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A Sticky Post Orderer Plugin basically enables you to control the order in which your posts show up.

Once you download the plugin from here, activate it, go to Manage and click on ‘A Sticky Post Orderer’. When you do this the following description of the plugin.

1. Super-sticky: Show before anything else
   (you can set a limit for how many posts from this cat or tag should be given this preferential treatment)
2. Sub-sticky: Show after individually ordered posts for given view but before on-sorted posts
3. Default: Treat normally (except for individually ordered posts)
4. Droppy: Show only after everything else

and you get a page that looks like this:

In my case, I want to make my summary of the Best Wordpress Plugins post come up first, so I choose that one (2nd from the top).

Once I do this I get the following screen which shows me the posts which come under the category for ‘Best Wordpress Plugins‘.

As you can see I have 6 plugins listed so far. I want to make my summary come up first so I put the number ‘1′ in the box. After that I have made it alphabetical and numbered them accordingly. Once you save and refresh this is the order in which your posts will dispay when someone clicks on the ‘Best Wordpress Plugins‘ category.

Below is a list of the plugins I find most useful for my websites.

1. Akismet plugin
This default plugin which helps protect you from Spam should be activated as soon as you start your blog.

2. A Sticky Post Orderer
Allows you to control the order of your posts in categories. This is a must plug-in for me and helped me get around the problem of ordering my posts which was nagging me for some time. You can download the plugin from here

3. Popularity Contest Plugin
This is one of my favourite Wordpress plugins because it is so useful. It automatically calculates the number of hits you get on posts, categories etc. and allows you to display them on your front page. Just using this plugin as a tool to better understand how users are using your site is useful, but having the top 10 posts always displayed on your site is good for SEO and allows users to easily see what is popular on your site.

4. Google Sitemap Generator
I am not technical, so creating a sitemap for me was way beyond my skill set. In fact, I didn’t even know what a sitemap was! Using this plugin makes it a cinch to create and submit your sitemap to Google.

5. Easytube
This plugin makes it easy to insert YouTube videos. Once you install it all you have to do is activate and then when writing you post simply add and you’re done. I’m sure there are other YouTube related plugins around but this is the easiest one I’ve found so far.

6. Smart Update Plugin
A great plugin which allows you to track which pings have been successfully ‘pinged’. It also allows you to create a log file for debugging purposes. This was good for me because I had no idea before I used this plugin whether or not the sites I was pinging were being successfully sent to. It turned out that about 1/3 of the sites I was trying to ping weren’t working.

7. WP-d-tree Pluging
This is a great plugin and allows you to create drop down menus and collapsible and expandable categories for all your posts, categories, archives etc. and also enables a fair bit of tweaking of the colour scheme and the way the categories are displayed when you expand them. Surprisingly easy to install and use.

8. WP Review Site
This is the perfect plugin if you want to add a ratings system to your site. The plugin integrates with Wordpress administration and you can sort your posts by weighted average. Unfortunately you have to pay for this plugin but it’s probably worth purchasing if you have a site based on user ratings.

Sitemap Generator for Wordpress Plugin

Although it is not absolutely necessary to create a site map and submit to google, it does help to do it because it makes it easier and faster for google to crawl your pages and index them correctly. Google basically uses your sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase their coverage of your webpages. You should submit your website to as many directories as possible, including the Open Directory Project.

Step 1: Download the XML sitemap generator from here

Step 2: Drag the folder to your plugins area using your ftp server.

Step 3: Activate the plugin from your admin panel

Step 4: In wordpress 2.5, Go to ’setttings’ and click on XML-Sitemap and you’ll get the following screen. Click on where it says ‘Click here’ to build your sitemap.

Once you do this you get a screen like this (below) which confirms that your sitemap has been built.

If you click on the above ’sitemap’ you can see the sitemap which has been built for you (as below).

The next thing you have to do is submit your sitemap to google. On the right hand side you will see something which says ‘webmaster tools’. Once you click on this you will be taken to googles webmaster tools dashboard. There is an option here to add your site, so type in your site as illustrated below – ie. www.whateveryoursiteis.com and click on ‘add site’

Copy the end of the URL which is displayed at the top of this page and go back to the webmaster tools website. You only need the last bit of the URL – i.e. just the bit which says sitemap.xml (see below for example).

Click on Sitemaps, Add sitemap. There is a drop down menu – choose ‘Add General Website’ as displayed below.

Add the sitemap.xml text and click on ‘Add General Web Sitemap’.

You then get a ‘Successfully added’ screen like the one below.

You will then be asked to verify your site. On this screen you may see that Googlebot has already successfully accessed your home page before. This just means that google has crawled your site, but because we now have a sitemap it will make it even easier and faster and the crawl will also be more accurate next time google crawls it.

Once you click on ‘verify site’ the following screen will appear. The words ‘not verified’ appear. This means your site has not yet been verified, which we now have to do. There are two ways to do this, by adding a meta tag or uploading a HTML file. Personally, I found it easier to upload the html file so that it what I will show you how to do here.

Once you choose the option from the drop down menu to verify it by uploading a html file, the following screen will appear. You are then asked to create a file with this name and upload it to your website.

The next step requires you to open notepad and simply click on save as and copy the html verification file so the name of your file matches that of the one provided – i.e. something like google11e16a9c84a5db38.html

Save this file where it is easily accessible and then drag and drop it into your site using an ftp server. I prefer filezilla because it’s reliable and free.

In step 2 on the verification page, you will notice it asks you whether or not you’ve uploaded the file and can view it in your browser. Just copy the file which has your website name and the .html code at the end of it into your browser and see if anything comes up. If you haven’t put it any text then a blank screen should appear.

After you verify your site you should get a ‘Success’ screen like the one below.

Trouble Shooting

When I first tried to verify my site I got the following error message which said Verification status: NOT VERIFIED. We’ve detected that your 404 (file not found) error page returns a status of 200 (Success) in the header. This happened on two of my sites. The first time I fixed it by disabling a ‘redirect plugin’ and the second time I managed to get it working by updating my permalink to custom %postname%, which I had forgotten to do when setting the site up. I’m not a technical person so I have no idea why this happened?