WordPress and RSS go together like ham and cheese, but there are always ways to make the combination that much better and make sure you know exactly how well you are doing.  The following 12 plugins will help you add information to your feeds, manage your subscribers and view statistics on how you’re performing.

All of these plugins are supposed to work in version 2.5 and above. Also, as always, don’t install all of these unless you want to decrease your blog’s response time.

Additional Feed Content

Ozh’ Better Feed - Allows you to add just about anything you want to your RSS feed entries such as links, ads, copyright information and more.

RSS Footer - Allows you to insert copyright information and link backs to your original posting in your RSS entries.

RSS Includes Pages - Allows you to include pages and not just posts in your RSS feed.

RSSupplement - Allows you to add a number of different things to your feed including comments link, social bookmarking links and more.

Simple Feed Copyright - Adds a simple copyright notice to the bottom of each entry in your RSS feed with a link back to your blog.

RSS Management

FD FeedBurner Plugin - Redirects your main feed, and your comments feed if you choose, through FeedBurner without any need to modify templates.

Feed Key - Allows you to add keys to restrict feeds to registered users.

Feed Wrangler - Allows you to manage your feed with ads, without, make some feeds bypass FeedBurner and more.

RSSless - Allows you to use short codes to remove certain types of content from your feeds such as videos or images that don’t format correctly.

Stats

Feed Subscriber Stats - Allows you to see how many subscribers you have according to FeedBurner in your dashboard instead of going to their site or having to view your own site.

FeedBurner Widget - Allows you to add the FeedBurner chicklet directly from within your admin area.

FeedStats - Tracks feed usage in your dashboard.  Lets you set the number of days to tracks, IPs to exclude and more.

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Recently we brought you a list of free & legal music downloads, but we understand that not everyone wants to eat up space on their hard drive or MP3 player.  So we’ve compiled a list of 30+ awesome streaming music sites we know you’ll enjoy.

Whether you’re interested in general streaming music, mixtapes, music discovery, or more, the Internet offers a plethora of streaming music services. Tell us which are your favorites.

General Streaming

AH.fm - Streaming techno and dance music, as well as a forum for you to discuss with other fans.

AmazingTunes.com - Search for artists you want to hear or choose from a list of stations. Has a pop out player so you can listen as you browse other sites on the Web.

AOL Radio - Powered by CBS Radio, AOL Radio brings you talk, streaming music and actual radio stations.

Deezer.com - Part social network, all music.  The site allows you to listen to free streaming music, build your own playlists, share them with friends and even embed music on other sites.

DI.fm - Digitally Imported specializes in streaming electronic and dance music from all around the globe.  Also offers premium upgrades for higher bit rates.

Free.Napster.com - Free streaming music from Napster that includes full albums.

Grooveshark.com - Build your own playlist, as you go along, save it, and you can listen to it again in the future.  Also suggests similar songs and more.

iLike.com - Features a mixture of full songs and samples that you can listen to. An extremely popular app on many social networks.

iTunes - While not a Web application, the vast majority of us have it already installed on our systems.  Just click on the “Radio” link and listen to different Internet radio stations from all over the world.

Last.fm - Last.fm follows what you listen to and then makes suggestions of what else you may like, or you can also just dive right in, listening to whatever you feel like.

Live365.com - A mixture of free stations and ones only available to VIP subscribers, it covers just about every genre of music you can think of.

Magnatune.com - A home for independent artists where you can either stream their albums, or buy them by naming your price, starting at $5.00.

MikesRadioWorld.com - A guide to over 5,000 streaming radio stations from the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Europe.

MP3.com - Stream the music, or download it free.  Lets you jump around choosing the tunes you want to hear.

MusicMesh.net - Start with one album, listen to it in its entirety or just one track, and then check out other artists and albums that are of a similar vein.

RadioTime.com - Collects streams from radio stations from all over, putting them in one easy to use directory.

Real Player - Download Real Player and then play free music via their Rhapsody service.

SHOUTcast.com - Using a program such as Winamp, choose the radio station of your choice from around the world, and “Tune In”.

Slacker.com - Listen to their pre-built stations, or start building one of your own.

Streampad.com - Search for music to listen to, or point it directly to a page you want to listen to, including podcasts.

TheSixtyOne.com - Streams music and then allows you to purchase the tracks via Amazon.com’s MP3 store.  Site also has social aspects allowing users to “bump” songs up playlists as well as make leaderboards by building their own playlists.

Yahoo Music - Only works with Internet Explorer (still), but streams music from artists or by station.

Mix Tapes

MeeMix.com - Start exploring your favorite music and similar artists, create your own station and then share it with your friends.

Mixwit.com - Like Muxtape, you can create and listen to “mix tapes” and then share them with friends.

