Twitter is buzzing and if your blog is based on WordPress, following is a collection of some of the best Twitter plugins which can be integrated in your WordPress blog.

Tweet This, a WordPress plugin for Twitter: Adds a Tweet This Postlink to every post and page on your blog. This plugin can automatically tweet new blog posts.

TweetSuite: Another useful plugin for WordPress that includes server-side tweetbacks, ReTweet-this buttons, a digg-like Tweet-This button, automatic tweeting of new posts and other useful widgets.

TweetMeme Button: This plugin allows your blog posts to be re-tweeted. The TweetMeme button provides a live count of how many times your post/page has been re-tweeted. It gives you the ability to control the length of the tweets and, supports hashtags.

Twitter Tools: This WordPress plugin integrates your WordPress blog with your Twitter account. It enables you to pull your tweets into your blog and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress.

WP to Twitter: This plugin posts a Twitter status update from your WordPress based blog using a couple of URL shortening services to provide a backlink to your post from Twitter.

Twitter for WordPress: Displays yours latest tweets in your WordPress blog. This plugin detects URLs, e-mail address and @username replies. It’s simple for use and is customizable.

WP FollowMe: Enables you to add a twitter “Follow me” badge on your WordPress based blog.

Tweetbox: The tweetbox plugin allows you to display your latest tweets in the sidebar of your WordPress based blog.

WordTwit:   When you publish a new post on your blog, WordTwit will automatically tweet your post and converts any links to tiny URLs.

Do tell us about your favorite Twitter plugins for WordPress in comments.

If you’re using Mozilla Firefox and you do any writing on the web then, here is an interesting and intelligent add-on for you.  After the Deadline, from Automattic,  is a fabulous add-on for Mozilla Firefox which brings smart, contextual spelling, style and grammar checking to the browser. It works on most text area’s used in HTML forms.

After the Deadline enables you to write better, tweet with correct grammar and spend less time editing. It can handle everything from common typos to misused punctuation, double negatives, redundancies and other grammatical errors.

Once you install this add-on, just click on the check icon displayed on text areas of web forms to check your grammar and spelling or right-click and select ‘Check Spelling and Grammar’ from the context menu of a text area.

You can set After the Deadline to run the proofreader automatically before submitting a form. Apart from the default grammar rules applied, some extra options like bias language, cliche, complex phrases, double negative etc., can be used to find patterns of poor writing style. You may add phrase(s) to the ignore list by typing it into the text field and clicking ‘Add’. Following is a screencast demonstrating some of the useful features of After the Deadline.

After the Deadline is also available as a plugin for WordPress, RoundCube, bbPress and PHPList.

Download After the Deadline for Firefox

You might also want to check out how After the Deadline tries to make spelling suggestions.

To mark the release of the Mozilla Firefox 3.6, WordPress has created two brand new personas  for Firefox.  In case you haven’t checked out personas yet, they are like themes for your Mozilla Firefox browser. You can switch between personas to quickly change the look and feel of your browser.

The two personas released by WordPress are Vintage Press and InkWell.

Vintage Press

This persona is inspired by the style of the old-time printing presses.

Get Vintage Press persona

InkWell

This persona portrays a well-used piece of paper decorated with splashes of color. It’s got some nice colors and, musical notes to add a new flavor to the design.

Get InkWell persona

You might also want to check out a couple of other interesting WordPress personas available for Firefox –  WordPress and WordPress Clean.

Which web site do you prefer for buying textbooks – Amazon, Half, Buy or others? Sometimes you might have noticed that, the same book is priced at different rates on various web sites. To help you with price comparison and in buying textbooks at a cheaper rate here is a simple, easy-to-use web service.

Textbook Price Comparison, is a free web service which enables you to search online merchants across the web and find the best prices on new and used textbooks. It allows you to search for books by – title, ISBN, author and keywords. The search results are sorted into categories by – lowest overall prices, used book prices, new book prices, and rental prices.

Textbook Price Comparison makes it very easy for you to find the cheapest option for book buying. It’s a must bookmark web site for students to quickly compare prices of a book across multiple sites and choose the best option available. Don’t forget to check out this site the next time you buy textbooks.

Key Features:

• Free textbook price comparison service
• Search for books by ISBN, title, author and keywords
• Sorts search results by lowest overall prices, used book prices, new book prices, and rental prices
• No registration required for use

Textbook Price Comparison

We have covered some pretty unique and handy web based PDF utilities so far. To add-on to the list, here is a simple web based utility, PDFmyURL – which provides you with PDF files when you enter a web address. It also provides you with a handy bookmarklet for quick access.

With advanced options, you can learn how to use PDFmyURL on your own site and even how to run PDFmyURL from your own server.

To use PDFmyURL on your web site, just link the text or image you want visitors to use for downloading a specific URL like,

http://pdfmyurl.com?url=www.techie-buzz.com

You can easily create text link(s) like this: Download this web page as PDF.

