If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. And all you Twitterati follow me on Twitter

Wordpress is my CMS and blog platform of choice.  I have tried a lot of different programs in the past, Geeklog, Drupal, Joomala, and even PHP-Nuke.  However the power and simplicity of Wordpress has made it the one for me.

Here is a list of the plugins that I install on EVERY site that I start either for myself or for a friend.

1. Add-Sig – This addon is great for adding a signature to every post.  I put in my twitter link, a reminder to add my feed at the bottom of every post.  Remember to keep it short though, you don’t want your signature to over-whelm your visitors.
2. All in One SEO Pack – If you are going to do nothing else for SEO, install this plugin and use it.  This plugin allows you to give every post its own title and meta information.
3. Google Analytics for Wordpress – This is the easiest way to add your site to Google Analytics without having to modify your theme.  This plugin also gives you the ability to NOT track the information of the admin which will give you a better idea of the traffic on your site when you are starting out.
4. Google Sitemap Generator – Google loves its sitemaps.  I know I said above that if you did nothing else for SEO you should use the All in One SEO Pack, well you should install this too.  With this you just have it install it, and every time you make a post it will add it to a XML sitemap that Google will use to hopefully index your site.
5. Contact Form – One of the things that Wordpress doesn’t have built in is a good contact form.  This plugin will allow you to add a contact form and allow your readers to get in contact with you, without you having to worry about making email public….if you’re worried about that sort of thing.
6. Twitter Widget – You’re on Twitter….right?  Well if you are and you have a Wordpress blog you know that the widgets that they have suck.  This plugin gives you a widget that will match your theme and allow your readers to see what you have been talking about on Twitter.
7. What would Seth Godin Do? – Seth Godin once said in his blog that you should use cookies to ensure that visitors to your site get a unique experience.  This plugin allows you to give first-time visitors to your site a special message.  With this message you can welcome them, point them to other great posts, and tell them where to go next.
8. Wordpress Super Cache – So you just started a blog and you are wondering why you need a caching system.  Well be positive, your blog will be popular enough and if you get a huge traffic spike you want to be sure that your site can handle it.  So install it, test it, and be ready for everything.
9. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin  – This plugin puts a list of past posts that you have made with the same tags as the one that your visitor is reading.  This gives the blog more stickiness so that your visitor has somewhere else to go when they finish reading the post that got them there.

These are my must have plugins for every wordpress installation.  What are some plugins that you would recommend for all wordpress users, or how about alternatives to the ones that I have listed here.

There should be a lot more to this, but I am busy doing stuff.  If you are on Twitter you should be using Tweepler.

What can I do with Tweepler?
Tweepler acts as a Twitter utility to process new Followers quickly and easily. The application consists of 3 areas that we call “Buckets” The first “Bucket” is the Unprocessed Followers “Bucket”. This shows you a listing of all the new people that have started Following you that you have not currently categorized. The other two “Buckets” are the Follow “Bucket” and the Ignore “Bucket”. The Follow “Bucket” is where you put Unprocessed Followers that you have decided you wish to Follow back. The Ignore “Bucket” is where you put the Unprocessed Followers that you do not wish to Follow back. We have found that by creating this Ignore “Bucket” organizing your Twitter followers becomes a much more painless task than if you do this through the Twitter.com website.

 

Check out @JessyO and @CorySchop on Twitter, they are the awesomeness that are behind @Tweepler.

I was just about to get pissed with my current web host.  A host that I have been using for a few years now, and that I changed to, after flipping from service to service. 

Hostgator has had a few hiccups over the time that I started with them to where they are now.  They have grown and acquired tremendously, and typically you would think that the customer service would decline. 

The last few times that I have talked to the live chat I have noticed a decrease in their ability to help me out.  More and more they are simply trying to get me off the line and to send in a ticket.  In the “olden days” the live chat peeps would put in the ticket for me at the least, and in some cases I had them go and FIND someone to fix it while I was chatting.  That type of service is amazing.

