No, this is not about Mozilla’s experimental project (which has been also coined the term Jetpack). Automattic has just launched Jetpack, a new plugin which brings WordPress.com goodness to self hosted WordPress blogs i.e blogs that are hosted with WordPress.org.

With the Jetpack plugin for WordPress, webmasters or bloggers who don’t use WordPress.com and prefer using the open source CMS version can access features that depend on WordPress.com.

Installing Jetpack on Your Self Hosted WordPress Blog

Getting started with Jetpack is easy, you can either visit the homepage and download the files (740KB). Else you can do a search for Jetpack(without quotes) under Add New Pluginsin your blog’s administration area. I would prefer the latter option because this method does not require downloading the plugin, opening up an FTP client and uploading the files to the Wp-content/plugins directory.

Once you have installed the plugin, you will have to connect your WordPress.com account with the plugin preferences. If you do not have a WordPress.com account yet, you know where to start

In the next page, simply enter your WordPress.com credentials and click Authorize Jetpack

After you have authorized the plugin, you should be automatically redirected to the Jetpack settingspage of your blog, where you can choose the features you want to use on your self hosted WordPress blog.

Plugins And Features That Comes Bundled With Jetpack

Oh My, so many stuff under one hood. Yes, Jetpack brings a lot of WordPress.com features to your self hosted WordPress blog with a single click. You can individually handpick the features or plugins you want to use or choose all of them in one go.

This is quite similar to the first Fantastico installation provided by Dreamhost and some other hosting providers. If you have the experience of installing a new WordPress blog using Fantastico, you might know that some hosting providers provide a default bulk plugin and theme setups, after you’ve installed WordPress.

Following plugins and features are provided with Jetpack:

• WordPress.com Stats: This one is a must, if you want to check your blog stats within your WordPress administration area. Simple, concise site stats with no additional load on your server.
• Twitter widget: Display the latest updates from a Twitter user inside your theme’s widgets.
• ShareDaddy: The most super duper sharing tool on the interwebs. Allow your website visitors to share content on Facebook, Twitter and many more social networking websites.
• Gravatar Hovercards: Show a pop-up business card of your users’ Gravatar profiles in comments.
• Wp.me Shortlinks: Enable WP.me-powered shortlinks for all of your Posts and Pages for easier sharing.
• Shortcode Embeds: Easily embed videos from sites like YouTube, Vimeo and SlideShare.
• After the Deadline: Helps you write better by adding spell, style, and grammar checking to WordPress.
• Latex: Let’s you mark up posts with the LaTeX markup language, perfect for complex mathematical equations and other über-geekery.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg says:

Every time we launch something new on WP.com the first question is always asking how people can get it for their self-hosted blog. Now you can have your cake and eat it too — host your own blog, completely under your control and with the freedom of the GPL, and still get all the cloud goodies of our hosted service. It’s the best of both worlds.

You can head over to Jetpack’s FAQ page to learn more.

WordPress is fantastic. Take out word for it. Even Techie Buzz runs on WordPress! One of the reasons why this blogging platform is so famous is due to its vast and vibrant community that creates, shares and modifies plugins.

Plugins are tiny (or large) pieces of code that extend your site to do a lot of things. According to WordPress itself, Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine, from sending your new posts to Twitter automat[t]ically to having HTML5 MP3 players with a minimal interface.

Now, Jay Harley, the founder of Heaven Interactive and an avid web programmer has put up a very short primer on making your own WordPress plugin in PHP within ten minutes. This Graphical User Interface (GUI) plugin works off your WordPress Admin Dashboard.

The tutorial assumes that you have a solid grasp of PHP and some experience with WordPress. It also builds up on concepts introduced by a few WordPress plugin-authoring books such as WordPress Plugin Development (Beginner’s Guide)

While the tutorial is not as fleshed out as a real introductory class on plugin development, it sets the stage for further development by you, the developer. If you have always wanted to write your own WordPress plugin, this is that ignition that you have always wanted!

Start making your own PHP WordPress plugin in ten minutes.

The literary meaning of comicis pertaining to comedy. If we look back at our childhood, we’d all remember how much we used to love comics. We’d all love and some may fanatically collect strips of Spiderman and X Men. Times have changed, mediums have shifted but the love has not.

The newest rage and most preferred way to start a new comic these days is through the internet. It’s called a Webcomic. If you haven’t been living under a rock, you probably are aware of the popular xkcd. There are also other popular comic publications/sites like Doghouse Diaries and Explosm. To give expression to your thoughts in a graphical form, you no more need a publication house. It can all be done through the internet, in minutes, all by yourself. Even better, you’ll be saving paper!

So if you have got the artistic talent to draw and the capability to put people into fits of laughter, this is where you should be starting out. Read on to see how you can create a comic site, or a webcomic in minutes.

Webcomic

Webcomic is a plugin for WordPress that helps you set up and manage comic sites in little time. It is inspired by the ComicPress theme that was probably the first theme specifically built for a comic site. It works together with its sister theme Inkblotand surpasses ComicPress with features like Flash comic support, user-submittable transcripts, multi-comic support, support for loading entirely different WordPress themes based on the current comic, advanced storyline navigation, WordPress MU support, and internationalization support. The plugin also provides support for independent comic libraries. With ComicPress, people often complained about the lack of flexibility. Webcomic won’t let you feel that. If you decide on this, don’t forget to checkout the video tutorials.

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.

Many blogs and websites sport Facebook fan widgets, which is officially available for fan pages on Facebook. However, if you also have a Twitter account for your blog, you can only display a twittercounter widget or a custom icon which leads to your twitter account.

