I ran across a new plugin today that will put a button at the bottom of each of your posts so that readers can email the post to a friend. Check out the plugin here: Email2Friend.

At first I was very excited at the possibility of the plugin. I downloaded it and installed it here to test it out. Once I saw the finished product I was disappointed. Here’s a quick rundown of the email2friend plugin.

Pros –

The plugin adds a email2friend link at the bottom of each of your posts making it easy for visitors to share your content.

It also has a simple installation. Simply upload the php file to your plugins folder, upload and activate.

Cons –

There’s no easy way to edit the text of the link. At the bottom of every post, a small envelope icon is displayed next to a hyperlink with the anchor text email2friend. I’m pretty sure this is an easy fix within the PHP file, but it would be a lot more user friendly to less php savvy bloggers if there was an admin page where setting could be adjusted.

Once you click the email2friend link, a new window opens up for you to personalize the email. Only problem is it’s hosted on the email2friend website. I’m not much of a programmer, so I don’t know how difficult it would be to self host the entire process within my own blog, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable.

Overall, if you’re looking for a quick way to add an email2friend link at the bottom of each of your blog posts, it doesn’t get any easier than this. In my opinion, this plugin is still very rough around the edges and I won’t be using it, however if more enhancements are added I will definitely take a look again in the future.

I just found a really nice plugin by Aseem Kishore that will post a summary of all the posts posted in your Blog over a time period defined by you. This is great because it promotes visitors to check out more pages on your blog and stay longer, and it will also give you a ton of extra deep links to all of your posts, so you’ll get a little boost from search engines as well. All you have to do is fill out the settings page and the plugin will do the rest. You can choose to post a summary daily, weekly or monthly, and summarize posts from the previous day, week or month.

Since I haven’t gotten into a regular routine with this blog yet, I’ve chosen to create a summary post once monthly of the top 10 posts from the previous month. If you’re the type who religiously posts daily to your blog, a weekly summary would probably be quite nice. Since today is the 29th, I hope to see a nice summary post in a couple days, so check back and see for yourself how the plugin works. I think this one will be a real winner.

Download the WP Best Posts Summary Plugin Here.