Around the Office is a weekly group blog of what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week.
A Year in 100 WordPress Plugins
Andy was interested in seeing where his favourite new WordPress plugins ranked in ManageWP’s top-100 list of free WordPress plugins for 2012. The top plugin was Types, which lets site administrators create and manage custom fields and post types for better site organization.
Given the great volume of useful plugins, we weren’t surprised that one of the top three plugins, Plugin Performance Profiler, is one that measures the impact of plugins on a site’s load time. Because despite the functionality a plugin adds, a visitor won’t stick around if your site takes forever to load.
WordPress Plugins to Fit a Responsive Designer’s Needs
Eva was tipped off to some great responsive WordPress plugins, which are a bit of a shortcut to help WordPress sites adapt to fit different devices and screen sizes. For instance, WP Fluid Images removes the width and height tags typically added to images and converts them into percentages so that the image will scale as the browser window or device changes.
Not Waving but Computing
Daveed figures that many keyboards and touch screens will gather dust once new interface technology instantly and precisely takes input from your hand gestures in the air. Created by Leap Motion, this 3D user interface is vastly more accurate than Microsoft’s Kinect controller. This technology is expected to be used not only with everyday computing, but in applications from robotic surgery to DJing.
A Piece of Your Mind? Please!
Believing a good story beats repeating a weak one over and over again, David likes the idea of “mind share” over “time share”. That is, staying memorable and compelling without necessarily spending more time with someone. If you have a great story to share, you can leave people inspired and impressed with what you’ve done and what you’re about to do. They’ll remember what you said and pass along to others.