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Friday Mashup: 10 Awesome Free Wordpress Themes

Marko — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 22:07:09 +0000

In this post you’ll find 10 new, high quality, widgetized, awesome, colorful, free Wordpress themes! Good Wordpress themes are pretty hard to find, so I’ve created a list of 10 themes that I found really cool.

Greviti

Demo – Download

DesignPile

Demo – Download

CelebrityHQ

Demo – Download

Mayumi

Demo – Download

Recipy

Demo – Download

ElegantNews

Demo – Download

SimpleFolio

Demo – Download

iRecipes

Demo – Download

iMobile

Demo – Download

Stratie

Demo – Download

10 Must Have Wordpress Plugins to Kick-Start 2010

Marko — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:17:16 +0000

In this post I will show you the plugins I use on my blogs. These are the must have in my opinion. Keep in mind there are alternative plugins for almost every plugin, but I’ll list only what I use to keep the list shorter. I will not link every plugin to its homepage, because with Wordpress you can install plugins from your Admin panel.

To install a plugin, simply go to your Admin panel, choose the menu Plugins and click on Add New. Then just type in the name of the plugin and click Install.

10 Wordpress Plugins I Use on My Blog

Akismet – Checks your comments to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”
Contact Form 7 – Contact form, obviously. Very easy to set up, very easy to use.
DISQUS Comment System – The DISQUS comment system replaces your WordPress comment system with your comments hosted and powered by DISQUS. Read more in my Disqus comment system review.
FeedBurner FeedSmith – Detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
GoCodes – Create shortcut URLs to anywhere on the internet, right from your Wordpress Admin. Also useful for hiding long and ugly affiliate links.
Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.
ShareThis – Let your visitors share a post with others. Supports almost all social bookmarking and sharing sites.
Top Commentators Widget – Adds a sidebar widget to show the top commentators. Reward commenters with a link to their website.
WP Greet Box – Show a different message to your visitor depending on which site they are coming from. For example, you can ask Digg visitors to Digg your post, Google visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed, and more.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Shows a list of related posts below the article.

Since I’m using Thesis theme on my blog, I don’t need any additional SEO plugins. If you’re using some other theme, then you may need All in One SEO Pack plugin too.

7 must have essential Wordpress plugins

Marko — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 22:11:34 +0000

There are thousands of plugins available for Wordpress blogs. Some of them will help you improve your blog’s performance, while others will improve your readers’ experiences, while visiting your blog.

In this post i will list the must have essential Wordpress plugins every blog should have. The following is an alphabetically ordered list of the plugins that you simply must have.

Akismet – Akismet helps you manage spam comments on your blog. It detects spam comments and puts them in a special moderation qeue separate from your other comments. You can then review and delete them.

All in One SEO Pack – Optimizes your blog for search engines. Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines, generates meta tags and avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs. For Wordpress 2.7.1 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box.

Contact form 7 - A very simple way to add a contact form to your blog. This plugin uses two spam filters, Akismet and CAPTCHA, to make sure you only receive real emails from your contact form.

Feedburner Feedsmith Plugin – Redirects your feed automatically to your Feedburner feed regardless of how various users access it. That means you’ll get the most accurate reports to track your feed through Feedburner because every access point will be counted.

Google XML sitemaps – The Google XML Sitemaps Generator allows you to create a complete sitemap for your blog. It helps search engines to crawl and index your blog changes quickly.

ShareThis – This plugin provides a quick, simple to use, and unobtrusive way for users to add your blog posts to social bookmarking sites through an icon that appears at the end of each of your blog posts.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – This plugin is great to keep readers on your blog and increase your page views. It adds a list of related posts at the end of each of your blog posts.

Did i miss anything? If there’s an essential plugin you can’t blog without, then please leave a comment.