Muxtape.com - Not your typical streaming site as users make up their own “mix tapes” of up to 12 songs, and then share them with anyone.

Spinjay.com - Create playlists and have people vote on them to make you a popular “DJ”, or simply browse through the existing ones and listen.

Music Discovery

Blip.fm -A “Twitter” for music that lets you tell others what you are listening to and embeds the music in your post, making an ever growing playlist by following the main timeline of the site.  Check out the Mashable Conversations interview with Gavin Hayes, lead singer of Dredg, we did a while back about the site.

Finetune.com - As you find music you like, you can add it to a playlist which you can then embed in your site.

Musicovery.com - Name your “mood” and Musicovery starts playing music based on that.  It then follows a progression based on your votes for the song, or you can jump around on the other suggestions on the screen.

Pandora.com - Many people were depressed when Pandora had to shut down its non-U.S. streams, but the site lives on.  Enter the name of a song or artist you like, the site analyzes it, and builds a channel on that style of music.

Soundpedia.com - Similar to Pandora in that you start with artist and then it builds a station based on that style/genre of music.

Music Search

Dizzler.com - Search for streaming music, radio stations, video and more.

Jiwa.fm - Search for music you like and Jiwa will search for streams of it.

SeeqPod.com - Even though its legality has been called into question, Seeqpod allows you to search the Internet for publicly available MP3s for you to listen to.

Skreemr.com - Like SeeqPod, Skreemr allows you to search for all of those allusive tracks you’d rather just listen to then admit you have them on your iPod.

[image credit: hryckowian]

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Last.fm Still Growing. Thanks, Free Music.

Even though WordPress 2.5 has been out for a while now, not all plugins are up-to-date. We’ve put together a list of 20+ must-have WordPress 2.5 compatible plugins to manage your blog, engage readers, and tempt new ones as well.

Below you’ll find helpful plugins that enable you to block spam, track analytics, promote your posts, and more. As always, please remember the more plugins you have, the slower your install will run!

Akismet - Every WordPress blogger’s best friend.  Akismet is the first line of defense between your blog and an endless stream of comments attempting to sell you Viagra.

All in One SEO Pack -A popular plugin with SEO fanatics, its All in One SEO Pack lets you insert meta tags, helps you with duplicate content, optimizing titles and more.

Broken Link Checker for WordPress - As your blog gets more and more posts, it can be difficult to go back and look for what has broken with time.  This plugin will check images and links and notify you via the dashboard when it locates something.

cforms II - Creating forms for your site has always been a bit of a pain to do from scratch. cforms streamlines the process allowing you to build one form and then insert it wherever you like with a simple line of code.

Enforce WWW Preference - This plugin will enforce either choice you have for your domain name, whether it be with WWW or without.

Events Calendar - Replace the default calendar with a more advanced one that will allow you to add events to your site.

Google Analyticator - Google Analytics is a popular way of tracking your site visitors, but it can be a pain in the behind to install properly.  This plugin allows you to enter your code, and it will take care of making sure it gets to the right place in all of your themes.

Google XML Sitemap - Helps you generate XML enabled sitemap to help with indexing by search engines like Google, MSN, Ask and more.  This plugin says it requires WP 2.1+, but it is working with 2.5 for sure.

My Page Order - Rearrange the order of your pages with a simple drag-and-drop interface, easily putting them in the order of your choice.

Nextgen Gallery - An advanced image gallery that allows your images to expand with ease and have captions under each.

No Self Pings - A nice little plugin that keeps pingbacks from showing up in your comments section when you link back to your own blog entries.

Recent Posts - Adds a sidebar listing of your most recent posts, which is handy for people who surf in from search engines to your older posts.

Share This - The well known little green button that will allow your users to send articles to various social networks, email them to friends, and more.

Similar Posts/Post-Plugin Library - We list these two together because Similar Posts does not work without the library plugin.  Similar posts will insert a list of posts at the end of each post that may be of interest to your readers.

StartPress - A customizable stats package that lets you easily set just how much information it collects, reducing the amount of strain on your install.

Twitter Updater - Sends a message to your Twitter timeline each time you post a new blog post.

Viper’s Video Quicktags - Helps ease the insertion of videos from sites such as YouTube, MySpace, GVideo and more.

WordPress Mobile Edition - Strips your blog of the normal theme and pictures so that it just shows up as text and links on mobile devices such as a BlackBerry, easing readers’ navigation.

WordPress.com Stats - A stats system that helps you reduce the load on your server by using the WordPress.com servers to keep track of your stats for you.

WP-Polls - Easily create polls to get feedback from your readers about their thoughts on a story or something you consider doing to change your blog.

