In my followup research after posting 48 Unique Ways to Use WordPress, I came across Jason Schuller's new WP Elements blog. Jason has some very cool WordPress plugins, an excellent free magazine theme, Massive News, and another theme for a video gallery on the way.

Two things caught my eye on Jason's blog: the Fancy Zoom plugin and the Featured Content Gallery plugin. The latter is a plugin version of the gallery box that appears in his Massive News WP theme.

Both plugins can really jazz up your WP blog's images.

Fancy Zoom

Fancy Zoom is a sexy variation to other "lightboxed" image plugins. The basic principle is this: show a relatively small image on a post and link it to a larger version. With Fancy Zoom installed, you'll see an animated "zoom" to the larger version without a browser refresh. When you close the lightboxed image, you'll see an animated close. (Watch out; clicking can be addictive.) Here's a screen grab after a click, but to see the full animated effect, go visit Jason's 32Eighteen site and click on one of the images in the middle column.

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There are a number of interesting developments in WordPress and I wanted to share them here, in case you've missed them elsewhere.

Prologue: Twitter-Like Microblogging Theme

Twitter microblogging is a growing phenomenon, despite the fact that there are actually more robust alternatives such as jaiku, tumblr. But Twitter's popularity has probably reached enough critical mass that more new users will gravitate there. In fact, I regularly get emails saying so and so is now following me, despite the fact that I almost never Twitter. (Too much inane Twittering for my liking, and I don't really have much... er.. little to say.)

But if you like the general functionality, there's a new alternative that lets you build your own Twitter-like clone in WordPress: the Prologue theme. It's clean and crisp, and you can add messages/ posts right on the home page. (Only registered users can see the textarea for entering messages.)

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Those of you who are just looking for a great way to display blog stats in your WordPress Dashboard, read no further. Sign-up for pMetrics and then download the plugin.

But connoisseurs of innovative technology take note. Performancing is today releasing what we see as a major step forward in WordPress plugin technology. The innovation that we are introducing is at the level of fundamental architecture and can be generalized for numerous applications. We demo the technology in our 1.0 pMetrics plugin release.

Several months ago over at College Startup, I wrote a post over at College Startup entitled Open Source Priority #1: One Click Updates. The general idea behind the post was that we should move beyond the old-art of software updates (deleting, downloading, unzipping, re-uploading). The old-art is especially problematic when running dozens or hundreds of blogs.

After making that post, I realized that I should do something about it. Enter Sean Hickey from Headzoo. I explained my ideas to Sean and asked him to execute this new software architecture, using the pMetrics API in the hopes of killing two birds with one stone: 1) making a killer demo and 2) giving pMetrics users an expandable, auto-updating plugin

In a nutshell here's what the pMetrics plugin offers:

1. Auto-updates (this option can be toggled on and off)
2. One-click installs for added functionality
3. One-click removals (deletes files off the server)
4. Blog stats in your WordPress dashboard
5. Latest searches display
6. pMetrics rank display
7. Auto-installation of pMetrics javascript code

Coming Soon

8. Auto-installation of affiliate banner in sidebar
9. Blog sales page with detailed pMetrics statistics
10. Feedburner integration

and much more...sky's the limit.

Download the plugin now

Many blogs use the related entries plugin (or it's equivalent) - along with anti-spam plugins and smart URLs it has become an integral part of a blogger's arsenal.

I've recommended the plugin myself a countless number of times but yesterday while working on one of my blogs I started wondering if, in some cases, showing related posts would actually be less effective?

Consider this - the most common spot to show related entries is at the end of a blog entry. However, that spot is also a prime advertising spot, that's where you put the comments and if you want people to digg/reddit/delicious/stumble/etc your post, that's where you put your social bookmarking links as well.

All that clutter means that when the reader reaches the end of your article, he doesn't have just one thing to do - he's presented with an array of options. More often then not, I've found out that the fewer choices you give to the reader in terms of what to do next, the better results you will get.

