My Favourite WordPress Plugins
It is probably no surprise to you that I’m running this site of the WordPress blogging platform and I run my other sites of it as well becuse it is a nice foundation. However I use quite a few plugins to help make the site what I want it to be, apart from a custom theme that is. So here is a list with my top favourite WordPress plugins that I actually use myself, and best is that they are all free!
Akismet
Included with the WordPress distribution is a spam protector that is called Akismet. It does its job wonderfully and protects me from the masses or comment, trackback and pingback spam I would be cleaning up every day! All you need is to get a free WordPress API key from the wordpress.com site and you’re good to go! It is a real life saver!
All in One SEO Pack!
The All in One SEO Pack is a great little plugin that is used to get better SEO control. It allows you to insert keywords and a description that is unique for each of your posts that helps search engines crawl your site better. It works great and really helps the SEO of your site.
cforms II
If you need any type of form on your site for email purposes, you really need to check out the cforms plugin! It is just the most powerful form creator available for WordPress! I use it for my contact form and I love it and couldn’t live without it! Check it out!!
StatPress
StatPress is a visitor logging script which logs your hits and unique visitors as well as the usual info such as browser, country and stuff. You can also see the latest referrers and also the latest keywords that people used to get to your site from search engines.
WP-Cache
The WP-Cache plugin is a plugin that caches your site for you to help the loading time. You can set it to include or exclude certain files and rules so it only caches what you would like it to!
Dean’s FCK Editor for WordPress
If you want a little more powerful WYSIWYG editor then this is for you. I just started using it and I find it awesome already! It has a lot more features than the Tiny MCE editor and suits the more advanced post writer.
The key to getting good sunset photos!
When you are browsing through some of the photography communities online you see quite a lot of photographs of sunsets with their photographers wondering why their photographs are not getting the same amount of reaction as others. Most of the time, it has not got anything to do with big trade secrets but actually quite a few simple things you can do to make your sunsets better.
Back home!
I’m currently back home and I’m catching up to everything that I couldn’t do whilst being away and resuming the project work as well with quite a few customer projects to do right now. Tomorrow will see a usual Monday Newsflash with some cool stuff gathering up for you 
Oh and by the way, there are two new tutorials up, one on History and Snapshots in Lightroom and the other one about HDR in Photoshop, they are booth in the featured tutorial box up top 
Fireworks - Tips and Tricks for photographing them!
Fireworks is a lovely thing to photograph but it may seem hard at first. I’m out for the first photographing of them right now in a few minutes and I took some time earlier today to write a little simple tutorial article on the tips and tricks when photographing fireworks! I hope it helps to clear up some stuff if you are unsure since I’ve gotten a lot of questions about it this year, and that you go out and try it tonight, it is really cool and fun.
Late Friday Stuff
So I’ve been terribly busy since Tuesday…Three tests and some larger homeworks but finally it is weekend and time for relaxing has come! So here are some quickies in late Friday stuff!
- If you need some icons for your designs and stuff, Nick La at N-Design Studio has reminded us once again of his awesome free Christmas Icon set that you can download from the link just below this text chunk. They come in full .eps (and .jpg) so they are full vectors, meaning scalability!! Check them out right here!
- More Christmas stuff. Here is a cool link to a collection of brushes and card templates for your holiday stuff made for Photoshop! Enjoy the link.
- If you like to share photography with others in a forum, commenting environment. Take a look at Photography Corner, an amazing site with a lot of cool contests going on (with a big one coming up, more on that one later on) every month!
Those were some quick tips on the late Friday stuff! Have a nice weekend where you’ll be seeing some posts on here!
Tuesday Stuff and Inspiration
It’s being a tough week with a lot to do (and by a lot I actually mean a lot) but there are small things that actually lifts the burden a bit and brings the happiness to the surface instead! One of these things are the message I had received on a forum today when I signed on thanking me for the tutorials available here. I’m very glad many of you find them useful and like them. I promise you there’ll be a lot more coming and I’m planning out some other surprises as well, so stay tuned! 
View your sites in IE if you are on a Mac…
I was planning to post this yesterday but I forgot it only to be reminded today of it by a post on a forum I visit (can you tell I go to quite a few forums). Since Internet Explorer isn’t in at least any current versions available for the Mac, all us Mac users have trouble testing our websites using IE. Luckily there are a couple of solutions with these two being the best in my opinion.
