Blogging

Bloggab (9/3): Your Must-Have Blog Plugins & Widgets

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Last Updated on July 22, 2018

#Bloggab is a weekly Twitter chat about personal blogging. Join us each Tuesday night at 9pmET. You can always find transcripts of past editions here.

Part of the fun of platforms like WordPress and Blogger is that in addition to a variety of themes (and the option of tweaking existing themes or incorporating your own designs), you have the option of adding additional functionality through plugins and widgets.

Plugins are separate pieces of code that can add certain functions throughout the site. On Blogger, a plugin is a widget.

On WordPress, a widget is a specialized kind of plugin that appears in your sidebar.

But semantics aside, plugins can do everything from changing the way your comments appear to monitoring your analytics to enabling social sharing more easily to behind-the-scenes scanning for security vulnerabilities.

There’s almost no end in sight to the options these pieces of software can give blog owners to make the experience better for the audience.

At the moment, I have 21 active plugins on my blog. Livefyre, a third-party comment platform is one of them. Another powers the contact form on my Contact page.

The Social Stickers plugin powers the circular social plugin icons that connect my readers with me on the various social networks on which I maintain a presence. It’s a quick and convenient way to encourage connections outside the blog.

Shareaholic places quick and easy share buttons beneath individual blog posts to help people share my content if they feel a desire to do so.

Another valuable plugin I’ve found is called P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler). This plugin keeps an eye on all of the others, meticulously scanning the load time of a blog and presenting me with a graphical representation of which ones take the most time to load: on occasions in which there was significant slowdown on the blog, that plugin helped me track whether a specific plugin was to blame. In fact, I’ve deleted a few plugins that P3 demonstrated were causing too much of a negative impact on the blog’s load time or on my host server.

Those are just a few of mine. Now that I think about it, maybe one day soon I’ll post a list of the plugins I’ve found most useful so far on my blog.

In the meantime, I hope you’ll join us Tuesday at 9pmET to talk about plugins you’ve had good or bad experiences with, what you look for in a plugin, and which additional functionality you’d love to have but haven’t found, yet.

the authorPatrick
Patrick is a Christian with more than 30 years experience in professional writing, producing and marketing. His professional background also includes social media, reporting for broadcast television and the web, directing, videography and photography. He enjoys getting to know people over coffee and spending time with his dog.

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