Here is a list of plugins that I have used on my old blog and couldn’t live without when I moved to FiddyP.

• SH-autolink
  An excellent plugin that can make keywords automatically link to whatever you want. Just install and avtivate. Go to Manage/Sh-autolink and you can add a word and it’s corresponding link, you can also choose to open link in the same window, new window, parent frame or top frame. I use it all the time for words like uvme or elottery or vwd.
  I like the fact that the html for the links isn’t saved with the post so if you want to change where a particular word links to, you can and anywhere that word is in your posts it will link to the new url
• Deans Permalinks Migration Plugin
  This saved my life, I had my permalinks set to the old ?cat= and I wanted to change them to a more search engine friendly version without ruining the old links and this did the job, it makes the old links report a 301 page moved and the search engines will index the new one and you don’t lose any page rank and all the old links still work.
• Feedburner Feedsmith
  Makes all your feeds point to your feedburner feed so you can track the amount of subscribers and also see what posts they clicked through to and more. It makes it much easier for surfers to subscribe by providing links to all the major feed subscription services like google reader and yahoo.
• Instant Upgrade
  I hated updating Wordpress, there were too many chances of overwriting the wrong files. Fortunately, this plugin takes care of all that for you. It’s reported to work with the 2.3 upgrade too.
• Popularity Contest
  This assigns scores to your posts based on comments, pingbacks, permalink views and more. You can also display the top posts in your sidebar. Nice to have the most viewed posts up for display to new visitors.
• Related Posts
  I’ve found myself clicking on related post links when I have clicked through to a single post on someones blog so I installed the plugin here and the related posts links have been getting clicked, especially on a single post that’s getting a lot of hits from Stumbleupon. It may take a few posts before it starts getting better at relating the content but it works quite well.
• Samsarin PHP widget
  An easy peasy way to add php scripts to your widget enabled blog, just past your script in the widget options and drag it to the sidebar to have it execute along with the wordpress core php on the server side. Good if you use widgets on your sidebar and have a plugin that requires you to edit the sidebar template with the plugins procedure name.
• IG:Syntax Hiliter
  Probably the best plugin for showing source code on your blog, it can do html, php, javascript, perl and much more. Very easy to use, the way to add buttons to the post page isn’t really needed if you only show one type of language, just use the [] [/]tags with the language name to enclose the code.
• Live
  Adds a really nice AJAX real time stats page to your admin pages. Shows visits, referers and comment entry.
• Top Commentators
  Encourage people to make more than one visit and comment, reward them for joining the discussion with a list of top commentators on your sidebar.
• Subscribe to Comments
  An easy way to allow surfers to subscribe to the comments of the post that they comment on.
• WP-Online Counter
  Shows how many visitors on your site at one time and keeps a total of unique visitors over time.
• WP AJAX edit comments
  How many times have you made a comment on someones blog and noticed a typo after you submitted? lol, it happens to me all the time. This plugin allows your commenters a few minutes to edit their comment.
• DoFollow
  Allows the links to your commenters sites to be followed by search engines, another nice incentive for people to join in the discussion of your blog.
• SpamKarma 2
  A lot of people use Akismet to combat comment spam but I have found SK2 to be a much better and easier experience. I very rarely have to moderate a comment or flag one as spam and on my old PR5 blog, it caught dozens a day and had a fantastic success rate on authorizing legitimate comments through all the mess of viagras and elargment spam.
• CommentLuv
  A nice way to spread some lurv to the readers who comment by adding a titled link to their last blog post. Like BlogRush but for people who you know, why link to strangers blogs with a widget when you can reward your commenters and provide links to people that are in your community?
  I made this one! I’m not a pro PHP coder and this isn’t at a full 1.0 release but it seems to work nicely on the blogs that I’ve seen it on and I’m going to keep developing this as my blog progresses.

Phew! and that’s not all of them, just the ones that I have found to be useful and above all, easy to install and use. Props to all the coders who provide the plugins that Wordpress is famous for.

Popularity: 7% [?]

I had my first SURGE of stumbleupon traffic and managed to capture the event on Camtasia!

I think I only got the tail end of it but it lasted for a nice while, it even came back the next day although at a reduced rate, stats and geekery below the video.

.

I’m guilty of giving some of my own posts a thumbs up now and then to start a trickle of Stumbleupon traffic to an article I have written or seen elsewhere such as the Hide a rar file in a jpeg. I saw it on a blog completely obliterated with adsense blocks so I decided to reprint it here in a cleaner-easier-to-read way. It got some traffic and upped my feed subscriber count but, the traffic wasn’t huge, just a few hits each hour, but still nice to have some new readers to my new blog

Then, I saw a small side article in a daily newspaper (yes, there is news available outside the internet!) about how Tussauds in London was due to show it’s first ever computer game character, it looked like a great story and I did a bit of research on Google for “Tussauds” ,”London” and “master chief”.

There were plenty of articles but none that mentioned London. Great!, there was one page that I found about Master Chief being in the Las Vegas version of Tussauds, it had some good information and some really great pics so I thought I would snag the pics, do some Photoshopping on it to give them a London edge and “make me an article” for here.

