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Mobile Ebooks, Self-publishing, Digital Storytelling

Jetpack – a Single Plugin Which Is Making Writer’s Life Easier

Jetpack consists of 8 modules replacing many other plugins

Jetpack is a turbo plugin which is making every WordPress blogger’s life easier, but it’s especially useful for writers, who instead of learning html would want to focus on writing – not only new blog posts, but also new books.

What’s so special about Jetpack? More time, less stress – these are the benefits. The plugin contains modules, which can easily replace many of your current plugins. One clear benefit is that you don’t get distracted by every update of every single plugin, except that single one.

Jetpack is developed by folks from Automattic, the company behind WordPress, which means that the plugin will always keep up with new updates of WordPress self-hosted installations. There is no stress that one day you’ll realize that your Twitter plugin was discontinued by its developer and compatibility issues arise.

There are 8 modules, which you can switch on and off (compare them with your current plugins):
- blog statistics – connected to your WordPress.com account,
- Twitter widget,
- easy embedding of media, audio or video, from many popular services,
- wp.me shortlinks,
- hovercards of gravatar profiles in comment section,
- Sharedaddy – a sharing panel,
- LaTeX – helps display complex mathematical equations,
- After the Deadline – a spell, style and grammar checking tool.

From a point of view of a writer two tools are especially interesting.

First one is After the Deadline. There is a separate plugin under the same name. I’ve used it for a long time. It helps you spot not only spelling errors but also highlights grammar and style issues and suggests better words and usages. The other great tool is shortcode embedding. If you want to place a video in your post, all what you have to do is to paste the address from a video sharing network. There is no need to switch to html mode to do that – what a relief.

Check the video below. It shows how to update WordPress to version 3.1.2 and in the second part there are useful tips how to connect Jetpack with the WordPress.com account.

As Jetpack is using a lot of solutions from WordPress.com, it’s also a first choice for everyone who moves from there to a self-hosted WordPress blog.