Blog updates: plugins and services

Site Referrer Info

I’ve finally gotten around to implementing a blog function that I’ve long wanted to incorporate into my blogs: a greet box to personalize my readers’ experience. You can see this in popular blogs such as Weblog Tools Collection. The reason for needing this is, I’ve decided to consolidate all my online contact forms into one site — Blogie.me — to lessen the load on my server somehow. (Even though I run a dedicated server, it’s never a bad idea to constantly find ways to optimize server performance.)

So, I was looking for a way to capture site referrer information (i.e., where are my visitors coming from?) so that I could properly inform my visitors that they weren’t lost when they landed on the Blogie.me contact form. So, let’s say you were in AngDabawenyo.com and you clicked on the “Contact” link — you’d be brought to a different site where I now host a centralized contact form. I realize that, for many people, this might be a rather jolting experience (because blogie.me looks very different from my other blogs). That’s why I think it’s important to be able to tell people something like: “You clicked on the ‘Contact’ link from AngDabawenyo.com…”.

The WordPress plugin I’m using for this is called WP Greet Box. If you have the same concerns as I do, I recommend you install this plugin. The cool thing about it is, you can configure custom greetings. The plugin comes with built-in greetings for visitors from Google, StumbleUpon, Digg, etc. But none for Plurk. Since I do get quite a bit of traffic from Plurk, I inserted a custom greeting (see below), which you’ll see on my posts should you happen to click on a link from that awesome microblogging platform.

I got the Plurk icon from rez0.info. Thank you!!

And here’s another greeting for readers referred by StumbleUpon.com:

Custom Registration Page

Another plugin that’s caught my attention is Register Plus. The coolest thing about it is, you can replace the WordPress logo in the registration / login page with your own image. Take a look at the login page for MindanaoBloggers.com:

This is particularly userful for community blogs where you want to build a sense of belonging among your members. Or, if you’re using WordPress for a corporate website and there are several people from the company accessing the admin backend, this is a good way to do site branding.

This plugin also lets you customize the user registration page. In WordPress’ default registration, only the username and email are asked for. But with this plugin, you can require registrants to fill in more information, such as their full name, blog URL, and even have them click on check boxes to agree to your website policies. There’s even a way to insert Captcha to minimize spam registrations.

Watch out for more WP plugin features and other WordPress stuff right here!

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WordPress plugins I use  |  Custom WP login page  |  Blog interviewed  |  Useful plugin for code  |  Tracking your blog’s subscribers