Mephistos

Cool Tools

By Ray on August 28th, 2009

As is usual for me on occasion, I have been doing some house cleaning on the blog plugins and a few other things. I started some of this back before my laptop got stolen and so I am not completely sure what has been reported on what has not. Most of the things below are regarding new blog plugins and a few updated notes on some older ones. There are a couple of non-blog tools included as well. All are open source and free to download and install, which was a guiding force as much as possible when I put things back together on my new laptop. And you know this is going to be a list…

• Pidgin IM – It is probably the greatest thing to have come along since the instant messenger chat system itself. First in its list of kudos is that it is open source which is a HUGE plus by my accounting and they already have compiled versions available for most operating systems. What is great though is its support for a huge number of chats, including Yahoo IM, AOLIM, MSNIM, IRC, and ICQ to just name a few of the alphabet soup that is supported. That allows for one client to be used in all of those cases instead of multiple ones and yet you can stay in touch with that diehard person that just refuses to move on to something else. Historically some functionality, such as file sharing was limited or lost, but current version seem to support those on all platforms that have such things natively. It does get a bit bloated supporting all of them, but still comes in at about the same size (memory usage) as any one of the above clients. There are some others out there in this area, but none seem to do all that Pidgin does.
• KB Linker – This is a nice little plugin for WordPress that automatically fills in links for you. I for instance, have several websites and whenever I use those words instead having to manually create an html link, I can use KB Linker to define the text and what link with which I wish it to be associated. This one is a handy minor time-saving gadget in my opinion but well worth the short setup.
• MobilePress – Another great plugin for WordPress. This one in particular enables several of the more common ‘smart-phones’ browsers. It also strips down a lot of the multimedia (think your theme gets wiped out) to make it more conducive to both load and especially see on the smaller device. I still do not think this is the way the world is going to head in mass, but it is nice to provide that functionality for the few that are looking for it and increase your blog readership appropriately – especially given the minimum effort required on this plugin.
• Google Images – A quick one here, but I am often looking for a photo that I can include in a blog that makes sense. Usually I have just used the plain old google search engine. If you use the one above though it only searches images. NOTE: I still do not always remember to do so, but when I do I try to credit the source of the photos that I use if it is appropriate.
• Pidgin Facebook Chat – Ad this plugin to the Pidgen product I noted above and you have the best combination of all messaging and chat. A lot of my friends no longer use the chats of yesterday but do occasionally shout at me from Facebook. Feature wise that chat lacks a LOT and further it crashes often, hangs up, and generally looses threads in the conversation. Further, there is no easy way to archive things for later reference. This plugin takes care of all that and more while integrating right into a nice standard chat platform. I have seen a few cases where it times out, but it seems to come right back and that may have been because of my poor connectivity at home. If we could only get this for Gmail chat the world would be completely right.
• GIMP – I may have mentioned this one before, not sure. Regardless if you are doing graphics or even some photo cleanup and do NOT want to spend a bundle for some of the big packages GIMP is open source and really handles it all very nicely. It has a lot of support in the open community and rarely have I come across something it does not do well that any of the more popular packages handle.

And some quick notes about some tried and maybe not so true plugins.

• Kontera – This the one I have been using to put word advertising embedded. It is not really generating a lot of revenue (did not expect much, but fifty-four cents in nearly six months). The aggravation of it loosing settings and the occasional accidental hovering by users is starting to make me wonder if this one is worth it without a HUGE stream of traffic.
• Ping.FM – still a good tool and one I use still with the phone and in conjunction with several social network sites to coordinate twitter, but the twitter tools seems to have that handled well enough now and it still has that limitation of one blog only. I was not using the advanced features to blog via a ping (or tweet) to my site, but that is now available in the twitter tool pack too.
• Twitter Tools – Another plugin that does a great job, but it now ads about three more plugins that I will not use. Do NOT try to delete them though, as it wipes the whole twitter tool plugin pack, not just the one unit. Fortunately all the previous settings are preserved after a quick reload. Yes, if you are wondering this experience speaking.

I have more than a few more things to talk about as I go through and test them out. Hopefully I will get an opportunity to work on a few of them over the weekend and have a new post shortly. Look for it soon if you like this kind of stuff and if not look for something completely different in between now and then.

** Picture from England’s Leatherman Tool site.