One of the plugins that was quite popular with the crowd at WordCamp Detroit last weekend was Jetpack. Jetpack combines a lot of useful functions into a single plugin, including:
- Readership statistics previously provided by WordPress.com Stats.
- Email subscriptions for your blog’s posts and your post’s comments.
- The WP.me URL shortener.
- For the Math geeks, a simple way to include beautiful mathematical expressions on your site.
- A widget for displaying recent tweets. Previously provided by Wickett Twitter Widget
- Your readers can easily share your posts via email or their favorite social networks. Previously provided by the Sharedaddy WordPress plugin.
- Your writing will improve thanks to After the Deadline, an artificial intelligence based spell, style, and grammar checker. Previously provided by the After the Deadline WordPress plugin.
All these functions were available before, but you had to install separate plugins for each. It’s much cooler to have them all in a single plugin. I’ve already installed it here on BorntoBlog.
To install the plugin, you’ll need a WordPress.Com account, but that’s not a big deal…at least not normally. When I went to install this on my amateur radio blog, KB6NU.Com, I tried setting up a kb6nu account, only to be told that username was already in use.
Not a biggie, I thought. I probably just forgot that I had done this already, and all I needed to do was recover the password. When I went to the “lost password” page and typed in the username kb6nu, however, WordPress.Com told me that there was no such user. I hope that they can straighten this out real soon.
At any rate, if you haven’t already installed Jetpack, you might want to give it a look. It will allow you to add a lot of functionality to your WP site, or if you already have some plugins that do what Jetpack does, combine them into a single plugin.