Marcin Juszkiewicz - widgets

WordPress plugins which I use on this blog

2009-03-04T18:23:00+01:00

Cliff Brake asked me which plugins I use on my blog for spam protection. I decided to write about all plugins which I use here.

Widgets

First part would be widgets which are used in sidebars:

Configurable Tag Cloud — I had my own one but needed more functionality
Feedburner Widget — tells how many readers my blog has via RSS readers. Not always sensible value ;)
Popularity Contest Widget — lists popular posts
Hrw Meta widget — no links to RSS, checks for WP/WPMU and give proper link

Spam related

I used Spam Karma 2 before but it is not maintained anymore. Now I use simpler ones:

Yawasp - Yet Another WordPress Anti Spam Plugin — mangle names of comment fields and adds some automatically changed one to protect me from spambots
ClearSpam — removes spam comments from database

Statistics

“Do not believe in statistics which you did not faked” or what to use to track visitors:

Google Analytics for WordPress — real monster
WordPress.com Stats — simple one but available in dashboard

Content related

Markdown Extra — this should be part of WP core — no need to remember HTML as simpler markup is available
Popularity Contest — gives informations which posts are still the most read one. Great when widget is used.
SRG Clean Archives — powers Archives page. Very heavily modified by me with most of features removed.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin — adds link to “probably related” posts at the end of each post
Recommended Tags — recommends tags in post editor. Modified by me — will release my version one day.
Tag Managing Thing — another rarely used plugin which helps to manage tags
Scissors — simple editing of uploaded images
Slimbox Plugin — nice popups of images

Other

Contact Form — I use it on Contact page
OpenID — adds possibility to use blog as OpenID server (also supports OpenID login to blog)
WP Super Cache — just in case of Digg effect

Theme

OK, theme is not a plugin :D I use plaintxtblog by Scott with few modifications.

New Wordpress widget: Recent Comments

2008-02-06T10:11:00+01:00

When I wrote post about my palmtops story WordPress added many pingbacks into my older posts (which I linked to). As a result all of them appeared in “Recent Comments” widget. This hide real ones so I decided that it is time to change something.

And thats how “Hrw Recent Comments” widget was created. I took wp-includes/widgets.php file from my WordPress MU installation and extracted original widget. Then one edit of SQL query and everything works like expected — no pingbacks to my blog posts in sidebar.

Download plugin.

License: same as WordPress (as it is WP code mostly).

UPDATE: fixed SQL query to make it really work.

Hrw tag cloud widget

2007-12-22T11:42:00+01:00

I use tags on my blog for years. First it was done with UTW and when WordPress MU 1.3 got released I switched to native WP tags.

The first thing which I missed was nice Tag Cloud widget. Default WP one just printed all tags without giving any control to user about how it have to look. So I looked at source and wrote own version.

How to use it?

Fetch archive, unpack into wp-content/plugins/ directory and enable “Hrw Tag cloud widget” in “Plugins list”. Then go to “Presentation/Widgets” and replace “Tag cloud” widget with mine. You will see configuration options.

Download archive is no longer available.

New look

2006-05-30T11:42:00+02:00

Yesterday I decided to give a new look to my website after I found Barthelme theme. It is minimalistic and it support Wordpress widgets so I’m able to change sidebar content without touching line of code.

Of course like always there had to be some changes done.. I added UTW support, wrote ‘Hrw Pages’ sidebar widget which allow to skip some ‘Pages’ and changed CSS a bit (I like to have preformatted blocks visible).

The result is visible now — what do you think about this look?