Jetpack by WordPress.com
I assume that most of you already know about Jetpack, which was launched in March 9, 2011. For those that don’t, Jetpack is a plugin that connects to WordPress.com and enables features, powered by their cloud infrastructure, for your self-hosted WordPress install. As of now, the plugin consists of eight features: WordPress.com Stats, Twitter Widget, Gravatar Hovercards, WP.me Shortlinks, Sharedaddy, LaTeX, After the Deadline, and Shortcode Embeds.
Jetpack can be installed just like any other WordPress plugin. Once installed, you need to access the settings page and connect to WordPress.com, so that you can enable all the features. By default, all the features are already activated, but if there’s a feature that you do not want or need, you can deactivate it by clicking the “Learn More” button and then the “Deactivate” button.
For the past month or so, I’ve been trying all these features out, so I’ll go over each one of them.
WordPress.com Stats
This is a service that provides basic statistics about your visitors. The statistics are intended to be simple and for users who are not interested in every single detail about their visitors. It displays information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave.
In my opinion, it would be better if it provided the number of unique visitors too and not just the number of views. I also don’t like how it displays a smiley on your site. It can easily be removed with CSS, but I think that they should have added a checkbox to remove it in the settings. One positive feature is that the stats can be retrieved and can be used to display information on your site such as most popular posts.
Twitter Widget
This is a widget that displays your latest tweets. It is configurable with a good set of options: title, Twitter username, maximum number of tweets to show, hide replies, include retweets, and text to display between tweet and timestamp. I like all the included options, but there’s one more that I wish it had, which is the option to display tweets from a Twitter list. However, this widget has a bigger issue, which is that it fails to perform its basic job. Instead of displaying tweets, it often displays the following error message: “Error: Twitter did not respond. Please wait a few minutes and refresh this page.”
Gravatar Hovercards
Hovercards enhance plain Gravatar images by displaying more user information such as name, bio, pictures, contact, and other services. This is interesting because users just need to create one single profile and it will get displayed in all sites that have Gravatar Hovercards enabled.
WP.me Shortlinks
This service shortens the URL of posts and pages for easier sharing. It uses the wp.me domain name which is short, safe, and reliable. It is very easy to use. All you need to do is visit the post or page of your choice and click the “Get Shortlink” button. For this post, it generated the following URL: http://wp.me/p1ri5a-d6.
Sharedaddy
This makes it easy to add share buttons to your site with its drag and drop UI. By default, the following services are available: Email, Print, Digg, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Twitter. Other services can also be manually added. I really like the friendly UI, the available options, and the clean look of the output.
LaTeX
LaTeX is a typesetting system that’s really good at formatting mathematical formulas and equations. There’s no UI, so you write them in LaTeX code, which could take a bit getting used to. However the output looks great.
After the Deadline
This is a proofreading tool that can check your spelling, grammar, and style. It supports multiple languages (English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish) and provides multiple options. For English, you can enable proofreading for the following grammar and style rules: bias language, clichés, complex phrases, diacritical marks, double negatives, hidden verbs, jargon, passive voice, phrases to avoid, and redundant phrases. We all make mistakes, so having a proofreader is always nice.
Shortcode Embeds
This creates a set of shortcodes that allow you to easily and safely embed media from other places in your site. They do what they are supposed to do, so there’s not much to talk about.
I hope you enjoyed this review! Please leave suggestions on how I could have made it better.
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Jetpack by WordPress.com
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