Plugins cleanup

I have deactived a whole bunch of plugins that weren’t used anymore or weren’t needed anymore for this site. Mostly these were related to statistical reports and text formatting.

This cleanup should make the site a little bit faster, because less database queries and less parsing operations are needed to display pages. Also, it should be easier for me to upgrade to newer versions of WordPress, as less things are likely to break.

I have checked around everything seems working as it used to. If you notice any problems or malfunctions, please let me know either via comments or the contact form (assuming, of course, that either of these works).

Spam Karma rules the WordPress world

If I would have a choice to install the only one plugin for my WordPress (how glad I am that I don’t have to make this choice, by the way), I’d go with Spam Karma.

Last week I installed it to see if it was any good. It is. I needed just a couple of days to realize how big of a problem SPAM comments still were. They weren’t appearing automatically on my blog, but I was getting an email every time a new comment was submitted, and I had to mark it as SPAM in the admin interface. Of course, there is a shortcut ‘Mark all as SPAM’, but still, it required an action.

With SPAM Karma, I don’t have to do anything at all anymore. It checks all the comments and automatically marks SPAM as SPAM and aproves the good ones. I don’t get emails about each SPAM comments anymore. Rather a daily digest that tells me how many SPAM comments were caught and where I can review them, if I wish. For each approved comment I still get a notification – so that I could reply faster. And on those rare occasions when SPAM Karma can’t make up it’s mind, it sends me the request for approval.

In short, it works better than very good. It works excellent. And I didn’t even do any configuration what-so-ever (although there are plenty things to tweak). Just intalled it as it was.

With this plugin there is no need to use captchas or limit commenters to logged in only users. Great!

P.S.: I’ve also recommended this plugin to Michael Stepanov and he seems to like it too.

My Stickies – the missing piece of your browser

By pure luck I cam across a new service, which is still currently in beta, – My Stickies. Within the first second I realized that it was something that I waited for a long time now.

In essence, My Stickies allows you to attach yellow sticky notes to websites. You can have as many of these notes attached to as many websites as you want. Whenever you come back to the website, you will see all your notes at the same place and of the same size as you left them.

My Stickies

Not only this functionality alone is great news, but there is more. You can even see your notes from a different place. This is great, because you can add notes to sites at home, and than see them later on in the office – no synchronizations are needed.

You can also see all your notes at their website. You can tag them, search them, and use notes as a sort of bookmarks.

Getting all this is easy too. All you have to do is register at My Stickies and install the Firefox extension. The service is free and works exactly as expected. Check it out.

SPAM protection reloaded

I have installed yet another SPAM fighting plugin for WordPressSpam Karma . I’ve read many good things about it, so I decided to try. Not that SPAM is a big problem for me, but it can be even smaller.

In case you find any problems with posting comments to this blog, let me know via contact form.

Mobile version is up and running

I came across a simply, but really useful plugin WP Mobile. It provides a much lighter version of WordPress blog for users of mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs. Since I am a rather often guest of my own, and on many of this occasions I use my smartphone, I decided to install this plugin and link to the mobile version of the site from the navigation menu at the top. Feel free to bookmark it too.