Our Favorite Plugins

In no particular order, here are some of the WordPress plugins that we’ve found useful.

  • sCategory Permalink — Allows you to set which category to use in the permalink
  • WP Random Header — This simple plugin by Callum Macdonald automatically rotates the header images for the Twenty Ten theme. We’re using it on this site — reload to see it in action.
  • WP-Table Reloaded — Manages tables for your posts and pages, with lots of options like row striping and column sorting
  • Flickr Blog This to Draft — If you use Flickr’s BlogThing to send photos to your blog, the default behavior is to immediately publish the post. With this plugin, the posts will be draft so you can check formatting, add categories, etc., before publishing
  • Broken Link Checker for WordPress — Alerts you to broken links, lots of options
  • Google XML Sitemaps Generator — Creates and maintains a file for Google to use for indexing
  • Facebook Like Button — Adds button to pages and posts

Custom Header Images for Twenty Ten Theme

Twenty Ten, the default theme for for WordPress 3, features a prominent header image. It comes with eight header images installed, photographs by Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress. (You can read more about these photographs on his blog: The Headers of Twenty Ten)

Here are a few ways that you can customize the header images for your site:

Change the Header
If you don’t want to use the default image, there’s an admin panel where you can select one of the others. Just go to Appearance –> Header and scroll down to Default images. Look at the thumbnails, and click to select the one you want.
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Print Friendly Plugin

The Print Friendly plugin adds a makes it easy for people to print a copies of your posts or pages, convert them into PDF, or to share them by e-mail or Twitter. It lets them save time and paper by removing the images or paragraphs that they don’t need.

It’s easy to set up — just upload the Print Friendly plugin and activate it! There’s a page of settings if you’d like a little more control over how this appears on your site: you can choose a text link or button style, decide whether you want it to appear above or below your content, and decide whether you want this to display on everywhere on your site (including on your main page) or just on the individual posts and pages.
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Google Search Stories

Last February, Google purchased their first SuperBowl ad, the story of a romance told entirely in Google searches, starting with “study abroad paris france” and ending with “how to assemble a crib.” This inspired all sorts of parody videos, and a few months later Google introduced the Search Stories Video Creator, a simple tool that lets you create these videos very easily. You simple enter up to six searches into a form, choosing the type of search for each: Web, Image, Map, News, etc., choose background music from a menu, and you’re ready to preview your video, upload it to YouTube and share it.

Here’s a sample I made.

Admittedly, this is not much of a story, just a series of searches around a particular theme, but more creative librarians could have some fun with this. I have a couple of simple examples below. This could be a fun challenge for a group of kids or teens to try. It’s really easy and fast. The three videos I did here each took me between five and ten minutes to make. I did find that after you upload them to YouTube there can be a delay of several hours while these are being processed.

But what I really want is for all the library vendors to offer a simple tool like this to make it easy for us to make these search stories using our library catalogs, databases, ebook collections and more!

Melrose Public Library Searched Several Ways

Famous People from Salem, Massachusetts

Embedding Photographs from Flickr

Balch HouseIf your library posts photographs on Flickr, you may find it easier to copy and paste code from Flickr to embed some of your images in your WordPress posts rather than uploading the files into WordPress. When you embed files, they are not hosted on the server where your WordPress lives, but are served up from the Flickr site — when people look at your post, their browser requests most of the content from your WordPress host sends to the Flickr site for the image file. If someone clicks on your embedded image, they will go to the photo’s page on Flickr, as required by the Flickr Terms of Service. The two photographs on this page have been embedded from Flickr.
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