Excited By Life » Life Online

Must Have Wordpress Plugins

excitedbylife — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:06:04 +0000

Every blogger has a set of “must-have plugins” that they install on all their blogs. We wanted to share with you the plugins that we love and use the most on our various blogs.

First off, we posted previously that if you don’t want the hassle of managing word press plug-ins then we recommend semiologic. The maintainer of semiologic, Denis de Barnady, works very closely with the wordpress team and always keeps his semiologic plugins up to date. Denis includes every plugin you could possibly want in his package.

However, if you want to install your own plug-ins here are our choices of must-have word press plug-ins.

ShareThis allows your readers to share your blog content. Unlike other bookmark plugins, it does not slow your site down with a lot of java script. It also has a Reporting Dashboard where you can see the number of page views and widget views.
Similar Posts Displays a highly configurable list of related posts. Similarity can be based on any combination of word usage in the content, title, or tags. This is a great way for automatically generating internal links on your blog.
YQL Auto Tagger Automatically finds tags based on your post content. A great time saver.
TweetMeMe allows your readers to tweet about your content on twitter. It also displays the number of times your blog post has been tweeted.
DoFollow removes the nofollow tag in the comments people make. You effectively become a Dofollow blog and are more likely to get blog comments.
FeedBurner FeedSmith Originally authored by Steve Smith and now maintained by FeedBurner, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible RSS subscriber.
Google XML Sitemaps This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.
No Self Pings Keeps WordPress from sending pings to your own site.
WP-Sticky Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog. This allows you to keep your pillar or cornerstone content always on your front home page.
WPtouch iPhone Theme A plugin which formats your site with a mobile theme for the Apple iPhone / iPod touch, Google Android and other touch-based smartphones. Also allows your blog to be viewed on the Amazon kindle.
WP-o-Matic Enables administrators to create posts automatically from RSS/Atom feeds. This is great if you have a store or shop that has an RSS feed of newly added products. As you add products to your shop they can be posted on your blog automatically.
All in One SEO Pack Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog.
WP Super Cache Very fast caching plugin for WordPress. By default the php code of wordpress is very slow and the slowness creates a very bad user experience on large blogs. This plugin will address the problem.

UPDATE: I previously recommend WP Auto Tagger for auto tagging, but was unhappy to discover that this plugin randomly posts advertising links into your Blog Roll links. In fact I recommend that people avoid downloading plugins and free templates from wordpresssupplies.com as their “free stuff” appears to contain a lot of adware that will be displayed on your website when you least expect.

What are your must-have plug-ins? Let us know in the comments below.Similar Posts:

Technorati Tags: best wordpress plugins, must have wordpress plugins, wordpress plugins

Flow State – Being In The Zone

excitedbylife — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 03:05:10 +0000

"When we are involved in [creativity], we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life." ~ Mihaly Cikszentmihalyi

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, has been searching since childhood (in the wake of the second world war) for what contributes to a life worth living. How can people find purpose and happiness even in the midst of losing their houses and possessions? He has been researching the subject for over 40 years and was the first person to coin the concept of “flow state” which is similar to the concept of being “in the zone”.

Mihaly’s research has shown that as personal income rises peoples level of personal happiness surprisingly stays the same. A lack of material resources obviously does decrease happiness but in western society increases in our level of prosperity have not correspondingly raised happiness levels.

Forty yeas ago Mihaly began to study artists and creative people to discover how people find happiness – a large percentage of creative people achieve purpose, fulfillment and happiness even with minimal financial reward. Mihaly discovered the answer in some of the early interviews he conducted.

“You are in an ecstatic state to such a point that you feel as though you almost don’t exist…My hand seems devoid of myself, and I have nothing to do with what is happening…And [the music] just flows out of itself.” ~ Composer

“..It’s like you’re on automatic pilot, so you don’t have any thoughts. You hear the music but you’re not aware that you’re hearing it, because it’s a part of it all.”
Figure Skater

Creative people report being in an ecstatic state. A mental state were you feel you are not just doing your everyday routine, you are “being”. It’s like an alternative reality. An interesting observation is that the remains of civilizations – the pantheons the arenas etc. are places of escape from the confines of everyday life. But artists and creative people can enter these ecstatic statse by just doing what they love – their passions.

When you are in this state (in the zone) you can’t feel your body as your attention and concentration is only on the task at hand. Existence is temporarily suspended. You don’t even notice that you need sleep or that you are hungry. This state seems to be achieved with mastery of a discipline with years of practice.

How Does It Feel To Be In Flow?

