I promised to donate to five of my favorite WordPress plugins a little while ago, and offered to let you help decide how the money should be divided. Unfortunately, that post didn’t yield enough comments to truly determine which of my picks you liked best. That’s why I decided to simply split the money five ways.

I made the payments yesterday, and I must say that felt good. I’ve been using some of these plugins for ages, and it seemed only fair I made a little donation in return. Please see the original post for the nominated plugins. Now if only I’d known Matt was going to introduce a ‘Thank a plugin developer day‘ so I could have timed this to match that. I’m pretty sure Joost, Arne, Krischan, Mitcho and Michael aren’t going to mind though .

I don’t like ‘re-blogging’. I try and write original stuff and not point to other people’s posts. This video however is essential if you’re serious about SEO and WordPress, and you haven’t seen it already you really should. My fellow countryman Joost de Valk talks about SEO and shares some great tips. The video is after the break.
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Igor A. Melekhine recently sent me a modified version of my Youtuber plugin that adds a ‘high quality’ checkbox to the options page. When checked, Youtuber will attempt to play all videos in the superior MP4 format. Not only will this improve video quality, it’s also the only way to get stereo sound. I’ve incorporated Igor’s changes into a new version, 1.4. Available from your local wordpress.org now.

Thanks Igor, Novastar sounds so much better in high quality.

Yannick Lejeune has ported WP-Cumulus to Typepad. Aptly named Tumulus, the snippet of code can be downloaded from Yannick’s site. One more step towards world domination (insert evil laughter here)…

Tagnetic Poetry is another experiment using Flash to display your blog’s tag cloud. It was Merel Zwart who came up with the brilliant idea to mimic magnetic poetry. Because it re-uses most of the code used in WP-Cumulus, the 0.8 version should already be pretty stable.

You can see it in action here.
More WordPress plugin: Tagnetic Poetry

One of the major shortcomings of Flash (imho) is the way it handles text. If you want to animate text, change its transparency or do any of the other things that Flash is so good at, you need to embed font characters into your movie. This is usually not so bad, if you know the target language your movie will be used to display.

My WP-Cumulus WordPress plugin however can be used to display tags in any language. Embedding all available characters would render the plugin unusable, as even the relatively simple Latin character set adds almost 30 kilobytes to the movie’s file size. This is why in order to use the plugin for other languages, you’ll need to add the appropriate characters yourself (or find someone who already has). Here’s how. It’s really quite easy.
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I was amazed last week when I released my Youtuber plugin for WordPress. I posted the plugin, went to sleep and by the time I woke up Weblogtoolscollection had already picked up on it. Their RSS feed is on pretty much every WP dashboard out there, and comments and trackbacks were coming in even though it had only been a couple of hours since I posted. The same thing happened a few days later when I decided to release the this.player plugin.
More Releasing WordPress plugins…

By default, embedded YouTube videos are 425 pixels wide, which is wider than the content column on Choking on Popcorn. To be able to easily resize and add cool videos to that site I copy-pasted together a very basic plugin for WordPress. It allows you to simply use something like [youtube ]xxxxxxxxx[/youtube] to embed the video. The ‘xxxxxxxxx’ bit needs to be replaced with the actual video’s ID of course. I know there are tons of plugins that do similar things and are vastly superior, but this one suits my needs perfectly.
More WordPress plugin: Youtuber