Jetpack is a free plugin created by the Automattic, the company behind WordPress. The latest update now includes 11 plugins within the one plugin, pretty cool.
You’ll need to connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com blog which means you need to own one so to speak.
Here’s what you get to use when you install the Jetpack plugin:
Latest Additions to Jetpack
Subscriptions – Allow users to subscribe to your posts and comments to receive a notification via email.
Extra Sidebar Widgets – Easily add images, Twitter updates, and your site’s RSS links to your theme’s sidebar.
Enhanced Distribution – Share your public posts and comments to search engines and other services in real-time.
Existing Jetpack Features
Spelling and Grammar – Improve your spelling, style, and grammar with the After the Deadline Proofreading service.
WordPress.com Stats – Simple, concise site stats with no additional load on your server.
Sharedaddy Sharing – The most super duper sharing tool on the interwebs. Share content with Facebook, Twitter, and many more.
Gravatar Hovercards – Show a pop-up business card of your users’ gravatar profiles in comments.
Shortcode Embeds – Easily embed videos and more from sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and SlideShare.
WP.me Shotlinks – Enable WP.me-powered shortlinks for all of your Posts and Pages for easier sharing.
Beautiful Math- Mark up your posts with the markup language, perfect for complex mathematical equations and other über-geekery.
Lets take a look in more detail at all the Jetpack features one at a time, the new features first of course!
Subscriptions
Easily allow any visitor to subscribe to all of your posts via email through a widget in your blog’s sidebar. Every time you publish a post, WordPress.com will send a notification to all your subscribers.
When leaving comments, your visitors can also subscribe to a post’s comments to keep up with the conversation.
To use the Subscriptions widget, go to Appearance → Widgets. Drag the widget labeled “Blog Subscriptions (Jetpack)” into one of your sidebars and configure away.
Extra Sidebar Widgets
The RSS Links Widget lets you easily add post and comment RSS feeds to a sidebar on your theme.
The Twitter Widget shows your latest tweets within a sidebar on your theme.
The Image Widget lets you easily add images to a sidebar on your theme.
Each of these widgets has a number of customization options. To use the widgets, go to Appearance → Widgets. Drag them into one of your sidebars and configure away.
Enhanced Distribution
Jetpack will automatically take the great published content from your blog or website and share it instantly with third party services like search engines, increasing your reach and traffic.
I guess there’s more to come down the track with this feature so stay tuned!
Spelling and Grammar
The After the Deadline Proofreading service improves your writing by using artificial intelligence to find your errors and offer smart suggestions.
After the Deadline provides a number of customization options, which you can edit in your profile.
WordPress.com Stats
There are many plugins and services that provide statistics, but data can be overwhelming. WordPress.com Stats makes the most popular metrics easy to understand through a clear and attractive interface.
I use Jetpack because WordPress.com stats provide a snapshot of important stats which tells me which posts are popular, which links are being clicked, which search terms are being used to find my content and which external links are referring me visitors. Read more about WordPress.com Stats Versus Google Analytics here.
Sharedaddy Sharing
To configure your sharing settings, go to the Settings → Sharing menu.
Drag and drop sharing services into the enabled section to have them show up on your site, and drag them into the hidden section to have them hidden behind a button.
You can find a list of additional sharing URL’s for Jetpack here.
Gravatar Hovercards
What’s a Hovercard?
Hovercards enhance plain Gravatar images with information about a person: name, bio, pictures, their contact info, and other services.
To see hovercards, look at any blog post on your blog that has comments. If the commenter has a hovercard associated with their gravatar, mouse over their image and the hovercard will appear. To turn hovercards off, click the Deactivate button above.
Shortcode Embeds
Shortcodes allow you to easily and safely embed media from other places in your site. With just one simple code, you can tell WordPress to embed YouTube, Flickr, and other media.
Enter a shortcode directly into the Post/Page editor to embed media. For specific instructions follow the links below.
WP.me Shortlinks
Instead of typing or copy-pasting long URLs, you can now get a short and simple link to your posts and pages. This uses the super compact wp.me domain name, and gives you a unique URL you can use that will be safe and reliable.
To use shortlinks, go to any already published post (or publish something new!). A “Get Shortlink” button will be visible under the Post title. When you click it, a dialog box will appear with the shortlink and you can copy and paste to Twitter, Facebook or wherever your heart desires.
Latext Beautiful Math
Latex is a powerful markup language for writing complex mathematical equations, formulas, etc.
Use
or
to include in your posts and comments.
Jetpack 1.2 update also includes some other latest additions like –
- Improved UI for showing new and updated Jetpack features
- Better support for other languages
- Smarter and safer Jetpack upgrades
- New Shortcodes for VideoPress & Google Maps
- Added LinkedIn and Google+ buttons to Sharing UI
- Image Widget
- RSS Links Widget
Impressive plugin which i hope integrates smoothly with all themes. Thesis for one could be a problem at the moment.
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