Regardless of the culture or the occupation there are seven conditions for flow (based on over 8000 interviews).

completely involved in what we are doing – focused, concentrated
a sense of ecstasy – of being outside everyday reality
great inner clarity – knowing what needs to be done, and how well we are doing
knowing that the activity is doable – that our skills are adequate to the task
a sense of serenity – no worries about oneself, and a feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of the ego – forget yourself and feel part of something larger
timelessness – thoroughly focused on the present, hours seem to pass like minutes
intrinsic motivation – whatever produces flow becomes its own reward.

When in flow, people typically are performing a challenging role that requires a lot of skill . I quite like the following diagram as it shows that we can start out with zero skill and zero challenge and achieve flow – but we must increase both challenge and skill over time to maintain this flow state. It’s a balance between boredom (too easy) and anxiety (too hard).

As we master more and more skills over time we can achieve higher states of flow and being in the zone. It is our belief that each of us needs to find our own unique purpose in this world and achieve mastery in the gifts we were bestowed. What skills are you mastering this year?

Passion, Creativity and Education

excitedbylife — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:27:18 +0000

Education is meant to take us into a future that we can never predict. How can we ever hope to educate our children for a future that will be completely different in 5 years from what it is now. Sir Ken Robinson points out in the following presentation that our education system is totally ill preparing our children for the future.

We are all impressed by the extraordinary abilities of children. All kids have tremendous talent – and our innate creativity is as important as literacy and should be treated with the same status.

Kids will take a chance. They are not frightened of being wrong. If they don’t know, they will still have a go. Lets face it, of your not prepared to be wrong you won’t create anything or come up with anything original. By the time children reach adulthood they have lost all capacity to be creative.

Our education system and corporations are educating people to believe that mistakes are the worst thing you can make.

“We don’t grow into creativity we get educated out of it.” ~ Sir Ken Robinson

Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects:

Mathematics/Languages/Science
Humanities
Arts

Even in Arts (at the bottom of the hierarchy) there is a sub-hierarchy with dance and drama below art and music. Why are not all skills and talents treated equally?

Our education system is based on academic ability and is designed to support industry. Kids are steered away from things they love on the grounds that they will never get a job if they peruse their passion. We can’t go on losing talented people like this.

More and more people will be graduating from University for the first time in history as India and China become more affluent. Suddenly degrees are now not worth anything. Even now you need a PhD as a minimum requirement for some jobs .

We need to seriously review the concept of intelligence in our education system.

For more information you can visit Sir Ken Robinson’s new website www.sirkenrobinson.comSimilar Posts:

Technorati Tags: Creativity, education, Education System, Innate Creativity, Ken Robinson, Passion For life, sir ken robinson

English Grammar Checker Reviews

excitedbylife — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 12:46:05 +0000

Image by lowjumpingfrog

We decided to put some free and commercial grammar checker software to the test. The results were surprising.

With the march of globalization as more and more jobs become outsourced to India and to the Philippines certain skills such as good written English are becoming more important than ever. These are skills that outsourced workers typically lack as you may have already discovered with your outsourcing. Sadly, a lot of us (including Maggie and I) didn’t put much effort into English at school, and it’s reflected in our writing style. However, there may be a solution for those of us with grammar and spelling phobias.

It can be difficult to find someone to review articles and blog posts for grammar and spelling. Even if you are good at English it’s all too easy to let errors slip into your work. Even expert writers need to submit their articles for independent review. Our solution to this problem was to find out what was available in the way of automated grammar checkers.

I am no English Professor so I decided to use some grammar tests for evaluating grammar checkers developed by Daniel Kies from the Department of English at the College of DuPage. From his study, the grammar checkers built into Microsoft Word and WordPerfect did surprisingly well even against the dedicated grammar checkers at least on the Apple platform. We also found the same to be true for the spelling checkers we evaluated for the Windows platform.

Grammar Check Anywhere and Gramatica were mentioned by a very good article on grammar checkers at Wikipedia. Because they both offered a free introductory trial, we decided to test them out. In addition, from our Google searching, we found that White Smoke was particularly popular. White Smoke also has a free online grammar checker where you can cut-and-paste individual sentences, so we decided to test White Smoke out as well.

TIP: White Smoke’s free online grammar checker is a great on-the-fly option if you are unsure of the grammar of a particular sentence.

We also tested AbiWord and its grammar plug-in but since it only underlines possible mistakes and does not offer any suggestions on how to correct the mistakes, we decided to discount it as an option.

Here are our results based on a tally of what each tool identified from Daniel’s 20 grammar mistake tests.