This service also provides you with further options to customize the output PDF document according to your needs. If you would like to get a PDF document out of a given web address then, PDFmyURL is a hassle free web based utility worth giving a try!

Spell with Flickr is a web service which enables you to type in any text you wish to and then, matches each letter of that phrase/word with letter pictures right from Flickr.

The letters that appear here are retrieved from images posted on the One Letter Flickr group. If you don’t like any of the images that appear, then you can just click on each individual image to change it. You can also try reloading the page to get a new graphic set of letters

Spell with flickr also provides with HTML code that you can copy and paste to any web page or blog.

This service can come handy to quickly make a heading for a web page and try alternate texts to suit your needs. It’s a nice little tool to play around with. Check out spell with flickr.

This service is free for use and does not require any registration for use.

Ideone is a web application which enables you to execute and share code in about 40 programming languages. It’s like a pastebin for programmers to quickly run, debug and share code online, without having to install a desktop based IDE.

Using Ideone is easy, just select the programming language you need, paste your source code and the input data for the program (if any), choose whether your code needs to be executed and whether it ought to be private and hit the ‘submit’ button. Then, you can see the compilation information and the output results of your code. You can share it with your friends, or run it again with a new input, if need be.

The code snippets, if run on the Ideone server, can be accessed via convenient hash links. Source code pages provide details about code and its execution including   the memory usage, execution time, language and compiler version, input uploaded by user, output generated by the program and error messages from compilers and interpreters.

Ideone provides you with an option to edit the source code, even after execution. Optionally turn on/off syntax highlighting for your code. When syntax highlighting is on, features like word wrap mode, go to line, font size, syntax etc., are made available. You can download the source file(s) and share it on most of the popular web services.

For this chilly winter season, why not intrigue your blog readers with a nice snow fall effect?   If your blog is based on WordPress, then here are three cool plug-ins which enable you to add a snow fall effect to your blog with ease.

Let It Snow!

This plug-in enables you to customize the snowing effect to suit your blog’s design. It provides you with options to set limits for,

• The maximum number of snowflakes that can exist on the screen at a given time.
• Maximum speed of snowfall in vertical and horizontal directions.
• The maximum number of active flakes etc.,

The interesting part of this plug-in is that, you can see all the snow settling at the bottom of the screen. Nice isn’t it?

Snow, balloons and more

This plug-in enables you to add nice snowflakes, leaves, drops and balloons that can float on your blog. You can choose the number of snowflakes and limit the plug-in to specific posts or pages. It provides you with options to set limits to the wind strength, snowfall speed etc., You might want to check out a live demo of this plug-in here.

Snow Storm

Snow Storm is a similar WordPress plugin which enables you to add a snow effect to your blog with all the snow accumulating at the bottom of the web page.

If your website or blog is based on WordPress, then here are some of the best plugins that help you with maintenance.

Broken Link Checker: Checks your blog for broken links. It monitors links in your posts, pages, blogroll and custom fields. It detects missing images and broken links and notifies you on the Dashboard. You can also search and filter links by URL and anchor text.

Maintenance Mode: This plugin will come handy when your web site or blog is under construction or maintenance. It adds a splash page to your blog to let visitors know that the blog is temporarily down for maintenance. Administrators once logged-in, can have full access to the blog including the front-end.

WP-DBManager: Enables you to backup, optimize, restore and repair your WordPress database. It supports scheduled backups. You can even drop/empty tables and run selected queries.

Site Maintenance: This plugin puts your site under maintenance mode by sending a ’503 Service Unavailable’ status to visitors.

WP Security Scan: Scans for security vulnerabilities in your WordPress installation and suggests corrective measures. It checks database security, passwords, file permissions, WordPress admin security and more.

AntiVirus: It’s an effective plugin to protect your blog against spam injections and other exploits. With this plugin you can perform a daily automatic check to make sure your blog is secure. You can do a manual testing and obtain immediate result of the infected files.

Trash Manager:   With the new functionality – Trash introduced in WordPress 2.9 by default you cannot directly delete posts, pages and comments. They have to be moved to Trash first, and then deleted. To make it easier for you, Trash Manager adds ‘Delete Permanently’ link to post, page and comments list. This enables you to delete them directly without having to move them to Trash first.

Squareleaf is a free web based virtual sticky note service. It can be used to store all the important and day-to-day information like schedules, phone numbers, addresses, to-do lists and other notes.

Squareleaf provides the convenience of arranging your notes on a white board in the way you like. The content in the sticky notes can be saved, modified and deleted as needed. Since this service is web based, you can access it from anywhere at anytime.

Once you sign up, you can start making sticky notes by selecting the color of your note and then clicking on add note’. You can also resize, change the color and location of the notes all over the white board.

The information in the notes can be saved and reloaded using the save’ and reload’ options. Squareleaf makes it very easy for you to manage your to-do lists, notes and other information.

Key Features

• Web based virtual sticky note service.
• Provides options to drag-drop, resize and change the color of note boxes.
• Can be used to store to-dos, schedules, phone numbers etc.
• Free to use, requires registration.