Twitter Fans Widget is a new and interesting WordPress plugin, which will allow you to display a Twitter Fans Widget similar to Facebook widget for your site. Once you have installed the plugin on your blog, go to Appearance > Widgetsand drag the Twitter Fans widget to wherever you want to display it.

Add the twitter username and the number of fans you want to display on the widget, and customize the colors for the widget. Once you are done, save the widget and reload the site to view the Twitter Fans widget in action. By the way, you can follow us @techiebuzzer to get the latest updates delivered directly to your Twitter timeline.

Thanks @loyals

Download Twitter Fans WordPress Plugin

There are more than thousands of social bookmarking plugins available for WordPress and out of those you would be definitely confused on which plugin you should be using. Its the same case with me too! I’ve shifted to as many plugins as I could to get the best out of it. Through my experience of switching and using many different plugins, I’ve prepared a list of which I rate them, the best” and would love to share it with you.

SexyBookmarks

Sociable

ShareThis

Social Dropdown

Digg Digg

SocioFluid

SociBook

I Love Social Bookmarking

Gregarious

MySQL is the preferred database for WordPress, however not everyone likes MySQL and there is no easy alternative to make WordPress use another database.

If you want to use PostgreSQL with WordPress there is a WordPress plugin that will allow you to do it without making any changes to the internal WordPress codebase.

PostgreSQL for WordPress (PG4WP) gives you the possibility to install and use WordPress with a PostgreSQL database as a backend. It works by replacing calls to MySQL specific functions with generic calls that maps them to another database functions.

When needed, the original SQL queries are rewritten on the fly so that MySQL specific queries work fine with the backend database.

Support for other database can also be added if the appropriate drivers are written for them.

We tested this out on a local installation and were able to use PostgreSQL with WordPress without any issues.

The only problem we see with the plugin is that you need to perform a fresh install for this to work, however it might work on older installations if you are able to import the MySQL database to PostgreSQL.

Download PostgreSQL for WordPress (PG4WP)

Here is a quick plugin I wrote called Plugin Update Email Notifier, the basic function of this plugin is to send out daily/weekly/monthly notification to administrators if there are any new plugin updates available for their blogs.

Many WordPress administrators do not usually login to the admin dashboard, thus missing out on new plugin updates made available by plugin authors.

Many a times these plugin updates are critical and may address a crucial flaw in the plugin or add a exciting feature, to keep you up-to-date on the new updates available for plugins you use (or also those that are deactivated) without having to visit the admin dashboard, you can use the plugin update email notifier plugin.

It runs in the background on a daily/weekly/monthly basis and checks for updates available in plugins and emails you a digest.

Installation is simple, just download the plugin and upload it to your plugins folder, once you have uploaded the plugin, activate it.

VERY IMPORTANT: Once you have activated the plugin don’t forget to set up the plugin to run according to your needs, this setup is required so that the plugin knows when to run and send you email updates about it. Just head to the settings page and change the settings accordingly, if you do not want to change the settings just hit the Save Settings button once.

You can choose to receive updates once a day, once a week or once a month, by default the updates will only include active plugins you are using, however you can choose to get updates for inactive plugins as well.

If you want to stop receiving emails for plugin updates, you can choose that option too without having to disable the plugin.

Here is the format in which you will receive plugin update emails.

If you choose to get updates for inactive plugins, the plugin will flag it in the email making it easier to decide whether or not you need to head to the admin dashboard to update the plugin.

Hope you find this useful, took me just two hours to code, however there are still other huge WordPress Plugins I am working on and will release soon, keep an eye out for them.

Right now the plugin is hosted on Google code, will move it to WordPress extend as soon as the plugin gets approval.

Download Plugin Updates Email Notifier

Update March 6th, 2010: Released v1.3.0 to fix several issues with NUS. Plugin now works fine with Google accounts. Support for old FeedBurner accounts has been dropped in this release.

Update May 24th 12:34 Am 2009: Release version 1.2, it fixes a issue users had with Cookies, this issue affected users and showed them a message that there were no subscribers even when there were subscribers who had not confirmed, thanks to @narayanah for pointing this issue to me.

Minor Update Released at May 23rd 2009 10:43 PM EST : Just pushed a small update to the plugin, it is to fix a issue with the feed ID I was storing in the database, earlier version used INT to store the value, newer version uses varchar, if you have been using the older version of the plugin, updating to NUS v1.1 should automatically fix this issue, downloads available at the same place, you will get automatic update intimation in the Plugins Dashboard.

Sorry for the unwarranted update, I thought I had taken care of this issue. If you have  been using v0.1 earlier, please upgrade to v1.1, v1.0 may not work for people who used the older version and have not deleted the old tables.

Quite sometime back I had written a plugin that allowed users to notify unconfirmed email subscribers in their Feedburner account, the plugin worked pretty fine, however it stopped working after Google started moving users from the old Feedburner accounts to Google.

I have been getting several requests to fix this problem, and have finally had a chance to sit down and make the changes to the code to work with newer Google Feedburner accounts.

The new changes include an option for users to specify whether they are using a Old Feedburner.com account or the newer Google Feedburner Account, before starting with the notification process.

Hope this helps whoever have complained that the plugin stopped working for them, if you haven’t deleted the plugin, you should see a new dashboard alert to upgrade the plugin to a newer version.

Another slight change in the NUS plugin is that I have moved it from the original location to under the Tools menu now and changed the title to Notify Unconfirmed Subscriptions, so please keep in mind where you can find that option now.

If you haven’t used it yet, you can read what Notify Unconfirmed Subscriber does on the release page or download the plugin from WordPress extend. If you have any problems with the plugin, please create a topic in the Notify Unconfirmed Subscribers Forum.

Download Notify Unconfirmed Subscribers