PRODUCT	SCORE	%
White Smoke	9/20	45%
Microsoft Word	6/20	30%
Grammar Check Anywhere	5/20	25%
Grammatica	2/20	10%

We were quite disappointed with Grammar Check Anywhere and Grammatica as they gave a lot of wrong information as well as scoring bad. However, you also need to keep in mind that some of the products may perform better with completely different test data. Our suggestion is that you just use the online free version of White Smoke and supplement this with a Microsoft Word grammar check.

Realizing that some of our previous posts are less than satisfactory we actually did decide to purchase White Smoke and will be correcting a lot of our older posts over time. We will also use the grammar checker built into Microsoft Word as an added precaution.

It could be argued that bad grammar and spelling even in a great article only leaves your readers with a bad impression of your business. It implies that you don’t really care and are unprofessional in your approach. So join us on an old blog post grammar bug hunt today!

Tips On Blogging From A Passionate Blogger

excitedbylife — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:05:29 +0000

There are a lot of sub standard courses and ebooks on how to blog and they all cost money.

A little secret on the Internet is that one of the top bloggers in the world shares his secrets and tips for free. Ask any professional blogger and they will tell you:

“There is no one more passionate and professional about blogging than Darren Rowse.”

Best of all he is the most generous person in the world and freely shares all his secrets without any monetary gain. In this live stream recording you can see his passion for blogging coming through – even though he has been doing this for a very long time.

If you lack the time or focus for blogging there are a lot of great tips on time management and blog-life-balance.

We listed a few notes after the recording if you lack the time to watch it all.

How do you motivate yourself to write blog posts when you don’t feel like writing ?

Choose a niche or market where you can think of topics to blog about days ahead. Then have some pre-written posts ready – a stock pile of posts you can draw from when you just don’t feel like writing a blog post.

How do you resist the temptation to install every latest Wordpress plugin or gadget ?

Being technically challenged is an advantage in this regard. My recommendation is to concentrate on blogging, content and building community. Your main task is writing content, don’t get distracted by the “other things”. Set yourself a schedule of writing blog posts and stick to it.

What Statistics tools do you use?

As with wordpress gadgets people also become obsessed with statistics, so don’t let it distract your from writing blog posts. Feedburner is great source for tracking your readership e.g. you can track what topics are popular and most read.

How do your balance Marketing with Writing Content?

The trick is to schedule blocks of time for tasks i.e. put aside blocks of time for specific activities. For example, stay off-line when you write your content so as not to be distracted by email. Set aside a block of time for reading and commenting on other blogs and stick to it. A good idea is to setup a complete schedule for each month to ensure you put appropriate time into each activity. it gets you into a rhythm (“the flow”).

On writing an eBook

It’s all about being useful. Get people to your blog first. Build up your profile. Get a community. Spend some time building a following and audience and then release an eBook – you will get more sales right from the start that way.

What books inspired you?

Any of Seth Godin books. Also a book called “Join Me”.

Do you plan what to blog next?

On Monday or Sunday it’s good to spend time planning an editorial calendar for the week. That way you don’t have to spend time thinking about a topic to write about or outsource.

How do you market your blog?

Its all about going to the gatherings – where the people in your niche hang out. e.g. forums.

It may not just be a form, it could be a blog. Wherever it is build up an audience first. When you get an audience you can “educate them” to other networks (e.g. twitter) where they can in turn evangelize others on your behalf i.e promote your blog to their own twitter followings.

How often should you post?

Less frequently with better quality is a good strategy. Some examples – high quality and longer lengths (Tim Ferris 4hr work week blog) or lots of short posts (e.g. Engadget). It depends on your niche and what people expect and about establishing your own sustainable rhythm.

How do you get inspiration & motivation.

Sometimes you just have to take a break.

To overcome writers block one suggestion is to go over your last 10 posts to get ideas, or buy a magazine on the topic of your niche, also read other blogs to get inspiration.

How do you find quality writers for your blog

The majority of guest post solicitations are rubbish. A good strategy is to start by looking for people posting quality comments on your own blog – contact them.

Another method is to have a forum on your blog – and look for quality posters.

How to get in the zone when blogging.

Darren says that it “tends to just happen for him”.

Also identify when your “golden hours” are. For Darren this is 9am to 11am. He dedicates these high productivity times to writing. In the afternoons when he lacks energy he concentrates on more marketing type tasks.

How do you deal with procrastination?

Something Darren also battles with procrastination. His advice – “Just get in and DO IT”.

What is your inspiration to continue?

Ever since the first day Darren discovered blogging he has been hooked. In blogging his two passions of communication and community have their perfect expression.

