Just another nerd.
LinkClump is a plugin for Chrome that allows the user to open, copy or bookmark multiple links.
Linkclump gives you the ability to drag a selection box around links using your mouse to quickly open as new tabs, open in new window, save as bookmarks, or copy to clipboard. Similar to Snap Links or Multi Links for Firefox.
Organize Series (apparently rebranded as PublishPress Series) is a plugin for WordPress that allows users to organize related posts together so readers can easily discover the related posts.
For example, I recently did a series of posts on a line of DC Comics greeting cards from the 1970s. Since there were so many such greeting cards, I divided these into five separate posts.
Someone discovering one of the posts via Google, etc., may not easily find the other four posts. With the Series plugin, I can make that more visible to visitors like this:
PublishPress recently purchased the plugin and has a series of “Pro” enhancements that adds shortcodes, the ability to add a post to more than one series, etc.
Local Gravatars is a WordPress plugin designed to minimize potential privacy issues around Automattic’s Gravatar service.
The plugin will get your users gravatars and host them locally on your website.
Your visitors will get the gravatars directly from your website instead of the gravatar CDN, therefore increasing privacy and performance.
To avoid cluttering the filesystem and to allow refreshing gravatars, the files get flushed on a weekly basis (interval can be modified using a filter).
To avoid performance issues server-side, the download process for gravatars is limited to a maximum of 5 seconds (value can be modified using a filter).
In an interview at WP Tavern, the plugin’s author, Ari Stathopoulos, outlined the sort of risk he’s trying to reduce with the plugin,
“And when I visit a site that uses Gravatar, some information is exposed to the site that serves them — including my IP,” said Stathopoulos. “Even if it’s just for analytics purposes, I don’t think the company should know that page A on site B got 1,000 visitors today with these IPs from these countries. There is absolutely no reason why any company not related to the page I’m actually visiting should have any kind of information about my visit.”
The Local Gravatars plugin must still connect to the Gravatar service. However, the connection is made on the server rather than the client. Stathopoulos explained that the only information exposed in this case is the server’s IP and nothing from the client, which eliminates any potential privacy concerns.
WPS Hide Login is a WordPress plugin that obfuscates the login page for a WordPress install.
It doesn’t literally rename or change files in core, nor does it add rewrite rules. It simply intercepts page requests and works on any WordPress website. The wp-admin directory and wp-login.php page become inaccessible, so you should bookmark or remember the url. Deactivating this plugin brings your site back exactly to the state it was before.
Honestly, I did this more to stop an annoyance than anything. There are tons of bots out there that try to do credential stuffing and dictionary attacks against even tiny sites like mine.
They’re unlikely to get past my strong password and 2FA, but it was getting annoying to see the constant stream of “user X has been locked out for 4 hours.”
I used the WPS Hide Login to set my login page to a random 16 character alphanumeric string that would be essentially impossible to guess.
Simple Post Notes is a WordPress plugin that adds a Notes section on the post edit screen, where WordPress users can leave comments about a post that are not displayed with the post. The notes also are displayed in a column on the All Posts screen within WordPress as well.
It doesn’t happen very often, but once in awhile I want to leave myself a note about a post, and this is a nice way to do it.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open source initiative that Google is pushing to provide faster-loading content on mobile devices.
For WordPress, Automattic has created an AMP plugin that will render a WordPress blog posts in AMP (the plugin does not currently support pages and archives).
The plugin essentially dynamically generates an AMP version of a given blog post as long the requestor adds /amp/ to the end of the url. So, for example, https://brian.carnell.com/articles/2016/orcus/ will give the full HTML version of one of my blog posts, while https://brian.carnell.com/articles/2016/orcus/amp/ will return the AMP version.
At some point, Google seems likely to penalize pages that are not AMP-enabled as the search engine company increasingly sees mobile as key to its future. Plus, AMP is a much better alternative IMO to competing initiative such as Facebook’s Instant Articles.