For those who are using WordPress, After the Deadline is a great spell checker plugin that checks your content for spelling and grammar mistakes. It is easy to use, and comes at no charge.

After the Deadline does not load the whole dictionary to your server. Instead, it sends your content back to their server, validate it and send it back to your server. Everything is done in AJAX, so you won’t notice the differences.

Once you have installed and activated the plugin, you will see a new “ABC” button at your post editor toolbar.

At any point of time, you can click on the button to get it to check your content for any spelling/grammar errors. Any spelling mistake will be underlined in red while a grammar mistake will be marked with green.

To correct the mistake, you just have to click on the word/phrase and a pop-up will appear, showing a list of word suggestion. You can then select from the correct entry or just select “Ignore Suggestion” to ignore it. For word like “MakeTechEasier” that is not in the dictionary, you can select “Ignore Always” to add it to the library so that it won’t bother you for the same word the next time.

Settings

Unlike other plugins that come with a dedicated Settings page, there is no Settings page for After the Deadline plugin. Instead, you will have to go to your profile settings to configure the proofread option.

Options you can configure include whether to automatically proofread content when a post/page is first published or when a post/page is updated. You can also get it to proofread various grammar and style rules such as technical jargon, or redundant phrases.

Support for various platforms

While this article is about the WordPress plugin, After the Deadline also comes in various forms, including a bookmarklet, Google Chrome addon, Firefox extension, Intense Debate comment system, bbPress plugin and even the popular Open Office extension. The bottom line is, as long as you have a text field to type on, you will have a mean to spell-check.

Trying it out before installing

If you are not sure if this is useful to you, you can always head over to the After the Deadline website and try out the demo. You just have to type in the text field and click “Check Writing” when you are done. This will give you a good feel of how it works and you can then decide if you want to install the plugin/extension.

Overall, After the Deadline is a useful plugin that works well and doesn’t take up much resources. If you have not installed it, grab it now.

After the Deadline

Like many of the backup options out there, you have the choice of a free or a pay option. The pay option of iDrive would be for someone who needs more than the 2Gb of space allowed in the free account. If you are simply backing up documents, 2Gb is a lot of documents.

When you go to iDrive.com to get an account, you will see the different account types. For this post, I will talk about the Windows backup and the WordPress plugin.

iDrive basics

You will need to have 2 separate accounts if you want to use both the Mac or Windows backup and the WordPress backup options. If you have a Mac, the options are pretty much the same as the Windows version; they are just a little more aesthetically pleasing.

iDrive for Windows

The Windows backup application reminds me a lot of Mozy. It can be integrated into your Windows machine in a way that doesn’t make you change your established filing habits.

To download the application, you need to create an account. Nothing out of the ordinary here; name, password, email choose your OS and enter in the numbers. You will be whisked away to the download screen.

If you are concerned about security, you can enter in your own encryption key. If you’d like to, you can use the default.

From there, you can select the folders you want scheduled to be backed up automatically.

If you choose to, you can choose the continuous backup option turned on. As you may expect, keeping this option on will use more of your computer’s resources.

iDrive WordPress plugin

The WordPress plugin is a pretty good thing to have for your self hosted site. It backs up your files up to your free 2Gb account. The cool part of the plugin is it backs up daily and it is an incremental backup. If you change or add a file on your WordPress site, they are what is backed up, not the whole thing every time.

Go to the iDrive WordPress plugin page to download the plugin.

Upload the file in the same way you would another plugin. If you choose to, you can also search and install the iDrive plugin from the plugin tab in your site admin page.

As I mentioned above, you will need to set up a different free account for the iDrive WordPress plugin. When you activate the plugin, you can start an account from the login screen.

The backup screen is very streamlined and does not need many adjustments. Click Backup Now to start the initial backup.

Restoring is just as easy. Click Restore Now and all of your files are replaced if needed.

Conclusion

iDrive seems to have a leg up on the other guys with the WordPress plugin. Many people neglect backing up information. Having an automatic backup is easier for most people. Better yet, if you have a WordPress site this is a great way to automatically keep all of your hard work saved in case of disaster.

What backup solution do you use for your website?

Why the need for a cache plugin?