How do you separate work from home

Darren sets aside specifics blocks of time for work and family. Blogging stops when the family gets home at 5:00pm till the time the children go to sleep.Similar Posts:

Technorati Tags: blogging, darren rowse, problogger

How Our Minds Can Be Fooled

excitedbylife — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 09:18:19 +0000

Are we really in control of the choices and decisions we make?

Do we really act rationally?

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely and the author of “Predictably Irrational” shows how we are not as rational as we might think are when we make decisions. In fact we can be easily directed by others into irrational decisions. In this very humorous and entertaining Ted presentation Dan uses some classic visual illusions and his own research to illustrate his point – it’s really short so takes no time to watch.

Advertisers, marketers and even stock brokers make lots of money from our “cognitive limitation and illusions”. For example, If we don’t know what to do, we usually just pick what was chosen for us. Dan’s findings and research are good to know.

Dan’s papers are available free at MIT University.

Similar Posts:

Technorati Tags: Dan Ariely, Social Sciences

Book Review – “Loving What Is” by Byron Katie

excitedbylife — Wed, 13 May 2009 09:50:08 +0000

The full title of the book is “Loving What Is: Four Questions that Can Change your Life” by Byron Katie and co-authored with her husband Stephen Mitchell.
After reading this book we believe it provides an overlooked key to help end all suffering. We have read many self-help and personal-growth books but none really change anything; this book did for us. We all intuitively know that our thoughts create our suffering, but we lack the tools to challenge and change our thoughts. This book is not written by a new age Guru re-cycling stuff we know already, instead it is written by someone who has been to hell for 10 years and discovered how to find the peace and happiness that was always there. It’s Real. It’s Authentic.

You may already be aware of Byron Katie since she appeared on Oprah recently (one of the reasons we purchased this book). Byron Katie (or “Katie” as everyone calls her) has developed a powerful process of inquiry called “The Work”.

What Is “The Work”?

In her early thirties Katie was severely depressed. For nearly ten years the depression, self-loathing and suicidal thoughts just spiraled, so much so that for last two of those ten years she could not even leave her bedroom.

It all changed one February Morning in 1986 when in her own words she “woke up to reality”.

“I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn’t believe them, I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional. I found a joy within me that has never disappeared, not for a single moment. That joy is in everyone, always.”

Over the years she developed a process called the work. The process is profoundly simple and only requires a pen and paper and an open mind. It will help you trace the sources of unhappiness in your life, eliminate them and set yourself free. The work is a process of inquiry and consists of 4 questions and a “turn around”.

Is it true?
Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
How do you react when you think that thought?
Who would you be without the thought?

and

Turn it around.

We don’t want to give the process away or try to explain what Katie already explains so well – you can read an explanation of the work on Katie’s web site www.thework.org.

How Does “The Work” work

Eckhart Tolle had the best explanation we could find on how “The Work” works:

“The root cause of suffering is identification with our thoughts, the ’stories’ that are continuously running through our minds. The Work acts like a razor-sharp sword that cuts through that illusion and enables you to know for yourself the timeless essence of your being. Joy, peace, and love emanate from it as your natural state.”

Want More

Check out Katie’s official blog http://www.byronkatie.com/

You can also buy Byron Katie’s book from Amazon.

PARTING TIP If you are suffering from any problem try this YouTube search. Go to www.YouTube.com and search for “Byron Katie + ” – you may just find the solution to your problem.Similar Posts:

Technorati Tags: byron katie, depression, Live A Happy Life, loving what is, personal growth

Friendfeed And Twitter – The Dynamic Duo

excitedbylife — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:36:16 +0000

Twitter has it’s limitations but when combined with Friendfeed they make a powerful system.

Image by chanchan222

A number of people have been noticing Friendfeed receiving a surge in new users, especially users joining via Twitter. It’s not surprising as the two services complement each other quite well.

Friendfeed was built by former Google employee Paul Buchheit. Paul worked on gmail and on adsense in his Google days. Friendfeed is quite innovative and is gaining more and more traction, even despite its recent spate of extended down times.

Friendfeed is something most of us don’t really “get”. It has been termed a “social media aggregation tool”, as you can collect and view all your social media activities (your blog, twitter, bookmarks etc) in the one place. It is like Facebook in many ways but just a lot more open, as you can share your stuff with everyone not just your friends.

It differs from an RSS reader in that Friendfeed also allows you to comment on your friends online activities. It’s a great way to share and collectively comment on interesting sites, books reviews, videos and photos. Interestingly, the majority of the comments that occur are around twitter posts – it’s a value add for Twitter.

