As an accumulation of research over the past couple of weeks, I have come across 6 Wordpress Plugins each one totally different from the next that you might find helpful in a project of yours or maybe even on your own Wordpress blog.

1. Full Registration Form

With this plugin you add the fields ‘First Name’, ‘Last Name’, ‘Nickname’, ‘Description’, ‘Website’ to your registration form. By default, the wp-register.php file that allows your readers to register as a user to your blog only asks for Username and Email. You can of course use this to get a little more information about your users.

2. Side Content

This plugin provides similar functionality to the Drupal Side Content module. It enables you to define a set of widgets which are effectively placeholders. Each one is empty until you assign content to it when editing a page. This enables you to effectively extend the content of the page into the sidebar. Suppose, for example, you have a set of pages about people in your company. You could use a side content widget to add a biography for each of them, or a photo, or to list their favorite pizza toppings. You can use the plugin without any template changes at all, but it does provide a simple API so you can test for the presence of side content widgets and adjust your templates accordingly.

3. WP-LinkChanger

WP-LinkChanger is a small script for affiliate link masking. That means all of your affiliate links in a post will automatically be changed to an internal file. After installation all links of your new posts will look like http://your.domain.tld/exit.php instead of http://evil.affiliatelink.com/ref/id/123

4. Email Commenters

Sometimes you want an easy way to e-mail all the people who commented on a certain post. Up till now that took a bit of work, now it’s as easy as installing this plugin, and clicking the link you’ll get underneath each post labeled “Mail the commenters on this post”!

5. WordPress MU Sitewide Tags Pages

This plugin creates a new blog on your WordPress MU system for all the posts on your site, much like http://wordpress.com/tags/ For performance reasons the number of posts is limited to a user configurable amount, and the blog itself can be made indexable by search engines or not.

6. WP Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. However, because a user’s details are displayed in the comment form after they leave a comment, the plugin will only serve static html files to:

1. Users who are not logged in.
2. Users who have not left a comment on your blog.
3. Or users who have not viewed a password protected post.

This plugin should help your server cope with a front page appearance on digg.com or other social networking site.

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Do you want to speed up your Torrent downloads? Then here are 5 tips that could help you. These are just basic tips, and I will be listing some more advanced tips later on on this blog. But start with and make sure you are doing the basics first, before you move on to the advanced.

1. Seed

Downloading speeds will be sub-optimal for everyone unless everyone plays their part and seeds. Private tracker sites are a great example of how the overall speed of the swarm increases when everyone is seeding and downloading in equal measure. So, play your part in seeding and tell others to as well.

2. Be Connectable

Make sure you’re not “firewalled” by opening up your incoming ports or by enabling UPnP in your router, otherwise you’ll be leaving bandwidth on the table.

3. Manage your upload speed

It is all about striking a balance. You don’t want the upload speed to be too high, nor do you want it to be too low. Ideally you want to set your upload speed to be 80% of the maximum possible line speed.Try this handy settings calculator, works for all clients

4. Select the right Torrents

Your download will be faster if you choose to download a torrent where there is a good balance of seeds and peers. For instance, Vuze ranks its search results according to the number of seeds and peers to make this easier.

5. Be Realistic

Check the swarm average and if you’re already above average, then you just need to be patient. If you’re below average, go back and check some of these other things I’ve mentioned.

Much thanks to torrentfreak.com for providing this list of tips. You’d be surprised how much you can speed up your downloads just by following these 5 basic tips. My downloads increased dramatically. Big downloads basically got cut down to about a day rather than several days.

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Camstudio is the open source screen recording software for your computer. There are many other software companies that offer to sell a screen recording/capturing software. But if you know how to use Camstudio correctly and understand some of the basics of configuring it, you’ll never need any paid software in this field. Camstudio will do the job completely for you. The following YouTube video is by far the best instructional video on how to setup and use Camstudio. It will tell you everything you need to know.

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In case you didn’t know, let me be the one to tell you. The Official Wordpress Themes Directory is back live again and updated with all new free themes for your wordpress “crazies” like me. No more searching those random affiliate ad heavy websites for new themes. The official theme directory for Wordpress should be pretty well updated with everything from here on.

Tip: RSS Subscribe to the Newest Themes

A simple little tip that will help you stay up to date on all the latest new themes that come in through the directory. When you go to the themes directory, click on the “Newest Themes” link located on the right hand side of the page. You will notice now you have an option to subscribe to this page via RSS. That way, you can see all the new themes right as they are coming in and stay ahead of everyone else on the goods!

Contribute Through Voting

Help the community know which themes are the best by using the 5 star voting system and voting each theme you come across. This will help everyone as a Wordpress community sift through the bad and the good. This will only take you not even a second as you are browsing the different themes, so just do it and help the rest of us out!

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Many of you i’m sure are accustomed to dealing with many of the open source ecommerce/shopping cart applications and might understand what i’m about to explain to you. It’s so hard to find any good free templates/themes for any of these ecommerce applications. Most of them, especially OScommerce and Zen Cart are absolutely hideous looking right out of the box.

Free Ecommerce Theme from CSS Creme

CSS creme has put together a free CSS ecommerce template that looks pretty nice. It’s simple and coded together well so that you can customize it and use your imagination on top of what is already put together. If you are using an open source application like me, you will need to apply this template to your theme and make your customizations. But I know with me that this will save me some serious time on a few projects of mine.

Instead of recreating the wheel everytime I make a shopping cart website, I can build off an already CSS/XHTML built template and make my customizations after that. The free template comes with 3 pages:

• Product Listing Template
• Product Detail Template
• Form Template (contact us)

That way you have enough to build off of with your Zen Cart theme or OScommerce theme or even Ubercart theme. This also could be a benefit if you are just putting together a quick shopping cart for a friend or relative for free, and you don’t have much time to put something elaborate together. Just throw this CSS template together with your theme and you are good to go.

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Here’s a new and interesting plugin. It’s called the FriendFeed Comments Wordpress Plugin and it displays your FriendFeed comments from your posts on your Wordpress blog. It’s kind of a difficult thing to describe easily, so i’ll let the creator explain it to you.

“This plugin will allow you to display on your own site the comments that people make on FriendFeed about your post. I keep trying to think of a more succinct way of writing that but I can’t. It always sounds more confusing than it is.” There we go that’s much better.

How it’s Used in your Template

The plugin ads a template tag called <?php wp_ffcomments(); ?>, which you can drop onto your template somewhere inside “the loop” so it can access the post’s details to match it up with the FriendFeed data.

How I plan to Use it

I personally have not been to motivated by the FriendFeed tool, despite all the attention that it has been getting. But now if I can integrate the comments between FriendFeed and my blog, then I don’t see any reason why I won’t promote my blog posts on FriendFeed and start building a network of friends. In my blogging efforts, I hope to be able to use this method to build more comments and conversation on my blog(s).

Why FriendFeed?

The interesting aspect of FriendFeed is its quick evolution from a lifestreaming service to lifestreaming plus discussion forum plus latest news plus search engine. It seems to be a way to add all of these different information sources into one. The way I see it, if you can tap into all of my informational resources, than you can know everything I know about the Internet. And that becomes mutual. I can learn everything you know about the Internet. Knowledge sharing increases at incremental rates if people use FriendFeed to it’s capacity.

You can download this plugin from the creator’s website. Don’t forget to inform him of any bugs that you may come across. And don’t forget to thank him for his contributions.

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