A number of years ago now this site started off as my personal blog. Politics, news and general rants were the topics, with the occasional review of tech products that I’d bought. In time the latter started to take over and my new-found interest in writing WordPress plugins.

As a result the site has become more a commercial venture and personal posts now seem inappropriate to the point where I rarely add any. None-the-less I wanted to still put finger to keyboard occasionally so I decided to separate out my personal posts. I looked at 3 different ways to do this…

1. Get the site to exclude personal posts and list them in their own separate section. Sadly, excluding one category from certain parts of WordPress is not as simple as it seems and just caused me problems when I tried it.
2. Use the Multisite option in WordPress to set up a secondary site. Unfortunately, as I have an established site with set (and indexed) URLs, introducing a 2nd site would likely to cause problems.
3. Create another site. Thankfully I already had one. A few months ago I decided to create a separate sandboxed WordPress installation for testing my plugins. Hardly used except for the odd bit of testing I realised this would be the ideal candidate – I can still use it for testing as if this site goes down for a short while it’s not a big deal.

So, I’ve done it. The sandbox website has had a splendid new theme (although not of my design – I used a free “out of the box” one) and I’ve transferred over all my personal posts. Many of these are quite old so were in need of TLC – videos spilling out of page widths, missing images, etc. I also had to go through and add new categories to them all (and there’s over 100 posts!).

Click here to visit my new personal site – I’ve already christened it by way of a new post today.

2011 has been a hectic year for me and my WordPress plugins. I’ve learnt an awful lot – especially thanks to the excellent book Professional WordPress Plugin Development. As a result I’ve been re-visiting a lot of my plugins and vastly improving their code quality and capabilities.

I’ve also got rid of my first plugin.

Plugins that have been given a fresh lick of paint are (in no particular order)…

• Artiss PSN Status
• Artiss AdSense Insert
• Artiss Content Reveal
• Artiss Draft List
• Artiss Code Embed
• Artiss Twitter Data
• Artiss Relative Date
• Artiss YouTube Embed

You’ll notice they all begin with “Artiss” – another change which is part of a new re-branding exercise. Some of these, however, were modified early on and will be due a further update to bring them totally in line with current standards.

Existing plugins due for an upgrade in 2012 are…

• Flu Pandemic Level
• Google Docs Viewer
• Simple Social Bookmarks
• Simple Timed Content
• Simple URL Shortener
• WP README Parser

Simple Feed List is to be re-written from scratch with feed duties being all “in house” rather than relying on WP’s built in RSS functionality (which appears to be rather flaky).

Artiss Facebook Link, Simple Twitter Link and Simple Buzz Link will all be merged into one new plugin, Artiss Social Link.

Android App Share, Simple Readbag List, Simple TTIW List and Simple Wakoopa List will all be merged into a single new plugin, the name of which is yet to be decided. It will also allow for other sites that provide XML data.

WP Plugin Cache will be abandoned (as all caching will be performed by individual plugins).

What all of this will mean is a reduction in the number of plugins, by merging a number of similar products. However, all are due to recieve the “full monty” of additions so, rather than adding the odd small feature, most should require minimal maintenance in future. Plugins such as Social Bookmarks and YouTube Embed, however, are likely to continue to have big changed applied to them.

If after this I find some time, I have a number of plugins that I’d like to turn my hand to, including a banner rotation plugin. There are a number available in the market but none that offer what I need (and I’m not being particularly needy either) – it was actually a user who asked me about this after coming across the same problem.

I’ve just launched version 2 of my Artiss Draft List plugin for WordPress and if you’ve not tried it, it’s really worth a punt. In a nutshell, it lists on your blog any posts (and/or pages) that you have in draft. This can provide an ideal, and unique, way to promote posts before they are published. Output is in text so will be picked up by Google, adding SEO advantages (see below).

But let’s get back to the plugin. Once installed you have option to use a sidebar widget, use an in-post (or page) shortcode or even just manually call it via PHP. A new templating system allows you to define exactly how the results are output – yes, you can output a list of draft posts, but what about adding an author name, word count or date of last update? All of this is possible.

It’s all cached so takes as little resource as possible and you can even exclude certain posts from being included in the list (this is done in the editor itself). Finally, you can make sure that the list only includes drafts for a particular time period – for instance, any created in the last month.

Scheduled posts are not excluded either – these can be included and can be indicated via an appropriate icon.

So, how does this help SEO? Well, let’s take a live example from my site. I recently had a product review post in draft. Searching for that product in Google, gave the following result (click to see a larger view)…

As you can see all the top results in Google are for my site – even though the review hasn’t been published. Instead the fact that the text is in the list of drafts within the sidebar has already attracted attention to my site and getting me listed. Of course, this is quite an obscure product so don’t expect top billing in Google for anything as a result. But it does help with your SEO and it give your readers a helpful insight as to what to expect soon.

Download Artiss Draft List from WordPress.org.