Author-izer

Sallie Goetsch — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:05:30 +0000

Site

www.author-izer.com

Relationship to WordPress Asylum

The Author-izer is Sallie’s other business.

Theme

Authorizer2 by Sallie Goetsch, created with Artisteer

Active Plugins

November 12, 2009

Notes

The plugin that deserves honorable mention here is Redirection, because I installed it on my old authorizer.fileslinger.com site to redirect the original Author-izer blog to the new author-izer.com location. Depending on the kind of 404 messages I start to get from SEO Ultimate (I just switched from All in One SEO Pack), I may install it here, as well.

I did more than move the Author-izer site from a subdomain, however. I expanded the static pages from three to 26 (at last count). That makes a plugin for organizing pages absolutely critical. PageMash works wonderfully. It makes the back end of WordPress look a lot more like the mind map I used for my site redesign.

Another great tool for a large site is Dagon Design Sitemap Creator. Where Google XML Sitemap Creator builds sitemaps for search engines, Dagon Design builds them for humans. You insert one short code phrase into the HTML editor of your sitemap page, and it does all the rest.

I used Podcasting rather than PowerPress mostly because I had never tried it before. As a podcasting consultant, I thought I ought to know how the plugin worked, even though PowerPress is now the podcasting plugin of choice. It works, but I won’t be switching any of my other sites over to it.

Query Posts lets me show recent posts without including the posts that are just collections of Delicious bookmarks inserted by Postalicious. (It lets you do other things, too, but it’s very handy for excluding certain post categories.) While I think it’s useful to have those links collected in my blog, I don’t think they’re the items of most interest to visitors.

I may be taking the Collapsible Archive Widget out, not because there’s anything wrong with it, but just because the current thinking seems to be that including your archives takes up space you could use for something more interesting to your readers. (Also, a colleague told me that all those links to archive pages can slow down your page loading.) Expect to see some updates in the plugin list.