Feedsmith Feedburner

One of the best reasons to use WordPress is the ability to utilize the built in syndication capabilities. It frees the blogger/writer from the technological need to know how to create an RSS feed, or how to ping a service to get their content indexed. Using the right mix of technology it’s possible to get pages into directories and search engines in mere hours.

So, if the indexing of the content is the right hook, having interested people signup for all your future stuff would be the body blow. WordPress, by way of Feedburner, takes care of that, too.

FeedBurner, recently purchased by Google, takes the feed of your site (which is automatically generated by WordPress) and publishes it for you in a format ready to view on their igoogle.com home page, in the Google reader, and in the Google Alert system.

In other words, they do quite a lot of work for you. But it gets better. Built into Feedburner is the ability for your subscribers to receive an email every time you publish NEW content. Automatically – meaning you don’t have to do anything. Really. I’m not kidding. You can download the subscribers and Google doesn’t eat them for lunch or anything, either.

Which brings us to this plugin. Rather than try and hack the core RSS code to redirect the feed to Feedburner, this plugin hijacks – with your permission – the feed to point to your Feedburner account.

Installation

Download the plugin, then follow the instructions below to begin forwarding all WordPress feed traffic to your FeedBurner feed.

1. Copy the plugin file, FeedBurner_FeedSmith_Plugin.php into your default WordPress plugin directory, wp-content/plugins/ .
2. Activate the plugin by logging into your WordPress administration area, clicking Plugins, then clicking Activate at the end of the “FeedBurner FeedSmith” row.
3. In the WordPress administration area, begin the configuration by clicking Options and then the FeedBurner FeedSmith sub-option.
4. Follow the links to create your FeedBurner feeds, or if they already exist, simply fill in their URLs in the boxes provided.Note: If you currently use the old, 2005-vintage version of the Ordered List FeedBurner plugin that generates a FeedBurner-specific URL (an example: www.yoursite.com/feedburner_838196/), that URL is no longer available or necessary. You will have to reset your FeedBurner feed’s Original Feed address to now use your standard blog feed address. Additionally, you should examine any .htaccess files that control access to your WordPress installation’s content and remove any existing references that forward or redirect your feeds, as these references will no longer be necessary.
5. Verify your URLs in the text entry fields, and click Save.

Now all of your WordPress feed traffic should be redirected to FeedBurner.

Twitter Tools

Alex King has some of the best plugins out there. The code is clean, and I’ve found that they work from revision to revision of Wordpress. If something breaks – they’re on it.

Twitter Tools is a tried and tested favorite of WP-TravelWebsite.com. We use it for all the sites serious about social media marketing and our own personal blog.

In short:

Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.

Details

Twitter Tools integrates with Twitter by giving you the following functionality:

* Archive your Twitter tweets (downloaded every 10 minutes)

* Create a blog post from each of your tweets

* Create a daily or weekly digest post of your tweets

* Create a tweet on Twitter whenever you post in your blog, with a link to the blog post

* Post a tweet from your sidebar

* Post a tweet from the WP Admin screens

* Pass your tweets along to another service (via API hook)

As I said, it’s seamless. There are other services that can do a little more, but I prefer the stability of Twitter Tools.

DOWNLOAD HERE