Whenever you load a page on a WP site, the server has to first query the database for the relevant content, then format the content into html format before sending to the browser for you to see. This is fine if your site only have 10 or 20 visitors per day. However, if you are receiving ten of thousands of readers every day, your CPU workload will also increase exponentially, and eventually crashed. This is also why plenty of sites went down when their post reaches the front page of Digg (aka the Digg effect).

What a cache plugin does is to store the dynamically generated page in a static html format. Whenever a visitor visits your site, the static page is served to the visitors instead of fetching it from the database. In this case, it will relief the workload of your CPU.

W3 Total Cache: An all in one caching solution

W3TC is more than just a cache plugin. It is in fact a combination of various features to optimize your site.

There are 4 main aspect of W3 Total cache

• Page caching
• Database caching
• Minify scripts
• Content Delivery Network

Page Caching

This is the part where a static html version of your site is generated and shown to your visitors whenever they visit your site.

In the Settings, you can determine whether to cache pages for logged in users and the homepage. You can also configure the lifetime of the cache and the user agents of the browser. If you are using a mobile theme, you may want to add the mobile device’s user agent to the list so that the mobile theme (instead of the cached page) will be shown on the mobile devices.

Minify Your Script

Minifying your CSS and javascript is a great way to reduce the file size of your web page, which in turn reduces the loading time of your site. In the Settings page, you can configure W3TC to minify your HTML code, Javascript and CSS.

Database caching

To reduce the number of database query, W3TC caches the database query and keep it active for a period of time. During this period of time, all database queries will be loaded from the database cache, thus reducing the number of time the server has to go to the database to fetch the items. When the expiry time is reached, the plugin will re-cache the database queries.

Content Delivery Network

Unless you are seeing a lot of traffic, chances are, you won’t need to use a CDN. What a CDN does is to load your content (such as images, css, javascript files) from an external server closest to the visitor’s geographical location so as to achieve a faster loading of your content as well as reducing your server’s bandwidth.

W3TC works with several CDN company, including Amazon CloudFront, S3 and even your own FTP account. You can choose to load your wp-includes/files, active theme files and even minified CSS and JS files from your CDN. There are also options for you to configure which file types get uploaded to your CDN.

Checking out the performance of W3TC

Once you have installed and configured the plugin, you can log out of your dashboard and go to your site. Right click on the browser and select “View Source“. Scroll down to the bottom and you will see the W3TC message. This will give you a good idea of how fast your site is loading.

Alternatively, you can also carry out website speed test before and after you have implemented the plugin to see the differences.

Let us know in the comments if the W3TC plugin works well for you.

Image credit: gibb626

There was a time when web pages had to be written specially for mobile devices and most devices available in the market just couldn’t display regular web sites designed using HTML.

The Safari browser on the iPhone and iPod touch devices is responsible for more than half of the world’s mobile Internet usage and it doesn’t look like that uptrend is going to change soon. The reason behind this popularity is that, unlike other smart phone browsers, mobile Safari can display regular webpages as well as desktop based web browsers.

But, while the iPhone and iPod touch browsers display almost all websites perfectly, using a mobile specific theme you can offer a lot of advantages to your visitors.

For one, the mobile optimized pages will load a lot faster. The fonts will be optimized for reading on a device with a small screen and last but not the least, the user won’t have to scroll and zoom just to read the content.

But, if you’re worried that you’ll have to do a complete rewrite of your blog’s theme to make a mobile optimized version, don’t worry, WPtouch is here to your rescue.

WPtouch is a wordpress plugin that completely changes the way your blog looks on a mobile device like the iPhone, iPod touch or the Android. In that sense, it acts more like a theme for your blog rather than a plugin.

If you’re using wordpress version 2.8 or above, the easiest method to install WPtouch is to login to the admin panel and click on the “Add New” link under Plugins.

Search for the term WPtouch and when the WPtouch plugin shows up in the search results, click on the Install link to install it automatically.

Once the installation is completed, you can activate the plugin by clicking on the Activate link on the same page.

The plugin will now be installed and activated, ready to start serving a mobile version of your blog to your iPhone totting visitors.

If you want, you can just leave it at that and WPtouch will happily keep serving your visitors as long as you want, but if you’re like me and like to customize each and every part of your blog, I’d suggest that you give the Settings pane a look and customize certain aspects of WPtouch to better match your blog.

