 2.

Every once in awhile you stumble across something that makes you ask this question: "How did I ever manage without ... ?"

This week I had that experience after reading about the "WP-Amazon" plugin over at Problogger. From the plugins description:

Have you ever wanted an easy way to link to a book, movie, or product that’s relevant to what you’re writing about? Typically, this is a pretty cumbersome task—open up a browser, go to Amazon, look for the product you’re interested in, copy the URL, then paste the link to your entry.

Not anymore. With WP-Amazon, the Amazon product catalog is available right from WordPress. This plugin will allow you to search Amazon as you compose your post or page entry.

Let me just say this... WOW! With one part WordPress, one part AJAX and one part Amazon Associates this makes adding amazon links 1000x easier.

If you have an Amazon Associates ID and if you regularly, or even occasionally, recommend items from the Amazon catalog then you'll find this plugin an absolutely invaluable tool!

I've done some work checking out digg Integrator with WordPress 2.1 and everything appears to be working well.

If you've upgraded to WordPress 2.1 and begin experiencing any issues with the digg Integrator plugin please let me know.

This is likely to be the last release of the diggIntegrator plugin before WordPress 2.1 is released. It includes a long overdue spelling fix to one of the digg categories as well as a small reminder on the "digg Integrator" page of the plugins menu.

Please remember, if you're using the diggIntegrator plugin I ask that you take a moment to include a link to the plugin installation page to help spread the word.

You fan find the plugin here

Thanks,