Problems in Hosting Paradise

Fast forward to a couple of days ago, I noticed the other day that Fantastico still hadn’t been updated with Wordpress 2.7 for this domain.  This was important since I tried out 2.7 on a couple of my other sites that I manually install on and I found it was a HUGE improvement(You can search, and install plugins from the admin area AWESOME !!!) ,so when I had a free moment I logged onto the live chat to see what was up.  Here is the transcript from December 28, 2008:

(2:37:24 PM) Joseph Ve: has entered the chat.

(2:37:40 PM) Joseph Ve: We currently don’t have an ETA on the next Fantastico update

(2:37:56 PM) Joseph Ve: Until then you will have to either manually install or upgrade Wordpress

(2:37:57 PM) Jeff: Any guess?

(2:38:11 PM) Jeff: 2.7 has been out for a month

(2:38:51 PM) Joseph Ve: Really can’t tell ya. We’d have to roll it out to all of our shared servers (five or six hundred of em)

(2:39:25 PM) Jeff: Fair, but isn’t it a security risk to have so many out of date scripts installed?

(2:40:36 PM) Joseph Ve: If there was a serious security flaw in the older version of Wordpress that comprimised the safety of our hosting plan, we would roll it out asap

(2:41:33 PM) Jeff: Alright, I will have to upgrade manually

(2:41:39 PM) Jeff: Cheers, Jeff

(2:41:43 PM) Joseph Ve: Okay, take care and have a great day!

(2:41:44 PM) Joseph Ve: Thank you for using HostGator Live Chat. If you could take a minute to rate your experience with HostGator as well as my overall performance, that would help us to improve our customer service. To do that, just click the button that says Rate and Exit in the upper right hand corner. The survey takes less than a minute to fill out.

Twitter to the Rescue

So needless to say I wasn’t very pleased with the outcome of this. 

But I wasn’t going to kick up a stir yet, I am too busy.  I didn’t write a post about it, I didn’t t Twitter or bitch about them on the forums, I simply left a response on that stupid survey conveying the lack of usefulness that I got out of the live chat.

But out of the blue someone at hostgator contacted me on twitter.  So I replied to them and told them what was up.

This is when it got fast and the customer service experience got a lot better.  I told me the domain that I needed fixed and they GOT IT DONE.

 

When I asked why this was not something that could have been fix eariler.

HostGator Redeemed….For Now

So there you have it.  I should have got the service that I felt was deserved from Joesph (see above) when I went to get some help with the Fantastico service on my account.  It wasn’t done not because they have to do them all at once and they have a lot of servers, (Joseph Ve: Really can’t tell ya. …five or six hundred of em) or that it is controlled by Fantastico.  It wasn’t done because they didn’t want to put in the ticket, either they didn’t know how (doubtful) or didn’t want to.

I feel that when I put in the horrible review that I did after my online chat session, it flagged something.  Not sure how they figured out that I was the right guy though.  Maybe they just searched my email that I sent the survey from.  But going those extra few steps to contact me vis Twitter, and try to remedy the situation.  This puts me back in the good books and prevents me from starting my search for an alternative host.

Well that didn’t take long.  I guess I have a real problem.

I am going back to Twittering, but I will be sure not to be using it as I was before, a play-by-play of my life.  Instead I will be using it as a micro-blog.  I have a lot of little ideas and tips that I think of during the day, but don’t think that they are “important” enough to write a full blownblog post.

Don’t get me wrong, it is not that these things are useless, it is j
ust that they are tips and unless I put together a bunch of them there is not really a point to fill someone’s RSS reader.

So, Join me on Twitter and find out what life lessons (and affiliate business) I learn, as I learn them.

I am finally decided to end my Twitter experiment. I will probably stay a member but won’t be actively building my Twitter community. There is no point. Whenever I have something neat to say it is down.

If they had the ability to scale then I am sure that I would stick around longer. But for now I am going to get out of the micro-blogging space. Maybe when fall comes around I will join up on FriendFeed.

What do you think about Twitter. Are they on the brink of failure, or have they already started on the downward spiral?