How you can fire up your blog with Ajax

Not really sure what (not who) Ajax is? Quoting Wikipedia:

Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML), or AJAX, is a group of interrelated web development techniques used for creating interactive web applications or rich Internet applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. Data is retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object or through the use of Remote Scripting in browsers that do not support it. Despite the name, the use of JavaScript, XML, and asynchrony is not required.

Alright! Still not sure what it means? Let’s just say that it’s a really cool technology that allows people like you and me to do magical things, that are still a bit uncommon within the blog communities.

Ajax is very powerful, but to code it down to meet our various requirements require a significant amount of Ajax know-how. So, today, I’d like to feature a plugin which enables to incorporate various Ajax snippets to your blog without you ever having to know anything about Ajax – Ajaxed WP Wordpress Plugin.

I’ve seamlessly integrated some Ajax features to this blog, to ensure the smooth flow of ’stuff’. But everyone of these features were just put into place by the Ajaxed WP Plugin. So without telling you what this plugin is capable of and re-writing it’s documentation, let me tell you what it did for me, and what it can do for you.

• Post Excerpts: You may have noticed that in the blog’s homepage only the excerpts of the posts are shown. Usually, with Wordpress, this requires the use of ‘more’ tags. But with Ajaxed WP, this can be automated, and you can display any number of fixed words, without cutting single sentences in half.
• Threaded Comments: This helps me reply to reader comments then and there rather than posting up comments below and addressing them altogether with a single comment.
• Enhanced comment box: Ajaxed WP gives me a rich text editor to enhance the reader comments. When posting comments, commentators can use similes and etc to give their comments some personality.
• Comment preview: Let’s the users see their comment preview live, before posting it.
• Hide/Show comments at will: Allows you to hide or show comments in the comments section as you please.

Except for those ones I use here,

• Built in Cache: Since Ajax uses a significant amount of resources, it may significantly affect your server load. Not to worry, the built in cache will give your server some breathing space!
• Protect tags: Protects code, blockquote and pre blocks from being included in the word and paragraph counts, so they aren’t trimmed.
• Ajax & Effects: Give your blog some lively transition effects, for you readers to feast their eyes on.

So, I believe these listed features and give you a birds-eye view of what this powerful plugin is capable of. Mind you, there are many other functions that I couldn’t mention. So, feel free to download this plugin and experiment. It’s too cool to be missed!

3 Responses to “How you can fire up your blog with Ajax”

1. Michael Aulia says:

   July 13, 2008 at 11:28 pm

   Interesting. I personally love the threaded comments as it’s so much easier to reply to the commentators
2. Blog for Beginners says:

   July 15, 2008 at 2:02 am

   I love the idea of comment preview and reply to option, both are the elements that are missing on my blog.

   I can see a nice spinball when submitting comment, what plugin do you use to process the submission?

   Yan
3. A simple secret which can reduce Wordpress spam comments by 90% » ROCKFUSE says:

   July 26, 2008 at 3:02 pm

   [...] is, Ajaxed Wordpress for me. If you don’t like all the attractions of the plugin as explained here, you can simply enable the “Comment Form” module, which will be sufficient for this [...]