Akismet has long been accepted as the most popular spam fighting WordPress plugin, closely followed by both Bad Behavior (which can be used along with Akismet) and of course Spam Karma 2.   However, one interesting WordPress plugin I recently came across is the AntiSpam Bee plugin, which was designed by the author specifically to be a competitor with Akismet.

The interesting thing is that this WordPress plugin actually replaces the comments field completely, making it so spammers can’t find it.   Some other listed features:

• Quick & Dirty: activate, done!
• Spam may be marked or deleted immediately
• Saves no data in the database, accordingly no connection
• WordPress 2.7 ready: Design and as well as technical
• Very, very fast execution
• No need to adjust any templates
• Clean up after uninstall the plugin
• Anonymous and independent

Has anyone tried this WordPress plugin yet?   I’d love to some first-hand experiences from people using it.

Possibly my favorite WordPress plugin of all time has always been the Popularity Contest WordPress plugin from Alex King.    Back when WordPress 2.5 first came out, there was a minor scare where Popularity Contest quit working on new WordPress blogs, but a fix was eventually published and once again all was right with the world.

Now that WordPress 2.7 has been released, I noticed the other day while setting up a couple new niche blogs that Popularity Contest appears to again be broken on fresh installations of WordPress 2.7.    My WordPress installations which already had Popularity Contest installed and were upgraded to WordPress 2.7 seem to still be working fine.

While checking for updates on the authors page, I noticed that it appears that Popularity Contest (along with Alex’s other plugins) are no longer supported and will not receive any future updates.  In fact, the last update was over a year ago.   The only exception I know of is the Share This plugin, which I believe was purchased by someone who has continued to improve the plugin.

My hope with this post is that someone will either take over supporting this WordPress plugin (if Alex is willing to hand it over to someone), or that someone will create a similar plugin for the WordPress community.   Heck, something like this that is supported and gets regular feature updates might even be something I would happily pay a one time fee for!

Anyone having luck with Popularity Contest and brand new WordPress 2.7 installations?

Although I personally am not a major Twitter user, I do see the value in the service and have made several attempts to use it more often.   For many others, it has become an addiction and possibly even a major time sink.

One trend we are starting to see more often lately is Twitter being integrated into WordPress blogs.  In the past we’ve featured a couple methods to integrate Twitter into your blog such as How to Add a “Tweet This” Link To Your Blog and How to Display Most Recent Twitter Entry.   Even more recently there have been some WordPress plugins released to further integrate Twitter into your WordPress blog:

1. Tweetbacks – This recent plugin by our friend Joost De Valk displays any “tweets” about your blog post below that post in the same way trackbacks/pingbacks are often displayed on WordPress blogs.   You can read more information about the plugin and how to install it here.  A similar plugin called TweetSuite was released recently as well.
2. Twitter Comments – Works similar to Gravatars, but displays the comment author’s Twitter avatar instead.  If a Twitter avatar is not available, it will then attempt to locate a Gravatar to use instead.

Due to the popularity of WordPress, I would imagine this is only the tip of the iceberg and many more Twitter WordPress plugins will follow over the coming months/years.   Out of curiosity, for those of you that are heavy Twitter users, what have you done to integrate Twitter into your WordPress blog?

Update: I just ran across this post over at Profit Blogger which shares more than 20 Twitter WordPress plugins that already exist.

A few days ago, I wrote a guest post on Pro Blog Design about creating a Stats page for your WordPress blog. One day later, Kyle, who liked the article, wrote a post here on WP Hacks to let you know about my guest post.  One of WP Hacks readers, Wesley, enjoyed the post and decided to create a WordPress plugin to enhance the functionality of my initial hacks.

The plugin, entitled “Blog Stats” makes available a number of statistics about your blog, including number of posts, comments, trackbacks, users and categories, PageRank, Alexa rank, Technorati rank and Feedburner RSS count.  To ensure you always have the most up to date values, the plugin automatically update statistics on a daily basis.

How to Install and use the Blog Stats WordPress Plugin

First, you have to download the plugin on Wesley’s website or on the WordPress.org page.

Once you have it, unzip it on your hard drive and upload the plugin file to the wp-content/plugins directory of your WordPress blog.

