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Plugins and Widgets used on this blog

This blog is composed out of the following components:

The basic system

WordPress 2.9.1

This is the wordpress basic system. This is the front end that is used to manage the blog.

MySQL 5

This is the database, where all the posts and adjustments are stored.

PHP 5

The scripting language that builds the pages, so that they can be viewed in a browser.

Frugaltheme

The Frugal theme is the actual design of this blog. It gives you a lot of possibilities of designing your blog without the need to write any code or to adjust any css files and it has great SEO capabilities, too.

The plugins and widgets

Cute Profiles

Cute profiles is the bar at the right where all my social media profiles are displayed by a grayed out button. If you hover them, the will get colored and if you click them, you will be taken to the certain profile.

Disqus comment system

The Disqus comment system is great! When I think of my browsing habits… Whenever I see an interesting blog and thought, well, you should really comment here, in 99% of all cases I would not do it simply because of the logon process. I have to create an account specific to that blog. But I’ve got enough of them already! I can’t use another one. Another login, another password to remember, etc. Probably this will be my last visit to this blog, so why should I register? Disqus makes it easy for the readers to comment on the blog because they can login using their already existing Facebook or Twitter or whatever account. They don’t have to create a new one! It’s as easy as that. You only need a free Disqus account to set up the comment system on your blog. You can get one here.

Facebook Share New Button

This is the Share with Facebook button at the top of each post (right beside the Tweetmeme button). It is used to enable the readers to share the post directly to their Facebook network. You could get one with the Facebook widgets, too, but as it is to those, you have to insert it manually to each and every post. And Facebook Share New Button will do that automatically for you!

Facebook Status Updater

The Facebook Status Updater actually is capable of updating 2 more sites: Twitter.com and MySpace.com. It does, what it is supposed to do. Whenever you write a post, Facebook Status Updater sends a status update to Facebook, a tweet to Twitter and a status udpate to MySpace. I think, I don’t need to mention, that you will need free accounts on those sites….

Facebook widgets

The Facebook widgets section brought the Facebook-Livestream into the page, as you can see to right, when you scroll down a little. You can choose from different formats and from different pages you can add. I’ve created a fan page of Frank Piotrowsky so I added its status to the page.

Sexybookmarks

Sexybookmarks is the bar with the different social bookmarking platform icons underneath each post, so that your readers can leave a bookmark to the post on their social bookmark profile. You can easily format this bar to include the platforms you prefer.

Tweetmeme Button

This ist the tweet/retweet button at the top of each post (right beside the Facebook Share New Button). It Is used to enable the readers to share the post directly to their Twitter network. Tweetmeme has nice analytic functions available. Of course, you will need a free Tweetmeme account to get that working…

Twitter Widgets

The Twitter live stream on this blog is brought to you directly by the Twitter Goodies. I’ve searched a long time to find a widget or plugin that could make it look like Twitter easily, but this was the best I could find. You will get it directly from Twitter. And did I mention, that you will need a free Twitter account for this?

Why Do Work AdSense

Why Do Work AdSense is used to display Google AdSense on the blog. Of course, I could have just entered it somewhere in a Text-widget in the Widgets section of wordpress, but Why Do Work AdSense has a nice feature to display advertisements after a specified period of time (e.g. whenever a post is older than seven days). Well, and you will need a free Google AdSense account to make any use of it.

MM Forms

MM Forms is a simple, powerful Forms system for wordpress, that can send you an email, store it in the database (of course with export capabilities), send confirmation emails to the user, etc.

WPTouch

WPTouch is the mobile theme plugin, that delivers a mobile website designed after Apple’s app store design specs, whenever a user loads the page with a mobile browser. It comes with a button to switch between mobile and standard view, Google AdSense and Google Analytics support, and a lot more.

Smart YouTube

Smart YouTube is a great plugin to easily insert YouTube videos into any blogpost. Just insert the url of the video into the text and append v, vh, vhd to the http to display v(ideo), v(ideo)h(igh), v(ideo)h(igh)d(efinition) videos (e.g.: httpvhd:/ /www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-k90Z9H5EU).

This is a list of the current status of the widgets and plugins I’ve used to build up this blog. I am really interested in your thoughts on other widgets, tools, etc. -- even design issues (for I am not a good designer…), so please feel free to comment on this.

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