Five on Friday for April 29, 2016

This is the first of “Five on Friday” for the blog.

What is “Five on Friday”?

I heard about “Five on Friday” from a couple of my clients who are bloggers. FOF is just a list of five things that you choose to write about. The list contains fives things that you like – from products and services to simple quotes, images and even articles.

For the purpose of my FOF, I will be sharing mostly products and services related to WordPress, social media, inspirational, motivational, and anything else I think my readers may be interested in.

Soooo… here goes my first “Five on Friday“!

1. Genesis Mobile Widgets

This actually is a plugin I developed with the help of two very well-known Genesis developers – Robin Cornett and Gary J. Genesis Mobile Widgets adds widget areas that can only be seen on mobile devices. A lot of bloggers generate revenue from their blogs.  However, if they use WordPress, the sidebar drops down on mobile devices leaving their ads at the bottom. Genesis Mobile Widgets provides mobile widgets in key revenue areas, as well as a mobile widget that sticks to the bottom of the screen – even when scrolling. You can see a demonstration of GMW here.

Genesis Mobile Widgets is available here. You must be using the Genesis Framework.

2. Scriptless Social Sharing

Speaking of Robin Cornett, she has developed several plugins that I just love and have started using regularly. One of them you can see at the bottom of this post called, “Scriptless Social Sharing.” It adds buttons to your posts/pages, to make it easier for your readers to share your content on social networks. It’s lightweight and really simple to use. And, if you are a developer and want to do other fancy stuff with it, take a look at her Readme file. She provides filters so you can reposition them where ever you want them.

Check out some of the other plugins she’s developed here.

3. WP DraftsforFriends

I really love this plugin. If you are anything like me, then you might want someone to take another look at your blog posts before publishing them. From my old secretarial days, the rule of thumb was “never proofread your own work” and “another set of eyes can pick up errors you probably won’t catch.”

Developed by Lester Chan, WP DraftsforFriends gives you a unique link that you can share with friends or clients to allow them to preview your draft before it’s published. You are able to set the expiry for the link as well.

Lester has been developing plugins for a long time and he has some really great ones out there. You can see more here.

4. Business Profile

Just recently while working on a clients’ site and SEO, I came across the Business Profile plugin. While Yoast developed the Local SEO plugin to serve this purpose, my client was looking for a free plugin. The Business Profile plugin allows you to add your business contact details to your site with seo-friendly Schema.org markup. This helps search engines like Google discover your address, phone number and opening hours so that they can display them with your listing on Google.

If you are a single location business, this plugin would be perfect for you. However, if you have more than one location – you may want to take a look at Yoast Local SEO.

5. My Eyes are Up Here

If you are a fashion or beauty blogger you may have probably run into issues with thumbnail images not cropping in the most pleasing way. Instead of the image showing the person’s complete face, it may show part of the face or shows the middle part of their torso. My Eyes are Up Here helps you control how WordPress generates thumbnails.

The plugin can automatically detect the face or you can manually crop it to give you the desired look.

---

This wraps up my first “Five on Friday.” I have a lot more to share with you! If you’d like to receive these in your email, sign up for my newsletter. The first one goes out next week!

Thanks for stopping by and have a great weekend!