One of the handy items worth doing with a website is highlighting specific content.  It turns out that there are a number of WordPress plugins available capable of doing the work, to one degree or another. However, for me there is one that stands above the crowd:

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The beauty of this tool is that it does what most of the others can but it does not conflict with the plugins I use.  If you want to see the plugin in action you may view it on two of my personal sites:

• GoodWines and
• FuzzyGuys (a site about our cats…)

Each site provides a slight variation on use of the plugin… but you’ll get the idea. It is worth noting that the plugin does require a small addition to your theme code. But the change is truly small and not very hard to accomodate; plus accurate instructions are provided with the plugin.

This is a real winner.

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As many of you may have noticed, I have been working on improving the ‘noticability’ of my sites using select WordPress Plugins. I can say with certainty now that the following plugins have had a very positive impact on my SEO rankings but more importantly on my site traffic. The plugins I refer to are:

• YARPP- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin- I use this plugin with customized settings (variable per site and my business objectives) to improve cross-linking of information on my site.  This not only improves some of the ratings in Google but seems to have a positive impact on whether or not people stay on the site and look at additional related information.  AND.. since I am in the business of providing information to people, this serves a very improtant function. (Similar functionality can be made available via Simple Tags– although I find this plugin superior.)
• All in One SEO- This plugin is very useful in improving what Google and others see when they examine my web-pages. The one dependency I have observed in using this plugin is to load the same keywords I use/ generate in Simple Tags in the Home Keywords area of this plugin.  This seems to provide a higher hit rate on my pages when the search engines come by.  It additionally appears to have a positive impact on making relevant pages available to search engines.
• SEO Smart Links- I use this plugin for much the same reason as YARPP.  The big plus is that this plugin places hot links within the body of Posts/Pages to facilitate cross-navigation around the site.
• Simple Tags- is possibly the key to everything.  If you are like me and often forget to tag things this plugin makes it easy to augment and re-tag your entire site at will. If you keep the tag list in this plugin as your master, it also makes it easy to cross-link and cross-reference all your SEO data across the site.
  • Be certain to look at the admin function for this tool because you can invoke the following key functions:
  • Related Posts- cross-linking of posts where content is similar (similar to YARPP)
  • Related Pages- cross-linking of pages where content is similar (similar to YARPP)
  • Relevant Tags- listing of the tags used on the Page/ Post

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In order to better understand the relative merits of moving from NoFollow to DoFollow, I have begun a test on this site.

Basically I am using two new (for me) plugins.

• Lucia’sLinkLove -and-
• Nofollow Reciprocity

The basic notion is that Lucia’s LinkLove allows for an automatic reset of the default NoFollow for comments to DoFollow, after pre-determined number (determined by me) of approved comments have been added by a given user to this site. The NoFollow Reciprocity module sets and/all comments to NoFollow if the receiveing site has their site set to NoFollow.

Hopefully this test will demonstrate an uptick in this site’s ratings and traffic without a significant additional burden in SPAM.  I’ll post the results of my test, as they become obvious.  If you have ideas of other plugins that I should add to this mix, please let me know.

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Because there are times when reliable, affordable (read Free) web conferencing would make everyone’s lives easier, I thought you might appreciate this new and highly regarded Open Source offering- it is called DimDim.  DimDim may be found at: http://dimdim.com.

I am registered as: rabideau on the DimDim site.

We will be exploring utilizing this technology for transitioning ideas etc. to our client base.

update: 20 April 2009

The DimDim site/ software does not treat all operating systems equally.  I am hugely disappointed that Linux desktops are not able to share their content with MAC/ PC whereas the reverse is possible.

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For those of you who have been kind enough to spend time on our site, we thank you AND we are pleased to say that we have made a significant breakthrough in our site’s performance.

The long and short of the issue is Plugins. Plugins can act as a significant drag on your site’s performance. We have noticed load times on this site approaching 11+ seconds (wayyyy to slow!). Now the load times are running at about 4.5 seconds (we think that’s much better!). In order to solve this load dilemma we have been using a set of free tools from Pingdom.

Areas of problems we noticed in our debug process included:

• misplaced and missing image directories in the tarski theme (we now have three directories of our little gif images… because of the errant calls within the theme internal calls)
• broken image links (yes we were part of the problem too…)
• numerous poor (read slooowwwwww) plugins; these are all removed

Additionally we have learned to remove any unused (not active) plugin. Inactive plugins can still act as a performance hit. And lastly, I scrubbed our DB. Numerous plugins had left a trail of unused tables and rows in our DB– the worst culprits were a forum plugin and an audit trail plugin.

Again, thank you to everyone for sticking with us. We appreciate your patience and hope you will find our little lessons-learned useful.

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WordPressHelp (WPH) is very pleased to announce that we have implemented the newest release of TreeMagic-Banyan thereby aggregating the web’s most important WordPress information all in one location!!!

