Get 25% off any hosting plan at Hostgator. Use coupon code wphosting9 at Hostgator checkout
Plugins
Add Web Fonts to WordPress
WP Google Fonts Plugin Review
Aug 29, 2010 hreview by Gary
Web fonts are increasing in popularity very rapidly. There is no longer the need to use the standard fonts available for use with Internet Browsers and Computers. Web fonts mean that a vast number of fonts are easily available for use in your website via an Online font directory.
As part of the many tools available from the Google Code Website is the Google Font Directory that has an increasing number of Web fonts for use in Websites. The great thing about the Google Font Directory is that the fonts are free to use!
So how can we use these free Web fonts in WordPress? With the very powerful WP Google Fonts WordPress Plugin all one does is install and activate the plugin then choose which typography to use and when (e.g. just Header1 or all text etc.). There is also the ability to add CSS definitions.
The plugin author has done a great job of making a simple to use Plugin that offers many possibilities.
Metaweb TopicBlocks Plugin Review
Plugin needs work
Jul 17, 2010 by Gary
Now that Google has acquired Metaweb (and Freebase) I thought that the ‘Metaweb TopicBlocks’ WordPress Plugin may have improved.
Unfortunately data displayed by this Plugin still doesn’t look great at all.
The official description of the Plugin is below and I recommend waiting until the Plugin has been updated:
‘The Metaweb plugin is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily add Metaweb TopicBlocks to your blog posts directly from within WordPress. You can quickly add TopicBlocks to individual blog posts or have TopicBlocks automatically inserted whenever you use certain tags.’
High Performance Google Analytics for WordPress
The Google Analytics Plugin by Yoast has been downloaded almost 1 million times for good reason; it does its job very well and is a solid and reliable WordPress plugin.
Version 4 of this popular Plugin has been released and has uses the awesome ‘Asynchronous’ loading of the Google code. Google describes this asynchronous loading thus; the code ‘loads in parallel with other code load the tracking code in parallel with other scripts on the page, thus reducing the web page load time’.
Many previous users of Yoasts Google Analytics Plugin will notice that the code runs by default in the header which, as Website speed buffs will know, is usually not a good place to run code that may be run in the footer. Fear not however as, because the code runs in parallel with other code, placing it in the header may actually have benefits over running it in the footer. We’ve tested with both Google Pagespeed and Yahoo YSlow and saw marginally better scores with Pagespeed by placing the code in the header as opposed to the footer (i.e. this is a good result).
Well done to Google and Yoast!