Matt’s Journal

There are thousands of lists of what bloggers deem to be the best plugins for the Wordpress blogging platform. My aim here today is to throw you a few that you haven’t heard of but may be interested in using. So here goes…

1. DoFollow

DoFollow is a plugin designed to spread joy amongst bloggers by spreading the link love to your readers. 99% of you have the Askimet SPAM plugin installed, so why not reward the people who do comment on your blog buy allowing Googlebot and his friends to crawl to their sites also?

2. Tiger Style Administration

You’ve been blogging for years using Wordpress and you still cant work out why the team haven’t made the Admin interface a little easier on the eye. This new style from Ordered List replaces the bog-standard layout with one that is not only a lot sexier but it actually makes the navigation easier to master.

3. WP-Postratings

You can see this plugin doing it’s thing on this very post. It adds a tasty looking ratings bar for you to give your feedback on an authors post.

4. WP-Slimstat

WP-Slimstat allows you to report on your blogs traffic from the comfort of your Admin Panel. Slimstat boasts:

• Liquid layout: optimized for 1024×768 and 800×600
• Metatags to show stats on your blog
• Fully localizable
• Improved browser and platform detection
• Tracks Wordpress search form
• Shows visitors and unique IPs, not just hits
• Uses of a local ip-to-country database

5. Google Sitemap Generator

This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. It basically makes your blog more visible to the world and means you are indexed by all the major online search players.

That wraps it up for now, expect an updated one when Wordpress 2.3 has more compatible plugins.

Want to make Google Reader or Gmail beautiful?

Gmail

This Greasemonkey script beautifies and customizes Gmail’s interface.

Google Reader

Head over to John Hicks’ blog to install a nice theme to make Google Reader all beautiful

Good luck!

I have a couple of betting accounts around the web, mainly for adding a bit of interest to an otherwise boring weekend on football. I set aside £10 a week in the interest of predicting the weeks Premiership matches.

What I tend to do is predict the outcomes of all ten matches and then use the combined odds to place a bet of small value with a high pay-off. From those ten games I normally use the Seven-Fold Accumulator which basically means that from a result I get right, the money is reinvested back into the next game for the rest of the matches, I have seven matches I need to get right. In Lehman’s terms, if you get any seven results correct, you win money resulting in the combined odds of those seven games (if you get all ten, you get a greater payout).

The reason I say betting is a mugs game is because you can be so close yet so far. Two weeks running now, I have placed 6 correct outcomes and needed one more to come in to return some winnings…..did they come? No. I tend to lose about £5 on each bet, I have pretty much stopped going out so I see it that I would normally have spent it on beer so £5 on a bet a week isnt that bad.

I think I will have to learn the ways of cover betting, that way I can make some money!

Does anyone have any good resources or tips? I could do with some!

[tags]betting, football, soccer, tips[/tags]

I am writing this from my new laptop, I have it on my lap as I sit in bed, I am watching a new episode of Family Guy, chatting to my girlfriend and downloading torrents. This is of course, all without wires.

Kickass.

(Pictures to follow).

Flickr user adactio has gone through all the landmarks in The Matrix and photographed them in their real life situes. It’s pretty cool to see how they were changed, how they look when mirrored with shots from the film and even looking at the models posing in the exact same positions as the characters for the shots.

Take a look @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/adactio/sets/72157594317693606/

[tags]Matrix, photos, set[/tags]