Click on the WPtouch link under Settings.

This is where you can change the theme’s style, colors and the icons used. When you’re happy with your custom changes, click the Save Options button.

If you use the WP Super Cache plugin on your blog, like I do, then you need to make some more changes to the your setup.

Click on the WP Super Cache link under Settings and check the tick box that says “Mobile Device Support” and click the Update Status button.

Scroll a little further down the page and you’ll find the Rejected User Agents text box. You need to add the following user agents to the list that is already there.

• phone
• ipod
• android
• dream
• cupcake
• webos
• incognito
• webmate
• opera mini
• blackberry9530
• blackberry9500

Save the list.

That’s it. You can now happily declare your blog as the most mobile friendly blog in the neighborhood.

What is Global Translator?

Global Translator is a WordPress plugin that gives you the ability to make your blog accessible to your readers in 41 different languages (Please see the next section for the 41 languages). It uses four different translation language – Google Translation Services, Promt Online Translator, Altavista Babel Fish and FreeTranslator – that will be the deciding factor as to which languages your blog can be displayed in.

What are the 41 languages?

The 41 languages are Italian, Korean, Chinese (Simplified), Portuguese, English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Greek, Dutch, Bulgarian, Czech, Croatian, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Norwegian, Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Albanian, Estonian, Galician, Maltese, Thai, Turkish, Hungarian

Note: Remember that the number of languages you are able to access depends on which translation engine you choose

How do I install it?

• If you are using WordPress 2.7 or higher, you are able to search for the Global Translator plugin on the plugin search page and automatically install it.
• If you don’t, then you can click this link: Download Global Translator here

- Extract the zip file and upload global-translator folder folder into the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
- Login to your WordPress admin page, click Plugins. Look for “global-translator,” and click the Activate link.

How do I customize it?

After installing the Global Translator plugin, on your Dashboard, go to Settings->Global Translator.

1. Choose your translation engine (i.e. Google Translation Services, Promt Online Translator, Altavista Babel Fish, or FreeTransalator)

2. Select your default language in the My Blog is written in drop-down menu

3. Choose which languages to make available to your visitors

4. Select how you want the language flags displayed

5. Press the Update Options button

6. Go to the Appearance->Widget section, drag the Global Translator widget to your blog’s sidebar

What if my blog is not widgetized or I want to show the language flags on the actual blog post?

Go into your Editor to the location you want the language flags to appear and type the following php code:

<?php
if(function_exists(”gltr_build_flags_bar”)) {
gltr_build_flags_bar();
}
?>

What do my users have do to translate it to their desired language?

I recommend placing the Global Translator widget as the first widget on your blog’s sidebar. Users will select their desired language’s flag, and the page will be translated. Below is a an example where the blog was translated from English to Spanish:

What other software do you use to translate your site?

Smartphones are becoming one of the main ways that people are using to browse sites. People are using them as a computer, telephone, camera, MP3 player, game system, etc. They provide flexibility and mobility when you are constantly on the move. Due to the increasing demand for smartphones, companies and individuals are having to ensure that their sites and blogs are mobile-friendly. If you are using WordPress to power your blog or site, there is a plugin that does the work for you. It’s called MobilePress.

What is MobilePress?

MobilePress is a WordPress plugin that uses customized themes to allow your WordPress blog or site to be viewable via smartphones. It also allows developers to create their own custom mobile themes if they do not want to use the ones provided. Mobile SEO is another feature that detects Google and Yahoo mobile search bots. The bots will use the mobile version of your blog/site, which will help with optimization on Google and Yahoo.

How do I install it?

• If you are using WordPress 2.7 or higher, you are able to search for the MobilePress plugin on the plugin search page and automatically install it.
• If you don’t, then you can click this link: Download MobilePress here
  - Upload mobilepress.1.0.4.zip file into the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
  - Login to your WordPress admin page, click Plugins -> Installed. Look for MobilePress, and click the Activate link.

How do I customize it?

After installing the MobilePress plugin, go to MobilePress->Options.