WP e-Commerce - As people use WordPress for far more uses than as a blog, plugins have popped up that help with those other functionalities.  WP e-Commerce allows you to add a shopping cart to your site for just a few items up to thousands.

WP Sticky - A useful plugin that makes one of your posts “sticky” so it always appears as the first post on your site, which gives you an easy way of explaining your blog to new readers that come in to the site.

WP Super Cache - Caches your pages as static HTML files as opposed to PHP files, which can take longer to process and display on your site.

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Adobe’s popular AIR runtime is gaining more and more fans, and with that, far more applications than ever that cover a broad spectrum of tools. From fun applications that let you order pizza from your desktop to applications that let you track your investments online and off , the entire spectrum is out there, and this guide should help you find at least one or two that fit your life.

Financial and Productivity

Agile Agenda - Helps with project management, letting you schedule and assign tasks, assigning priorities and more.

Google Calendar RSS Invoice Creator - If you use Google Calendar to track your work on projects, you can use this app to parse your RSS feed and create invoices for your time to send to your clients.

Klok - A tool for freelance workers to manage their billable hours to clients. Also gives you tools for visualizing what you spend the majority of your time on, managing your projects and more.

NASDAQ Market Reply - A powerful tool allowing you to look over the history of any security and study its trends.

Portfolio Viewer - View multiple investment portfolios, and you can view them offline as all information is stored locally.

StockQ - Start streaming stock prices to your desktop without having to belong to any other sites. Set refresh intervals from 1 sec to 5 minutes, you have complete control.

Wicked Stickies! - Make post-it-like stickers where you can put down notes to help with your GTD activities, even set them with an expiration date so they won’t clutter up your desk.
(more…)

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Firefox can be extended to do just about anything you want, so why not have it help you with your web development and design? We’ve got a dozen suggestions to get you started down the road of turning Firefox into a powerful design and development tool in your arsenal.

Be sure to check our first toolbox of Firefox add-ons for developers and designers, too.

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Sometimes it is just worlds easier watching a tutorial than reading it, and the Internet has made video tutorials of all kinds very available. Photoshop tutorials are especially popular due to the complexity of the popular program. We’ve gotten together 20+ sites with video tutorials for just about every aspect of the image editor that you can imagine.

And before any one comments, yes, we are aware of the “You Suck At Photoshop” series, but it didn’t really fit the theme.
(more…)

ShareThis

If you’ve been surfing the Web on your iPhone, and hit a broken Flash video link, there is now a way for you to get those to jive with your device. A new bookmarklet named iTransmogrify! has been released that will activate the broken link and allow you to play the video via the iPhone’s YouTube application.

When you come across the broken link, go to the bookmarklet, the page reloads, and you then see an image of the video which bears a YouTube-like playback button. Click the icon and the video runs. Handy for those invisible embeds you come across. You can find the link you need over at JoeMaller.com.

Note: Mashable weekend editor Paul Glazowski attempted to operate the bookmarklet on his own iPhone. The link triggered the iPhone to open its native YouTube application, but displayed the error “This video does not currently support iPhone.” If your attempts to verify that this code works correctly are successful, please do let us know.

Share This

As the iPhone and iPod Touch continue to gain market share, more and more websites are building versions designed for optimal use with these devices. We’ve gathered together a sample of some of the better ones out there for you to give a try. Please note that some of these links will open ONLY on these devices.
(more…)

Share This

Hoosgot (pronounced “Who’s got”… aren’t they clever) is a supposed replacement for the missing LazyWeb in your life.

David Sifry, the founder of Technorati, apparently cobbled this together over the past few days. The idea is fairly simple in that you either mention “hoosgot” in a blog post, or make a Twitter update including @hoosgot in it, and the site will pick it up. (in the case of a blog post, your site needs to be indexed by Technorati for it to work) You can ask any number of inane questions, and maybe get a reply if you’re lucky. Examples of some of the questions might be something like “I need to find a good pet groomer in the Los Angeles area” or the such, and you could then monitor the hoosgot Twitter account for an answer.

This a nice idea, but seems horribly unmanageable to me. Say it catches on, who has the time to read a gajillion Twitter posts to find the one someone forgot to add the “@” to, which does happen from time to time? It seems like a clunky way to get answers to me when there are much slicker ways to get replies to your queries in life like the sites we listed in our Q & A Toolbox.

Mr. Sifry’s name attached to this will bring it a lot of attention, but I think the time for a service such as this has long since passed.

(via Sifry’s Alerts)

Share This

Yes, you’re correct. Until 2007 is dead and buried, everyone will keep on pestering you with predictions for 2008. Since there’s just no way of avoiding this, I might as well go with the flow and give away all my insider secre…err, my wild predictions of what’s to happen in the upcoming year. (more…)

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