When you setup your blog there a few standard tasks that you should always do.

After optimising your settings the next thing is to install your plugins, unfortunately this can be a very tedious process but thankfully the video below shows you a way to automate this mundane task.

Unfortunately you will still have to personalise each of the plugins but when you have a file containing these settings then this tasks becomes simple and available to be outsourced. If this interests you then my process maps containing this file is available here…business process maps

Which of course leaves you to focus on the tasks that excite you.

This is a really useful plugin in that allows non English readers to enjoy your blog in their natural language.

It has a few settings and of these I would stick to the following.

Use On Fly (jquery) as the translation method, I found that Google translate does not work correctly on my blackberry phone, the screen is heavily corrupted, however using On Fly the new language is displayed instantly, plus this option comes with a choice of nation flags.

Do a little research in Google Analytics and determine which countries your visitors are coming from, then set these countries as your defaults, a simple but nice touch…

Now a word of caution

This Plugin will allow you to show a holding screen whilst you make changes to the layout of your blog. I have made a video that shows this in action as still photos would not really show it in action.

You can fully customise the message that appears on the screen and even add images and video to the screen if you so wish. Which actually could be a good idea if you knew the time you had allocated to the upgrade, simply pick a film that is a few minutes longer.

An update on this plugin, you can actually ad videos to the safety screen as well, thus you could actually drive traffic to this page and turn it into an event in itself.

Is this what your subscribers are faced with then they want to hear more about your beautifully crafted blogs posts?

A long stream of unformatted, unattractive and disengaging code that will most likely make people regret they ever asked for your feed.

Of course if they are using an RSS reader, such as FeedDemon, then they will only see this page once but as we both know first impressions last and could be the one thing that makes them change their mind.

Of course there is a solution…

I spent far too long dithering over whether to get this plugin or not as I already used the free version and could not see the benefit in paying just to combine a number of plugins. If there was a site load benefit then I would be interested but when Andy highlighted all of the other features I was sold and knew I had to get this plugin.

I do not regret making that decision

But what of the speed, did that improve?

I was  unable to measure the difference in load time fairly due to there being far too many factors that influence this. I do not have a private and dedicated Internet connection in my town for just my use thus other residents in this house street and across the world will all play a factor in that timing. But what of the Plugin how does it look?