• If you want the mobile search bots to show a different title and description for your blog/site, then enter them in Blog Title and Blog Description. If not, then leave them blank.
• For Force Mobile Site?, leave it at the default, if you only want mobile sites to pick up the mobile theme.  If you want normal web browsers and smartphones to pick up the mobile theme alike, then change it to “Yes.” It’s best to leave it at “No.”
• For Treat iPhone as a web browser, Treat Windows smartphone as a web browser, Treat Opera Mini as a web browser,  leave it at the default if you only want the mobile theme to be displayed on the smartphone. If you want the regular web version of your blog/site to be displayed on your smartphone, change the appropriate one to “Yes.” As above, it’s best to leave on the default “No.”

How do I choose the mobile theme that I want?

After choosing your options, go to MobilePress->Themes.

Choose the mobile theme you want, and press the Select! button.

What if I want to use my own mobile theme?

Upload your mobile theme to the /wp-content/plugins/mobilepress/themes/ directory. It will then appear in the MobilePress theme selector. You will now be able to use your custom mobile theme.

If you have not been doing regular housekeeping and database maintenance, either because you don’t know how to do or you are just plain lazy, here are 8 useful tricks that you can use to clean up your WordPress database easily and quickly.

1) Turn off/delete post revision

While the post revision is a good way to make sure that any changes to a post is documented, it can be a waste of database and server resources if you are the only user of the blog and does not collaborate with other authors for article writing.

To prevent the post revision from cluttering your database, it is best to turn it off once and for all.

You can easily turn off post-revision by adding the following line to the wp_config.php file

define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);

If you want to keep the post revision for record purpose, you can limit the number of revisions saved per post. In your wp_config.php file, add the following line instead:

define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, no_of_revision);

and replace the no_of_revision by the number of revision copy you want to keep.

Removing existing post revisions

Turning off the post revision feature only restrict WordPress not to keep any revision for future posts. It does not delete the existing post revisions in your database. To delete all instances of post revision and all its related entries), we will make use of the delete-revision plugin with some simple modification (the plugin only delete the post revision. It does not delete all other unused entries that are related to the post revision).

Download the plugin delete-revision to your desktop.

Extract the zip file. Open up the delete-revision folder and load the delete-revision.php file in a text editor. Scroll down to the line 140 where you see

$sql = “DELETE FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_type = ‘revision’”;

replace it with

$sql = “DELETE a,b,c FROM $wpdb->posts a LEFT JOIN $wpdb->term_relationships b ON (a.ID = b.object_id) LEFT JOIN $wpdb->postmeta c ON (a.ID = c.post_id) WHERE a.post_type = ‘revision’”;

(Code adapted from Lester Chan)

Save the file. Upload the whole delete-revision folder to your blog plugins folder.

Activate the plugin. Go to the Delete-Revision page under the Setting section. Run the application to scan your database for all instances of post revisions and delete them from your database.

If you are keeping copies of post revision in your database, you should run the Delete-Revision manager once every few months to clean up your database.

2) Delete unused images

Everytime you upload an image, WordPress automatically create duplicate copies of that image and resize them to thumbnail and medium size. Most of the time, these images are not used. In addition, there could also be some images that you have uploaded, but did not use them in the post. These unused images could easily add up to a massive size and cause unnecessarily burden to the server and database.

The DUI (Delete Unused Images) plugin scans your WordPress blog and find those images that are not used or referenced to by any of the posts/pages. It then proceeds to delete them from the database/server.

To use the plugin, you have use a FTP program to chmod the Uploads folder (the folder where images are stored) to 777. Once you have deleted the unused images, chmod the folder back to 755 again to prevent access from other people.

Similarly, you should run this plugin every few months to clear up your database.

3) Optimize database

As you add or remove entries into the database, pocket of spaces are created. These are useless space and could cause your database to swell quickly. You can easily free up these spaces by running a SQL optimize table query in myphpadmin.

If you are not technically inclined or find it troublesome to log into your myphpadmin, the best way is to use the plugin WP-DBManager to manage your database.

Install and activate the plugin. Under the Database -> Optimize Database options, select the table that you want to optimize and click the Optimize buttonto start the optimization. It should take less than a minute.

You can also schedule it to optimize the database every few days/weeks/months

Go to Database -> Database option. Scroll down till you see the Automatic Optimizing of DB. Set the frequency for it to auto-optimize your database.