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First off, I wanna say, I can modify php, but as of right now, I'm NOT a programmer, I wish I were, but I just haven't sat down and taught myself, yet. Perhaps, when I'm earning $6,000 per month blogging, and no longer have to work a day job, I'll have enough free time.

Here's my idea, and you can tell me if it'll work or not, or even if it's a stupid Idea, I've been looking for something like this for awhile, but either it's a stupid idea, which I doubt, being the genius that I am...(notice the sarcasm? lol):

Alrighty, I have a brilliant idea, for a wordpress plugin.

This would be link-builders dream widget.

Basic Idea:

1. First people would sign their website up from a central database.
2. The Central website would gather their rankings / metrics from a number of sources. (Alexa, Google, Yahoo Links, Technorati, Delicious, etc), and it would thoroughly spider the website for it's top twenty keywords / phrases.
3. Each site would be given a ranking based on those criteria, sort of similar to the Blog Juice widget on my sidebar.
4. Now for the fun part. Each site would have a widget on their sidebar, and each day at a random time, 1 new link will be added to each blog. This would alternate, where you'd be given a link that: matches your keyword at least somewhere on their blog, and it would alternate, where your first link will be a site ranked slightly higher than your blog, and your second would be ranked slightly lower.
5. The cool thing is that as your rank grows so will the ranks of those below yours and those above yours will continue to help your ranking grow, the plugin / database would always 'balance' itself. Like so:
   1. The max number of links would be 50, and in order to basically funnel each website higher than it began, there would be a ratio of 60 to 40, 70% of links will be lower than yours in ranking, but only moderately lower, and 30% will be slightly higher.
   2. The bonus, though is that every site your link is placed on - 70% of those will have a higher ranking than your site, and will lift your site up.
6. And of course, this would have some really good statistics, and might even be able to build a social community right around the central database.

Now I offer this idea Free to the blogging community, in the hopes that some young, or not so young programmer might take me up on it, and secondly that I get at least a little credit when they do.

I'm very open to criticism, so please tell me if, and why you think this is a great or bogus idea, and will or won't work or how to modify it to make it even better.

Everybody has their favorite WordPress plugins. I thought I'd share my five favorite plugins and ask you to do the same. One thing we should all be clear about: there are always better plugins in the pipeline, and many of them have already been released. Let's focus on the plugins that have already made a huge difference to the way we run our blogs. If you've got suggestions for better plugins that serve the same function, feel free to suggest them in the comment suggestion:

1. aLinks from Sean Hickey

aLinks is a flexible plugin that automatically generates links within your blog posts. One of its best features is the ability to specify keyword phrases and the corresponding link that should be placed on those phrases. The plugin is well polished, and gives you a great deal of control (e.g. the total number of links per posts) and includes a click tracking mechanism.

aLinks can be used to interlink your own content or to create automatic affiliate links.

2. WordPress Database Backup

When's the last time you've backed up your blog's database? Come on...be honest. If you're like me, you put database backup off because you don't want to login to phpMyAdmin for every single one of your blogs. The good news is that you can backup your database from within the WordPress dashboard, and even have the database sent directly to your Gmail account, for long-term storage. A definite must.

3. FeedList by rawlinson

It's not perfect, especially with it's handling of non-standard encodings in WordPress titles (the ? often replaces the ') but it's great for creating a common, interlinking sidebar between networked sites. You can see me using it over in the right hand sidebar at TenFootSquare.

4. Semiologic's Related Posts

Deep linking doesn't just involve getting links from other sites. You need to have deep internal linking too. Any good related posts plugin can make a big difference in your link building efforts. On more than a handful of situations, I've used "related posts" to jumpstart a stagnant blog revival. Without a related posts plugin, your average post is likely to have 2-3 internal links. With a related posts plugin, you can expect to see incremental growth in internal links to any given post. The more posts you have, the more internal links each post will have. There are many good related posts plugin. Another one is Contextually Related Posts.

5. iMax Width

This plugin resizes all uploaded images to fit a max width. If you have a photo based blog, a plugin like this can be priceless to avoid breaking your theme or overlapping images with other div sections.

So what are your favorite WordPress plugins?