Ultimate Social Plugin for WordPress: FV Community News

Janith — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 03:52:31 +0000

Running a successful blog is just as demanding as starting a business, meeting a goal or even running for the US presidency (exaggeration at it’s best!). It all depends on how much effort you put in and what you want to achieve with your blog.

Maintaining a successful blog and the above comparisons are by far different on many levels, but nevertheless they both require a type of confidence, a type of motivation and most importantly; a type of perseverance.

Anyways, moving on from the radical metaphors.. the point of that introduction was to highlight how hard it is to run a blog.

If you run a blog by yourself or with a friend – you know how easily how the workload can just pile up! When it comes to constantly writing good content, responding to your readers and obviously building on traffic – just too much for you to handle? Well, why don’t we eliminate “responding to your readers” as a chore and turn it in to a potential flow of targeted content?

Now, that would be a big positive because that would partially take care of two so-called “chores” of running a blog! So, what if there’s an ‘ultimate social plugin‘ that will do wonders to your site, ease your workload and EVEN please your readers? Well.. there is!

FV Community News allows your visitors to help you create more content for your site! A simple, yet ingenious plug-in to really incorporate your reader’s opinion and boost your site’s value, content and even SERPs.

As said by the developers themselves – “With this new Community News plugin you allow your visitors to add articles to the sidebar. Complete with moderation panel and a settings page, you can sit back while you have full control about the look and articles that being posted.”

Features

Currently, the Community News plugin has the following features:

Widget Ready (Different form/results widget)
Tags for use in posts/pages
AJAX Form Handling
Multi-Language Support
Moderation panel (with email option) – Make sure you approve the right articles
Edit Submissions
`My Submissions` Page
Customizable templates
Captcha Spam protection (on/off)
Akismet Spam protection (API key required)
Build-in RSS 2.0 Feed
Image Uploading
Settings
Uninstall Page
Configurable Responses

The Big Bad Wolf of FV Community News

That’s all the positives, but when it comes to using this plugin there are a couple of downfalls. The whole idea of allowing your readers to contribute with useful content is great – till you get spammers that try to abuse this feature.

You might find yourself accepting/rejecting articles added via this plugin a lot more than your comments ~ so, you need to balance out between free-content and loyalty of your readers. If you having problems with spammers, I would not even hesitate to suggest the use of Akismet and BadBahvious. The combination of these two plugins will take care most of your spammers!

Quick FV Community News Information

Author : Frank Verhoeven
Wordpress Version (required): 2.5+
Tested up to Version: 2.7
Current Plug-In Version: 1.3

What does it look like?

You can see the FV Community News in action over at DivitoDesigns. The side bar on the far-right is all content added by the readers. Also here’s a quick screen-shot of the actual Admin Control Panel, which can be accessed through your WordPress Admin CP;

Check it out, and let us know what you think!

Ultimate SEO Tool List Update 12/23/08

Janith — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 03:19:44 +0000

Following up on a thread over at DigitalPoint, a member took the time to make this list of both ON/OFF Page SEO tools you’ll ever need.

The tools vary from Optimizers to SERP Rank Checkers to the critical back link to verify those “Link Exchange Buddies” are still link to you..

I would recommend that you bookmark a few of them because most of them will provide with you excellent in-depth statistics which you can use to study your website/blog’s progress for the inevitable domination.

On Page Optimization Tools

Website Grader – A simple website analyzer with some helpful tips for your site

SearchEngineWatch – Article on creating an RSS feed for your site.

W3Optimizer – Nice on page optimization tool with key parameters checked on your site.

Off Page Information Tool

DiagnosticoWeb - Good all around site tool.

On page/Off page tools:

*New SEOCentro – Nice collection of basic SEO tools. Very basic but can help.

*New SEOAnalytic - Pretty good tool set including internal PR checker.

Keyword Traffic Tools

Google Adwords Keyword Tool – Type in the keywords you want traffic estimates for. Usually used for Adwords but nice to use for estimating niche markets for website development.

SEODigger – Gives a search estimate for specific keywords to your niche at different SERP standings. Nice.

*New Google Insights – Google’s on Beta search traffic tool by volume, region over time.

*New SEMRush – Nice tool for traffic and competitors. Added after checking it out per DPer on this thread!

Fake Pagerank Detector Tool

CheckPageRank - Nice PR checker and validator when exchanging/purchasing links.

*New Archive’s Way Back Machine – Try the Way Back Machine on this site when validating obtaining links. This gives you a good idea if the domain from which you want to get a link on was recently transferred/dropped and if its’ PR is about to go “poof”.

SERP Tools

*New SEOLogs SERP Checker – Check your SERP in different data centers via small Google like windows.

*New SERPRank - Check your SERP position on different search engines

*New IP Address & IP Address 2 – These are the Google Big Daddy Datacenters for the US. SERPs usually start here then migrate across the other datacenters.

Backlink Tools

*New BackLinkWatch – Added backlink checker recommended by several DPers.

*New Yahoo SiteExplorer – Yahoo’s back link tool which is very comprehensive.

*New Online-Utility Back Link Analyzer – Nicely organized backlink tool which is very compacted and gives you a quick look at how your back links are distributed. Try it you’ll like it!

Redirect Tools

*New InternetOfficer’s Redirect Check – The tool checks to see if your 301 redirect is working properly. This is important for new domain names and transferring websites.

Copyright Tool

CopyScape.com – Check to see who is copying your stuff and take action.

Avoiding Penalty Tips

KSL Consulting. Google Penalty – Good list of things to be careful about so you don’t get a Google penalty.

*New DiagnosticoWeb Google Chart - Very good flowchart on how to handle a penalty.