One obstacle that most bloggers face is spelling and/or grammar issues. The issue isn’t that they don’t proofread their work, it’s that when we know what something should say, our minds can correct spelling and grammar mistakes in our head. This lets typos and grammatical makes make it into our content without our knowledge. The good news here is that there is a new plugin called After the Deadline that will proofread our content.

After the Deadline uses “artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology to find your writing errors and offer smart suggestions.”

Now WordPress, by default, has spell check and so do all browsers. A few even have grammar check, but the question is, how good is it? After the Deadline tries to make it smarter and help you avoid both spelling and grammar errors.

As a WordPress plugin, After the Deadline replaces the built-in spell check and it works really well. By default, it only proofs your content when you hit the ‘Proofread’ button, however you can change the settings to proof as you type too.

Don’t agree with what it’s suggesting? After the Deadline can educate you as to why it’s suggesting an edit if it’s got a good reason.

Have you ever wanted to have the ability to better organize your uploads folder in WordPress?

By default, WordPress organizes all uploaded media by year and month. Where this works well for some bloggers, others want to organize their uploads into things like pdfs, downloads, videos and so on. This is especially important when using WordPress as a CMS.

That’s where the Relocate Upload plugin comes in handy.

Relocate Upload allows a blog admin to setup custom folders inside the uploads folder, or anywhere on the web server, for better file organization.

Relocate Upload Settings

When uploading media, Relocate Upload is integrated into the upload window with a drop down menu that allows the user to select the folder for the item to be uploaded to.

One of the most popular posts on BloggerDesign is how to get Flash (swf) into a WordPress post. The previous post is about three years old so I thought I’d write up a follow-up post, as embedding Flash is much easier now as it’s all built into WordPress.

With the newer versions of WordPress there is a button to embed media.

Embed Button

Once clicked, all you have to do is enter in the Flash (swf) file URL, set the dimensions, hit ‘Insert’, and WordPress will do the rest.

Embed Window

It’s that easy. No plugins, no confusing code, just provide WordPress with the URL of the Flash swf file and it’ll write the code to embed the Flash file into your post.

As a bonus, the embed option also works with Shockwave, Quicktime, Windows Media, YouTube URLs, and Real Media if you need to embed those media files as well.

A bloggers dream is to get noticed. That could be in the form of a post getting re-tweeted hundreds of times, hitting the homepage of Digg, shared a lot on Facebook, getting noticed by the media, or one of the many other ways a blog can get traffic. However, a flood of traffic can quickly cripple a blog and turn that dream into a nightmare. The good news here is that the WP Super Cache plug-in can help minimize issues caused by too much traffic.

The WP Super Cache plug-in creates a static HTML file of each post and serves that file up to users. This static HTML file loads faster and is a lot less demanding on the web server and database. Now if hundreds or thousands of people were to visit the same post in a short amount of time, instead of re-pulling that post from the database and piecing it all together, WordPress would just show the cached page; aka a static HTML version of the post. This page now loads faster and more efficiently.

Google Analytics is a full-featured analytics suite that is free to all to use. The data it captures lets blog owners know referrers to their site, keywords, popular posts, unique visitors and so much more.

With the Google Analyticator plug-in, you can view a summary of the blogs Google Analytics, for the past 30 days, right on the dashboard for quick and easy access.

Here’s how to setup Google Analytics on WordPress’ dashboard.

1. Sign up for a free Google Analytics account. If you already have a Gmail, or other Google account, then just sign-in. http://www.google.com/analytics/

Get Google Analytics

2. Get the Google Analyticator plug-in, install it on the blog, activate the plug-in, and remember to configure it.

Download The Plug-In

3. Once you have Google Analyticator up and running, go into the settings click the link to authenticate with Google.

Authenticate with Google

4. Google will then ask you to grant access.

Grant Access

5. Once access is granted, Google Analyticator will confirm that you are indeed authenticated.

Authenticated

6. Head back to the WordPress dashboard and check out the blogs Google Analytics summary for the past 30 days.

The nice thing about the iPhone WordPress is that there is a plug-in for just about everything.

Lets say you want to create a fancy image gallery to showcase your photography. With NextGEN Gallery you can add as many images as you want and have the beautifully displayed in blog posts or on a gallery page.

Image Gallery with NextGEN Gallery

Want to poll your audience? With WP-Polls you can create as many questions and get as many answers as you want.

Polls with WP-Polls

Maybe you want to you want to add Google Analytics to all pages of your blog AND see your stats on your WordPress dashboard. Google Analyticator can do that.

