CarmaBlog

Since version 1.8, Jetpack WordPress plugin includes a new plugin called “Mobile theme”, in order to improve the user experience of your blog with mobile devices.

Almost nothing to configure, absolutely brilliant!

Classic desktop theme

Mobile theme

The plugin replaces automatically your theme. At the bottom of the page, the user can still choose to go back to the classic desktop theme.

To know which other plugins I am using on CarmaBlog, you can read my previous post.

You want to know how your site looks like in different smartphone browsers (iPhone IOS, Samsung Android or BlackBerry RIM)? This website is the one I used to do the screenshots and works pretty well.

The purpose of my article is not to present WordPress, but to introduce you some plugins that I use on my blog. Most of these extensions are famous and well designed.

Akismet

Akismet checks your comments to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. It saves me from reading 2 000 spams, so I let you imagine what can happen when your web site has a high-traffic.

WordPress SEO

WordPress SEO optimizes your site for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization) thanks to keywords, page titles, etc.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 adds a contact form to your site. You can customize fields and messages. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting and Captcha.

Really Simple CAPTCHA

Really Simple CAPTCHA adds an additional CAPTCHA module for the Contact Form 7 plugin. It does not work alone, however, you can use it with your own plugin.

Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps generates a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. It notifies all major search engines every time you create a post.

qTranslate

qTranslate allows you to create a multilingual blog. Be aware there is no instant translation, but you will have to write your own translations.

Revision Control

Revision Control allows finer control over the Post Revision system included with WordPress. By default, if you are editing and reediting posts on your blog, you are keeping revision copies of every change you make. Not so useful, specially if you are the only author.

Shadowbox JS

Shadowbox JS is an online media vieiwing application supporting all types of media (image, video, music). Shadowbox is written in JavaScript and CSS, thus compatible with most browsers.

WP-Cumulus

WP-Cumulus displays your site’s tags using a Flash movie that rotates them in 3D. It works just like a regular tags cloud, but is more visually exciting.

WP-PageNavi

WP-PageNavi adds a more advanced paging navigation to your site.

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved provides clean syntax highlighting and line number support for embedding source code within pages or posts. A must have when your blog is about IT programming… Like mine !

WP-ShkShell

WP-ShkShell provides a terminal-like box for embedding terminal commands.

Jetpack

Jetpack adds many features, some are very useful. I’m using these modules : Statistics, Email subscriptions, Sharing buttons on social networks, Hovercard popups via Gravatar, Twitter widget, Mobile compatibility, Photon service to boost the image loading.

WP-PostViews

WP-PostViews enables you to display how many times a post / page had been viewed.

YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin)

YARPP displays a list of related entries on your site and RSS feeds.

Social Media Widget

Social Media Widget adds links to all of your social media and sharing site profiles.

Configurable Tag Cloud

Configurable Tag Cloud gives you more flexibility with the styling of your tag cloud. For example, change font colors and sizes, display the number of related posts…

Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress

Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress serves a CAPTCHA to new commenters, or if Akismet thinks their comment is spam. All other commenters never see a CAPTCHA. This extension is the perfect combination with Askismet, you will save time by avoiding searching in the list of potential spam for the presence of illegitimate spam.

CaptureFox is a Firefox plug-in allowing you to perform screencasts (videos of computer screen output) for free and easily from Firefox. Unfortunately, it is only supported on the Microsoft Windows platform.

After installing and activating the plugin, a new icon appears in the status bar of Firefox.

Click the icon to record your first screencast.

Before you click on the “Start Capturing!” button, I advice you to customize the default settings :

• The capture area can be the whole screen, the Firefox window or a specific portion of the Firefox window. If you select the whole screen, you can minimize Firefox and thus capture anything on your screen (like another software);
• Adjust the video quality;
• The number of frames per second;
• If you have a microphone, you can record your voice as well (useful in a tutorial for example);
• The folder where the screencast will be recorded.

Advanced settings are available on the second tab :

• The video and audio codecs to use. The final quality and size of the video will be different depending on the codecs selected;
• You can enter a delay time, so that CaptureFox doesn’t start as soon as you click on the button. It waits for you to be prepared;
• You can set CaptureFox to start when you minimize Firefox window, and stop it when Firefox window gets focus;
• The output filename.

Everything is configured ? Go ! Start recording.

To end the recording, you need to click the icon again in the Firefox status bar (or Ctrl+Shift+U shortcut).

A window shows up and asks you what to do, open the screencast, save it in a specific location or simply start again if you are not satisfied with the result.

I use it for quite some time now and I have noticed that on old computer, there may be some latency on the video produced. Also, CaptureFox tends to crash when you use the dual screen. I recommend you to disable it temporarily when recording your screencasts.

Except these two things, the plug-in works just perfect, especially easy to install & use.

You should test it with different settings and perhaps use a video editing software to put the finishing touches.