Other Features

Friendfeed does more that just aggregate your activities in one place, for example:

you can create private groups (rooms) which receive private member updates. You can also make them public. This allows you to setup communities interested in a certain topic.
you can organize your friends into lists, a feature twitter lacks. This is a useful filter to see what close friends are up to as opposed to work friends or business friends.
there is also a “best of” view which gives you a type of summary of the stuff your friends have been commenting on most. A great way to keep up on what is hot.

TIPS

to counter information overload you can configure Friendfeed to hide tweets unless they have been commented on or liked i.e. there is no need to watch tweets from both Twitter and Friendfeed.
use Friendfeed as a conduit to tweet google reader content you want to share. Ed Dale did a great presentation on how to use google reader from an iphone that explains how to set this up.
use Friendfeed for research. You can search for items shared by everyone not just your friends. Just go to Advanced Search, choose “shared by everyone.” and enter your search phrase.
you can easily find the people who find your content interesting just go to the stats page. You will see people listed who are sharing your blog content with friends and commenting on your Friendfeed entries
embed a Friendfeed widget into your blog sidebar. We have done this at excitedbylife.com. It’s a great way for others to see your social activities when they visit your blog e.g. your last tweets.
import all the people you follow in Twitter into Friendfeed. That way you get to see their bookmarking activities and can also join the conversation of comments on their Twitter messages. Just go to http://friendfeed.com/friends then Select Find / invite friends and select twitter.

We have decided to post some of of our twitter messages now from Friendfeed to prompt people to comment.Similar Posts:

Technorati Tags: friendfeed, twitter

Twibes – Tribes for Twitter

excitedbylife — Fri, 01 May 2009 10:06:23 +0000

How to find tribes of like minded people who twitter.

Image by wwarby

A new service that is gaining momentum is Twibes.com. It’s a great domain name and short for “Twitter Tribe”. A twibe is a a group of twitter users who are interested in the same topic. Anyone with a twitter account can create a twibe. When you sign up at Twibes.com you need to give access to your twitter account since part of the viral nature of twibes is that it will tweet the twibe you create to your followers. For example here is the tweet that Twibes sent out for a group we created:

“Just started a Twibe. Visit http://twibes.com/healthyliving to join.”

At the moment you can only create 3 twibes per twitter account. In the future the team at twibes plan to offer a paid service (via Paypal) to allow you to create more twibes – currently their only source of revenue appears to be adwords.

When you join or create a twibe it will go back through all your posts and display all the posts with the tag keywords associated with that twibe. So be sure to check the tags of a twibe before you join and also set tags appropriately for any tribe you create.

Benefits Of Creating A Twibe

SEO Benefit – if you are the first to start a tribe in you niche you get to specify the main URL displayed for that tribe.
Networking benefit – we created a group http://tribes.com/hongkong since we live in Hong Kong. In the future it will be a great way to meet up locally with other bloggers.
Branding – you will be perceived as the expert in your niche if you are the founder of a tribe.

It remains to be seen if twibes really takes off or not. What would really make it useful is if one of the desktop client applications integrated it as a service e.g. tweetdeck or twirl. Twibes have yet to add a RSS feed to each tribe – this is an obvious feature lacking at the moment.Similar Posts:

Technorati Tags: tribe, twibe, twitter

Google Profile and Twitter URL Shorteners

excitedbylife — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:52:16 +0000

Friday is Links Round Up day at excitedbylife. This Friday we look at google profiles and URL shortening services for twitter.

Google Profiles Enhancement

Google expanded it’s google profiles service to allow more meaningful profile pages. Techcrunch did a write up on this new google profile features. The advantage is your brand will show up higher in the google search. It is also a great way to keep track of all your social media profiles in the one place.

The profile name is now much more easier to remember. Rather than

http://www.google.com/profiles/113013891968711831347

or whatever you can now have

http://www.google.com/profiles/excitedbylife

If you already have a gmail account it is a straight forward process to setup. Just go to http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/me. Its fairly generic so you can add links to all of your social media sites e.g. stubleupon, digg, squidoo, twitter etc. You can pick and choose what details you want the world to know about you.

URL Shorteners

Techcrunch also listed some more ways to shorten URLs for twitter. We tried out one of the services mentioned called HootSuite. You can see a shortening we did here http://ow.ly/3NZZ using HootSuite. We like the way HootSuite brands the link with your twitter image in a frame. It also lets you manage multiple twitter profiles. We also tried unhub which looks to be the better of the two. Unhub also includes an analytics feature as well, so you can track the traffic you receive.

There are way too many shortening services to choose from at the moment so expect some of these services to disappear over time. We are actually thinking of setting up our own URL shortening script that we won’t be so dependent on these services.Similar Posts:

Technorati Tags: google profile, twitter, url shorteners