Jonathan Hensley | The Blog | JHensley.org

Here are some interesting links from today:

• Military launches video-sharing site for troops
  After banning YouTube and other social Web sites on all overseas computers in May, citing bandwidth and security issues, the U.S. military on Tuesday launched an alternative video-sharing Web site for troops, their families, and supporters.The new site is called TroopTube and has a look and function very much like YouTube, with one major difference: a Pentagon employee screens each video upload for taste, copyright violations and national security issues.
• Next version of Office heads to the browser
  Microsoft will offer browser-based Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in two ways. For consumers, they will be offered via Microsoft’s Office Live Web site, while businesses will be able to offer browser-based Office capabilities through Microsoft’s SharePoint Server product.The company has been pushed into this arena by Google, which has been offering its free Google Apps programs for some time. In competing with Google, Microsoft is touting the ability to use Microsoft’s familiar user interface, as well as the fact that all of the document’s characteristics are preserved.
• 10 Best Tips for WordPress Optimization
  This WordPress optimization guide is a collection of useful tips and tutorials on how to speed up your WordPress site.

A couple days ago I wrote about the plethora of plugins needed to create a secure family style blog.  Today I’m going to tell you about the 5 most essential plugins everyone needs to have installed and activated regardless of your blog style or niche.

Wordpress.com Stats
Wordpress.com Stats is a pretty powerful “real” time stats package that was built for Wordpress.com blogs.  It’s also been ported to a plugin for Wordpress self hosted blogs as well.  The Stats info sits in your Dashboard and gives you data for number of visits (by day, week, or month), top posts of the day, top searches of the day and most active posts all time.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is also a traffic stats plugin but is much more powerful than Wordpress.com Stats, however, the data only updates once per day (at night) so you can’t view real time statistics which is why you should use both.  Analytics provides the same data as Stats but also includes map location of visitors, visitor information such as browser version, OS version, screen size, ISP info, detailed referrer stats and much more.  Also included in Analytics is report functionality where you can schedule reports to be emailed daily, weekly or monthly.

FeedBurner FeedSmith
FeedSmith is Feedburner’s own plugin designed for Wordpress.

Using some WordPress plugin magic, and user-agent detection, this plugin simply forwards all your feed traffic to FeedBurner. The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.

Postalicious
Postalicious is a great, recently updated, plugin for casual bloggers (like me) who want a quick way to keep their blog activity going even when they don’t have the time to create new original content.  Postalicious takes your Delicious, Reddit, or Yahoo Pipes feeds and creates a blog post.  It’s very configurable and automatic.  I have Postalicious post my links daily (when there are at least two links).  You can choose what categories to assign to the post, have it auto published or saved as a draft, etc.  Delicious has their own tool , which they still refer to as “experimental”. Don’t waste your time, Postalicious is way more powerful.

Akismet
You have to have a comment spam killer if you have a blog.  Akismet, was built by Matt Mullenweg, Wordpress’ creator.  Generally installed automatically when you install your Wordpress self-hosted site, Akismet should be a no brainer.

Akismet is a spam-fighting service that is different from others such as Spam Karma 2 or Bad Behavior in that it checks the content of the comment anonymously with an online server, to determine whether it is spam or not.

Just before the arrival of my 2nd daughter I launched a new Wordpress site so we’d be able to keep family and friends up to date with the latest pictures and goings on.  We’d previously tried this but after a couple weeks it would start to fizzle to one post a week, then one a month and so on to basically a dead site.

The first couple sites were ones I was building in Dreamweaver with static pages that all had to be updated by hand. Part of the reason in the past that we didn’t just use a blog site was because we wanted pictures and sensitive information to be password protected.  Family blogs are different in that respect. You aren’t looking to get huge viewership, you just want to be able to share private photos, videos and stories that you wouldn’t share with the entire world.

Long story short it was never easy enough to post, much less for my wife to be able to post, there were security issues and password communication problems with family, etc.  There were just too many obstacles to overcome to create a successful family blog…  until now.

Finally! This time we got it right.

Thanks to the help of this post on Simply Basic, I decided on Wordpress and a pile of plugins. Surprisingly it works nearly flawlessly, is easy to use, my wife can post with ease (and therefore posts more often), it’s secured, family can all have their own login, and much, much, more.

Here are some more details on setting up your own secure Family Blog.
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