Login to your WordPress dashboard, go to the Plugins page and activate Blog Stats.

You now have a bunch of new shortcodes that you can use in pages and posts. If you don’t know what a shortcode is or want more info about it, I wrote some shortcodes-related posts on WP Recipes.

Ready to use Template

Feel lazy? After you installed the plugin, just create a new page and paste the following code in it. It will output all stats available from the Blog Stats plugin.

user_count: [user_count]
post_count: [post_count]
page_count: [page_count]
comment_count: [comment_count]
trackback_count: [trackback_count]
avg_comments_per_post: [avg_comments_per_post]
category_count: [category_count]
tag_count: [tag_count]
link_count: [link_count]
pagerank: [pagerank]
technorati_authority: [technorati_authority]
technorati_rank: [technorati_rank]
alexa_rank: [alexa_rank]
feedburner_subscribers: [feedburner_subscribers]
google_backlinks: [google_backlinks]
yahoo_backlinks: [yahoo_backlinks]
delicious_bookmarks: [delicious_bookmarks]

That’s all. I must say that I like this plugin a lot and Wesley really did a nice job!

Are you looking for another way to monetize your WordPress blog?   Back in November 2008, I wrote about a new premium WordPress plugin called Auction Thumbs.   After that post was published, there seemed to be a lot of interest in this type of product.  This seems to be because people are quickly discovering they can make a lot of money online by doing nothing more than simply sending traffic over to eBay for relevant auctions!  In this post I will be discussing a similar WordPress plugin which has actually been around for over two years now called PHP Bay Pro.

PHP Bay is an eBay affiliate script that comes in two forms.   The first is a stand-alone API version which allows non-WordPress PHP based websites to quickly and easily add eBay keyword based content advertisements to their website.  The second version is the one which will apply to our readers, and that is the easy to use PHP Bay WordPress plugin.

PHP Bay Pro lets you take advantage of the 80 million auctions on eBay by adding relevant auctions to your WordPress blog.   When users click on the auctions, they are taken to that auction on eBay.   Then once people buy ANY item on eBay, you earn a commission, even if it wasn’t what you referred them for.  In fact, you get commission for any auctions won over the next 7 days by that person.   If that wasn’t enough, if someone signs up for an eBay account within 7 days of clicking on your eBay auction link, you also get a very nice commission (can be as high as $40.00 I believe, but usually around $15.00 each).

Here is the feature list you get with PHP Bay:

• Earn revenue through the Ebay Partner Network or other popular programs like PepperJam, Mediaplex, TradeDoubler or Affilinet!
• Add keyword rich Ebay items to your php based web site that encourage impulsive buys!
• Easily Integrate into any New or Existing WordPress Blog!
• Thousands of free Wordpress templates available across the web to create virtually any type of site!
• Not Javascript based! Auction listings are 100% pure html based creating additional targeted content for your site!
• List auction items regionally from 17 different countries!
• List items by postal code (zip code) for localized results.
• List items from specific Ebay categories.
• Listings displayed in language and currency of selected country.
• Listings displayed in rows or specified number of columns for a Web 2.0 look and feel!
• Access to our active members only forum that offers a tremendous value in how to get more out of phpBay Pro, strategies, tips and tricks and much more!
• Use on as many sites as you own! phpBay Pro is not limited to one domain. It can be used on one, or hundreds of sites with one license!
• Comprehensive user manual with illustrations, in PDF format, for both the WordPress version and the API version, that will walk you through, step-by-step, to install and get working quickly with phpBay Pro!
• Upgrades are free for the life of the product! phpBay Pro is nearly two years old with three major upgrades made with suggestions from our user base!

If you are considering buying this WordPress plugin, make sure the topic your WordPress blog(s) covers will convert well on eBay.  Product based websites which cover something that is often bought on eBay seems to convert the best (electronics, pictures, etc.).   If your blog covers free products or some sort of service, chances are using a WordPress plugin like this won’t be worth your effort and will annoy your readers.

If you decide you’re interested in PHP Bay Pro, it looks like it is currently available for $79.00.  I believe they used to have a free version as well, but I’ve not been able to track that down so they may have removed it since I bought my copy of this plugin last year.