4) Delete unwanted plugin

If you have decided that you have no use for a particular plugin, deactivated them and delete them from your server. The more (unused) plugins you keep in your server, the longer it takes for WordPress to generate the plugin list and the higher tendency that it will slow down the loading time of your blog.

5) Uninstall plugin completely

When you deactivated/uninstall a plugin, the options or the tables that the plugin created are not removed. As you install and uninstall a lot of plugin, there will be more and more orphaned options and tables that are taking up precious space in your database.

For plugins that have created table entries in the database, you can use the abovementioned WP-DBManager to drop the respective table from your database.

For those plugins that have created options, you have to use the Clean Option plugin to hunt down the orphaned options and delete them from the database.

6) Remove unused themes

Similarly, if you have plenty of unused themes in the server, delete those that you don’t use.

7) Check your site for deadlinks

While it is an usual practise to link to other posts/blogs/domains in your articles, you should check frequently that the linked post/domain still exist and you are not left with a dead link. It can be very frustrating for your reader to follow your link only to find that the destination page is no longer around. In addition, too many dead links can also affect your search engine ranking. I am sure this is not something that you want to see.

The broken link checker plugin checks your new article for broken links as soon as it is published. It also scans your old posts when you are logged into the Admin page. Any broken links found are reported to you and you can choose to edit or unlink them from the posts.

8) Delete spam comment

It is common to receive tons of spam comments, sometime as soon as you post the article. Even though these spam comments are not shown in your blog, they are still gathered in your database to educate “intelligent” anti-spam plugins. If you received plenty of spam every day (or every hour), this could be taking up a lot of valuable database space. To erase the spam, either go to the Comment -> Spam page, check all the spam comments and select Delete from the dropdown box.

Alternatively, you can use the WP-Optimize plugin to clean up all spam and unapprove comments

The WP-Optimize plugin also comes with other features such as delete revision, optimize database table and change your username. Personally I would prefer to use the WP-DBManager to optimize my database table as it allows me to schedule the optimization task on a regular basis. In addition, the WP-Optimize is only tested for WP2.7, so if you are still using a WP version less than 2.7, you have to use it at your own risk.

What other ways do you use to clean up your WordPress database?

What this plugin does?

The WordPress Widget Changer plugin adds a dynamic widget to your sidebar. You can configure it to show a specific widget for a specific page/post. In the front page, the dynamic widget will not show anything. There is only the static sidebar. However, when a specific page/post is loaded, the widget that you specified will also appear on the sidebar.

Benefit of this plugin?

This plugin allows you to micromanage your ad or the information that you want to show to your readers. You can now display a targeted ad to a specific post that you have written.

For more information on this plugin, check out the plugin homepage or download the plugin here.

Popup itself is not a annoying; it is how you use it that causes annoyance. If you control the frequency of the popup and show it only when you have an important message to tell your readers, then popup itself will be a useful tool.

I have been a strong believer in popup window as it has helped me to boost my sales, increase my subscriber base for countless time. However, when I look around WordPress plugin repository for popup plugin, there are only a limited few. So here I have created a popup plugin that is highly versatile and fully customizable – WordPress Popup Scheduler.

What it does?

This popup plugin is fully customizable and can be used for all kind of situation. As its name implies, this plugin allows you to schedule your popup to show as and when you like.

You can use it:

1. to thank your new visitor for reading your blog.
2. to welcome back your returned readers and invite them to subscribe to your feed
3. to make new announcement to your readers
4. to use during campaign to boost results

Scheduling of Popup

You can choose to display a popup:

• at all time
• when a new visitor visited your blog
• when your readers returned to your blog for the second, third of fourth time
• or for a specified period of time.

In addition, you can set it to show:

• on the home page only
• on visitor landing page
• or specify your own page

Customizable

You can also customize it to suit your blog theme. Things that you can customize include:

• Width of the popup
• background color
• popup headline
• popup message (with the ability to insert image)
• the animation effect of the popup

Popup effect

If you think that popup is too annoying for your readers, you can choose to display the popup as a message before (or after) your first post. Else, you can choose a the following animation effect:

• simple popup
• drop down
• fade in

Download the WordPress Popup Scheduler Plugin here.

The demo here

Current version: 1.2.5.2

Please check out the plugin support page for more detail
(Note: this plugin requires cookie and javascript to be enabled on your visitors browser.)