The Download Munkey : Tracking the Treasure Down …

Nice!

I recently installed the LinkWithin widget for thoo2 who always wanted a more pictorial way of presenting links to related content below each post over at her blog. LinkWithin just happens to be one such free(!) service which fits her needs admirably and comes without any annoying ads (yet )

Heck, the cool people at LinkWithin don’t even require you to register an account to get the widget (currently available for Blogger, WordPress and Typepad blogs). Installation for these blogs is a breeze – simply download the widget, follow the instructions at linkwithin.com and you’re done.

For people on other blogging platforms or are using older WordPress themes, don’t fret as you can still use LinkWithin with a wee bit of tinkering with code to insert some Javascript for the widget.

Of course, there’s a catch to LinkWithin being freely available – whenever anyone clicks on a link via the widget, it redirects to LinkWithin’s servers before navigating to the original link. While the redirection is very quick and unobstrusive, those concerned with privacy and data-tracking might want to take note of this little issue before installing it on their blogs. I personally assume it’s for statistics tracking at Linkwithin’s end but don’t take my word for it

Nice!

For most bloggers, the LinkWithin widget is definitely a quick and very attractive way to add a related content section to each post automatically. I’m very sure that the automated selection of related links for each post will never be as relevant as manually handpicked links but there’s a price to pay for laziness, you know

Check out LinkWithin.

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Automatically Translate Your Website into 13 Languages via Google Translate My Page

Just found this very useful Google Gadget Translate My Page to automatically translate English websites into any of the 13 available languages. Installing this widget on a non-English site usually gives you only one option to translate it into English, but it’s still better than nothing. Now you can attract a larger international audience to your wonderful blogs, especially for those written in English

This Google Gadget works on most sites except those that expressively forbid scripting – meaning self-hosted sites and blogs on Blogspot get to enjoy it while blogs on WordPress.com don’t

© nothing2hide.net

Originally, I used the excellent Global Translator WordPress widget (above)from nothing2hide.net which comes with cute little flags of all languages available for translation. Although Dreamhost offers a fantastic 500+ GB of bandwidth per month, it isn’t exactly that generous in terms of download speed and causes the flag images for the Global Translator plugin to not load on multiple occassions, so I finally gave up and made the switch to Translate My Page last week.

IMPORTANT: The Global Translator WordPress plugin caches the translated pages which can be indexed by search engines, meaning visitors can find your site with non-English keywords. The Translate My Page widget doesn’t so that’s a important consideration if you’re thinking of making the same transition.

Get the script code for Translate My Page at the Google Translate site (top) or if you want additional customizability (widget size, border, default language, etc), visit its Google Gadget page (bottom). There’s more Google Gadgets to embed on your website over at iGoogle.

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Been busy fixing www.downloadmunkey.net and thoo2.net last week. Somehow I exceeded Photobucket’s 25GB bandwidth limit last month, resulting in most images on my previous site to randomly disappear for the last few days.

As a result, I switched to a WordPress site at Dreamhost.com. You can get your own at 22.40 USD/~33SGD for 1 domain registration + hosting for 1 year with promocode DOWNLOADMUNKEY

While fiddling with the WordPress configuration, I downloaded quite a few plugins and I’ve compiled a list of useful ones that I’m using. I believe that Akismet should be compulsory for any WordPress site and so doesn’t count in this list

1. Subscribe To Comments – IMHO the most important plugin to install. Allowing readers to subscribe to your comments makes it much easier to follow conversations. To place the “Subscribe to comments via email” checkbox above the Submit button, check out Derek Punsalan’s post at 5ThirtyOne.
2. FeedBurner FeedSmith – For redirecting your WordPress RSS feeds to your FeedBurner feed so that you can track readership and other stats.
3. Global Translator – Allows your readers to translate your English site to Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Portuguese, Russian or Spanish via Google Translation, Promt or Babelfish with a single click.
4. Exec-PHP – Handy for running PHP code in text widgets like those visual plugins which do not come as widgets but as code that you have to manually insert into the PHP templates e.g Global Translator.
5. Google XML Sitemaps – Create a XML sitemap for submission to search engines like Google or Yahoo!
6. WP-PostViews – Allows you to show the number of views for a post. Somehow I enjoy seeing 0 views in the posts all over this site Comes with an additional widget to show the top 10 most viewed posts in your sidebar.
7. Dean’s Permalinks Migration – I realized I preferred the date and name based permalink structure like Blogger’s permalink structure over the default WordPress permalink structure (e.g ?p=123) a few days after I set the site to go ‘live’. This nifty plugin allows both internal and external links using the older permalink structure to redirect correctly and seamlessly to the new location.

Also check out these two useful lists of plugins and widgets compiled @ eJabs.com and debbiewhoelse.com that I found while searching for useful plugins.