- One way of doing it is installing a copy of Windows using a virtualization program, such as VMware Fusion or Parallels. You can of course also install it using Boot Camp if you want. These will just enable you to power up your virtual machine or boot camp copy, and run the tests in IE. (This is where I find the virtualization programs to be much better since you don’t need to restart the computer.)
- Another way, the way I like much more and that is that you use one of the IE emulators available online. There are a plethora of them out there available and one of them that I use a lot is one called IE Net Renderer available at the link right here, online!
Some Tuesday Inspiration to last for the week!
It’s quite the beginning of the week and we might all need some inspiration to make it though, right Here’s a link to some great awesome photographers!
- Go and check out a very inspirational photographer, Anders Naesset who is an incredible landscape photographer with a lot of really wonderful photography from the country of Norway!
- Also check out one of my good buddies, Juha M. Kinnunen, also a landscape photographer from Finland who takes just breathtaking images. Go and visit his site now!
Monday News Tidbits
Today seems to be gadget day with most news being about some of the coolest gadgets available right now!
D3 and D300 Stuff, site + review
- Starting off in the camera news, brought to you by the amazing wildlife photographer, Moose Peterson is an entire little (or not so little after all) site about the D that has just been released with more stuff being added along the way according to Moose. So go and have a look at the D3 Site!
- Following the news of the cameras in Nikon’s latest release we have a great review by Terry White on the Nikon D300 camera posted today over at his blog! It’s based on his first impressions with using the camera for about a week now and he really seems to be liking it a lot. So if you are in the market for a D300 or just want to read up on it, go and read Terry’s review right here!
New Web Design tutorials coming!
So I’ve begun to write a couple of highly requested web design tutorials for the site here and the first one to be released is a tutorial on how to make a stylish portfolio header right in Photoshop that we’ll use to build an entire portfolio site, right in Photoshop! So go to the tutorial section and check it out!
Learn to polish up your vector art in Photoshop!
The amazing illustration guru, Nick La has posted up a very cool tutorial or article on how he uses Adobe Photoshop to polish up his vector art made in Illustrator. I found it very interesting and cool to read so if you are interested you should definitely take a look at it here!
What makes a good web design?
I was inspired by a question over at the NAPP Forums by a member asking how you can define a good website design. Now this question got me thinking a fair bit, because it is a complex subject and not only is that because we have different personal taste, but also because it is changing constantly. What was a good design four years ago when I started in web design is not considered a good design anymore. This makes it a quite tough subject and I want to open up for your thoughts on this as well because it is quite intriguing the subject.
Friday Updates
Here’s coming at you, the late Friday Updates where I first would like to wish all US viewers of my blog a late happy thanksgiving weekend We may not celebrate it here in Sweden, but it is still good use wishing you a happy thanksgiving. After that I’m going to get started on the Friday updates!
First off, on the Creative Suite Tips and Tricks podcast, you’ve got a special thanksgiving episode, released just yesterday. It is about creating a cool three column brochure using InDesign and Photoshop! Also, the Revver upload form is now working (for those of you that don’t know, Revver is the site I use to host my videos) for me, so expect all tutorials I’ve been recording to come flying up! They are being added right now and I’ve added two text tutorials so far today!
Website Tipper - Web Designer Wall
I came across an awesome resource the other day if you are a web designer you have to check out the Web Designer Wall website. Created by the awesome and talented Nick La of N-Design Studio, Web Designer Wall is the most awesome site to get some tutorials, discussions and just in general keep up with the latest trends in the design area!
Engadget hosting major Black Friday give aways!
If you head over to the tech blog, Engadget you’ll see them hosting a lot of major and big give aways on cool gadgets and stuff for free! They’re holding these as contests and all you basically have to do is leave them a comment!
Im in a contest voting!
I was very kindly nominated for the Photograph of the Month award for December at the Photography Corner website. Now it is up to their community to vote for the best of the 14 nominees! Keep your fingers crossed!
Have a wonderful weekend!
I’m hoping for some nice photo opportunities this weekend so I’m going to end by wishing you a very wonderful weekend! Enjoy the time off, I know I sure will!
Sunday Blog Tips
So I did promise you some blog tips this weekend when I didn’t post them yesterday, I’ve been getting some mails about it, so here they are! (Truth is that I wasn’t feeling all well yesterday and had to rest) They are all part of my RSS feeds that I read every day and they are really useful. I don’t get any kickbacks from posting them, I just do it because I like sharing good blogs and I get asked what I visit a lot as well.
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