In our continuing efforts to make WordPress easier to use, WPH now affords WP developers & users the opportunity to double-click on any text word on this site and gain “instant” access to related WP resource information from:

• WordPress
• Lorelle
• Automattic
• WordPress Themes
• WordPressHelp
• AmbientWebs and
• TreeMagic

Users may access the information from these sites either individually (via the drop-down menu which appears when you double-click on a term) or in a collective, intelligently, pre-processed and correlated fashion (via the WP Banyan Portal). This Web 3 functionality allows users access information ‘on-the spot’ and then return to the source for continued reading and information gathering.

If you have additional sites you wish for us to incorporate in our WP Banyan Portal and TM-Banyan Search function, please use our Contact page to let us know.

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AmbientWebs is pleased to inform everyone that the following sites are now enabled with TreeMagic-Cypress or TreeMagic-Banyan:

• TreeMagic-Cypress sites:
  • http://treemagic.org
  • http://drdiab.info
  • http://ambientwebs.com
  • http://goodwines.org
• TreeMagic-Banyan sites:
  • http://wordpresshelp.org
  • http://processteam.org

Please let us know other sites that are using the plugin… oh and we are also interested in what you might want to see this plugin do next….

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Earlier I made some modifications to a WP-plugin for Drop-Down Menus.  I have placed the cleaned up code on this site for any/all to use. You should find it in the Downloads are.

The original plugin is: Copyright 2007 – Zoute snor

css cleaned up and validated by Mark Rabideau — 26 Nov 2007

All rights reserved by Zoute snor. You are free to use this software and redistribute it for free but may not include it in any commercial distribution without prior written permission.

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TreeMagic Cypress is a new lightweight browser plugin for WordPress. Install, configure, then double click any word, or select a group of words on the page. On mouse-up a small popup appears adjacent to the selected text that gives you instant access to define, expand and explore related resources. It does not replace or interfere with existing hyperlinks, but adds an instant and powerful reference compliment to all your texts, regardless of formatting and styles.
The plugin can be configured to any external Internet website, as well as connecting to your own data, or network. TreeMagic Cypress is available as a free download from the downloads section of this site

The popup has a list of links that is configurable from the plugin administration section. The idea is that when you double click or select a group of words on a page, the popup is invoked adjacent to the word(s) allowing you to rapidly select a web site from the list. Typical examples of this are search engines, Wikipedia, Refdesk and similar knowledge-base sites. After selecting a site, the word(s) you have selected become part of a search string that returns results in a smaller separate popup window. You can of course keep your query results ‘on site’ such as searching your own content, help files or related resources. Because the query URLs are completely configurable in administration, you have total control over the searches, including opening the results page in a resized new window or using the existing target.

TreeMagic Cypress is not new technology and utilizes a small javascript and css to provide the fastest possible way to show extended meaning, content and relationship for text on a page. Once installed every text word on your site, that is not a hyperlink is potentially active. It does not interfere with any other mouse click functions and is totally unintrusive in use. Installation is simple, via a standard WordPress plugin. There are no database changes and the plugin adds negligible overhead to your HTML.

The broad concept is to provide the visitor greater freedom to take diversions from interesting cues in the text, but not taking them from your site in the process. Too many turns in the road and too many temptations to explore, can take your focus away from the content on a page. Most of us have come to realize that it is all too easy to be a ‘browser butterfly’ taking detours from hyperlinks and searches that often leave you marooned and lost in hyperspace. TreeMagic Cypress addresses the need to explore and supplement page content from other resources, but keeps your visitors safely focused on your website.

Searches can be configured for anything from a dictionary definition, translations, image searches to a full blown encyclopedia expositions. Following further links within the results ‘new window’ allows readers to explore in a separate browser page, while keeping your website in view when they want to return. Because we use a new window to display content, all your usual browser tools are available such as page saves and bookmarking your excursions for future returns.

As a web master, you have a simple administration interface that gives options for adding and deleting your website search strings, also the results window target and size. We have included a few samples to get you started, but the choice is up to you to provide the most suitable supplementary content for your website. There are numerous types of applications available for this tool and because you can manage your own reference links, you can offer a variety of offsite or internal content. All you need to do is track down your reference site and discover the correct query string.

Some typical examples of sites are as follows:

Google search
–Images
–News
–Maps
Wikipedia search
Currency converter
whois /IP lookup
answers.com
dictionary.com
Clusty.com
Translation
–en-fr
–en-ge
–en-it
Currency conversions
–£-$
–$-£
Navigation
–Home
–Contact us
–Help!
–Site map
–Site search

Do you need TreeMagic Cypress?

One of the main considerations with WordPress is choosing carefully which plugins to use. Too many and your website can suffer with decreased performance. Because of the tiny script footprint, this plugin will not add any significant processing burden to the database or page loads. It’s simple to use and will add some great features to your web page texts with the minimum of setup. The features and benefits are only limited by your imagination.

Download here …

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Licence.

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