I was quite pleased with the Master chief is coming to London and gave it a thumbs up on my work browser and finished off for the day and went home content with writing a new article that didn’t suck and wasn’t a copy and paste of some content found elsewhere.

When I got back home, I went to my Live page (a plugin [link] that displays hits to your site in realtime) in my Wordpress dashboard to see what was going on at FiddyP and I was amazed!, the video above is the tail end of what I saw.

These are the load times in the middle of the spike..

So, even with 141 at a time coming in, the server was still able to send the page in less than 5 seconds to most of the world.

I think the difference with this self stumble was that it was for a unique article and a few people gave it a thumbs up one after the other, I think that if you can get a few thumbs up as soon as the submitted page goes into circulation then you get a sort of exponential increase which could lead to another one and so on. As long as you keep getting thumbs up, the traffic will keep coming.

The hits started again the next day..

Some google stats..
One of the (many) good things about Google analytics is the way you can refine the stats so you can see all the individual stats for a particular referrer or page, here’s what was found just for the stumbleupon visitors

Not bad, average of 2 pages per visit means a lot of them took the time to see what else was on the site. 33% is a pretty good bounce rate for a social networking happening.

Encouragingly, nearly 90% of the people coming in were using Firefox. Sensible people use Stumbleupon

The vast majority of visitors had bigger than a 1024×768 screen, most had widescreens which surprised me, there must be a lot more widescreens out there than I thought.

I’ve seen a lot of advice about being a top Stumbler or increasing your ‘juice’ at places like StumbleGods that say you should add as many friends as you like and be a social junkie with comments and reviews of peoples profile pages. I think they’re right but for someone as busy as me, it’s hard to dedicate time to spend all my day trying to make contacts, the upside is, the contacts I do make are because they have recommended particularly good pages or I’ve ‘met’ them through this blog.

I was trying to think how I could repeat the event with a new post and spent a little while thinking what “they” want but, I don’t want to try and predict what people that come here will like, that’s not why I started this blog.

The best thing that I can do is, not worry about what Stumblers want and carry on making my blog for me for fun and writing about things that I find interesting without re-hashing stuff that’s already been done, if people like a post they will stumble it and if it’s good enough then sure as eggs is eggs, other people will and so on.

Overall, it was a good experience being bathed in hits for a short while. At least my server didn’t crash and it has given me some encouragement to carry on doing the things I like to do anyway and that’s plenty of geekery with a sprinkle of humour and a drop or two of nice pictures.

Thanks Stumbleupon! (and users) it was fun while it lasted!

Popularity: 5% [?]

This week there is a MASSIVE

175 million euros

to be won on the Euromillions and it HAS TO BE WON!

That means, if it isn’t won with 5 numbers and 2 lucky stars, it will roll down to the next available winner. I’m really excited about this because I have multiple accounts and multiple entries on each one with VWD because I have introduced quite a few people to elottery as affiliates. When you introduce 15 people, you get an extra entry each week, you keep getting extra entries (up to a maximum of 7) when you introduce more people.

It’s a great system and it’s what’s paid the bills for over 2 years now, if I’d saved all the money I made in commission and prizes, I could have bought a house! (damn, that makes me feel kinda funny!)

Even better, because of the way we run our syndicates, we can be sure that every syndicate will always match at least the 2 lucky star numbers! I’ve won hundreds of times with my free entries since I joined and I’m crossing all my fingers and toes for this one.

Can you imagine the publicity if when we win? LOL, it would cause a massive influx of new members!

Now to plan what I’m going to do with my winnings! What would you do with yours?

(the draw is being run on Friday, you can enter with VWD up until 6.30pm GMT+1 on the day and just play for one draw, it’s totally worth it) - (non-USA only)

Popularity: 3% [?]

I am really pleased that a few people have started using the CommentLuv plugin, I was over at Chessnoids place and saw that one of his commenters had a post called “7 reasons why I hate stumbleupon” under his comment and I had to click it!

I ended up visiting a site I had seen before on stumbleupon and the post is quite funny, as one of the other commenters said “Haha spoken like a true SU junkie. I feel your pain buddy “

I saw that Chessnoid had been there in the comments too, and it confirms what I had originally thought, the people that comment on your own blog must have similar views or interests to you because otherwise, they wouldn’t be commenting on your posts and the people that comment on their blogs must also be similar to you and so on and so on. What a great way to find new blogs and meet ‘proper’ people.

I hope some more people get to use this plugin, I’m sure it can add to a community spirit amongst bloggers that use it, spread the lurv

Popularity: 4% [?]

I noticed a new referrer in my stats the other day and it seems I am above google.com and yahoo.com on the popular sites page of Internetsupervision.com!

This probably came about because I stumbled my results page of internetsupervision, if you don’t know, internetsupervision is a very useful site that tells you how long your page takes to load from all over the world.

An ideal tool for tweaking your website and the reason why I took the blogcatalog widget off the blog, with it on, it took a minimum of 10 seconds and sometimes up to 60 for this page to load. Without it, the loading time is under 5 seconds from everywhere, including Chile and China!

It’s nice to know I beat the big guys at something

Popularity: 3% [?]