Google Analytics via Google Analyticator

Lets say you want to create a contact form. With cforms you can create simple, or complex, forms all by dragging and dropping form elements.

Forms with cforms

Need to find out how to easily embed a YouTube video in your post? Viper’s Video Quicktags lets you embed YouTube, DailyMotion, Viemo, Flickr, MySpace and more.

YouTube Videos with Viper's Video Quicktags

It’s never any fun to follow a link just to find out the page you were looking for can’t be found. Chances are, the user may spend a few seconds trying to find the correct page or just bail on the site. To ensure that visitors stay on your site, site owners should ensure that the 404 error page is friendly and helpful.

I did some research in the WordPress plug-in directory and came up with many plug-ins to enhance the default WordPress error page. However there were only two plug-ins that I could get to work and liked. The fist is Dunstan-style Error Page.

Dunstan-style Error Page

The Dunstan-style Error Page has a really nice layout that includes recent posts, a quick error report button, and a feedback form. It’s all built into the plug-in and there is nothing that needs to be configured.

The downside here is that the Dunstan-style Error Page tries to make integration simple but actually makes it complicated. The code did not work right with my design and I had to spend a few minutes modifying the plug-in so the layout was visually correct. This may not be an issue with all themes, but I could see it being a big deterrent; especially if you don’t know code.

A while back we covered a plug-in called Subscribe To Comments.  It’s a great way to ensure that when visitors comment on your blog posts, they receive follow-up comments and stay a part of the conversation.

After using Subscribe To Comments for over a year, there was one major issue, fake email addresses.  Whether they are from people who didn’t want to leave their real email address, or from spammers, the number of bounce backs can become overwhelming.

The good news is there are developers out there that have taken the Subscribe To Comments plug-in to the next level.  They require a user to validate their email address before subscribing to the comments.  This ensures that they wanted to subscribe and that their email address is valid.

The two plug-ins that I’ve seen are Gurken Subscribe to Comments and Subscribe to Double-Opt-In Comments.  I’ve started to use Gurken Subscribe to Comments and like the added functionality.

One thing that I did notice however is that you need to make sure to customize the subscription confirmation emails that go out.  The default one went into Gmail’s spam folder, as it was very light on content.  Take the time and write out a nice email to help keep it out of peoples spam boxes and inform the user as to why they are getting the verification email.

If you are currently using Subscribe To Comments, I’d suggest changing over to Gurken Subscribe to Comments and working with that on a go forward.  Not only will it make things easier for the person getting all the bounce backs, but it’ll also ensure that users want to be subscribed to comments and offer a better opt-in notification.

Moderator is an Adobe Air application that allows you to peek into your WordPress blog and manage any comments that are awaiting moderation.

You can see who wrote the comment, their email, Gravatar icon, what they said, when they said it, and then you can decide to accept, spam or delete the comment.  The settings also allow you to set the refresh interval and hide Gravatars if you’d like.

Another nice feature is that there are dock and system tray notifications of the number of unmoderated comments.

At this time, Moderator does not allow you to do a whole lot, but they plan on adding the ability to see all comments, reply to comments, manage multiple blogs comments, and get desktop pop-up notifications of new comments.

Moderator is a combination Adobe Air application and WordPress plug-in.  It’s pretty easy to install and works on Windows, Mac and Linux.  The next version is rumored to just be an Adobe Air application with no WordPress plug-in needed.

I’m eager to see how Moderator advances. It’s already a handy little tool and has potential to become even better.

We’ve talked about the benefits of owning your own blog, but what if you’ve already got a blog someplace else and want to move it to your own, hosted, WordPress blog?  You can do that.

WordPress offers a number of easy import options for most major free or paid blogging platforms out there.  This makes it easy to move away from other software to your own, hosted, WordPress blog.

WordPress currently offers the ability to import:

• Blogger
• Blogware
• DotClear
• GreyMatter
• LiveJournal
• Movable Type
• TypePad
• Textpattern
• WordPress
• OPML Files
• RSS Feeds

Each one of these options can be access by logging into your hosted WordPress blog and visiting the Tools -> Import section.  From there, WordPress will give specific step-by-step instructions on what to do.

Additional blogging platforms can also be imported, but are not officially supported. This includes:

• b2
• b2evolution
• Blosxom
• Drupal
• e107 CMS
• Excel/CSV Spreadsheet
• Jogger.pl
• Live Space (MSN Space)
• Mambo
• Motime – Splinder
• Pivot
• Plone
• PostNuke
• Nucleus CMS
• Radio Userland
• Roller
• Typo
• web-log.nl
• Xanga