WordPress Plugins I Love
One of the reasons that I love WordPress is that there is a large contingent of people who create code and put it out there for free, knowing that probably fewer than one in a hundred users will actually donate anything for their time and effort. It takes hundreds of hours of coding to create something useful and work out all the bugs, and in most cases, if you figured out what they earn per hour, they would probably be better off delivering pizzas. In other words, they do it for the pure joy of doing it.
So what I would like to do here is take a moment to point out some plugin authors whose work I love and use.
My Link Order
Andrew Charlton’s My Link Order plugin allows you to put your link categories in whatever order you would like. The only way to do this without this plugin is to give your link categories a letter in front of their title, like this:
A – Blogroll
B – Writers
C – Library Blogs
D – Academic Blogs
Which works, but is hardly elegant. The My Link Order plugin makes it both simple and elegant.
Clocky
Henry Leyden’s Clocky plugin is a cool little piece of code that lets you put any one of several styles of clock on your blog, with a title you can customize. Does this serve any purpose, when there’s already a clock on your computer, your wall, your wrist, and your cell phone? I don’t know and I don’t care. It’s just plain cool.
JR Countdown
Jake Ruston has a neat little plugin, the JR Countdown, which does exactly that. You can entire the time of any upcoming event, and it lets you know how much longer you have to wait. Unfortunately, now that all the Harry Potter books are out, I don’t know what to count down to, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out before too long. (Jake has lots of other cool plugins, so be sure to visit his site.)
Updated on 27 July 2010: Actually, from this point forward, we’re counting down to the start of school. After that, who knows?
Born on This Day
This is a neat little plug-in, from Joe’s Web Tools, who actually has lots of other neat things available for webmasters. Be sure to check out his main site. This is one of those strange little doo-dads that seem to have no purpose, but it’s really cool to check in every day to see who was born today.
WP-EMail
I’m also using Lester Chan’s WP-EMail, which is a neat little widget that allows you to email a brief snippet of a page or post (80 words) along with a link to that page to up to five friends at a time. As with all e-mail widgets, there is always a chance for abuse (spam!), but Lester has taken great pains to guard against this. I’ve got this plugin up and running for now; later on when I have more time, I’ll tweak the styling to match the rest of this blog and make it run even more smoothly.
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