Insights – This WordPress Plugin Is Awesome
Vladimir Prelovac is quickly making a name for himself in the WordPress community thanks in wide part to his innovative plugins. Insights is no exception. Insights is a WordPress plugin that really brings the write panel to life. After installing the plugin, you’ll have the ability to:
- Search your blog for posts, edit them or insert links to them into the current post
- Insert Flickr Images
- Insert Youtube videos
- Search and link to Wikipedia
- Search Google
- Insert a Google Map
Easy Access To Blog Archive:
One big reason why I’m such a big fan of this particular plugin is that, I can search my blog archive from within the write panel which makes it easy as pie to link to previous articles I have written on the same subject. I used to open up my blog archive in a new tab or a new window, perform a blog search and then copy the link URL to paste into the Write panel. Thanks to insights, I no longer have to go through this process anymore.
Images:
Adding images is as simple as performing a search from within the Insights search box and clicking on the image. The image will automatically be inserted into the post. You can choose from the following image sizes, 75px, 100px, 240px, 500px, and 1024px. When images are inserted into a post, the image will automatically be linked to the Flickr page from where the image is being hosted. This plugin does not display creative commons information that may be attributed to the image.
Videos:
Videos are taken from Youtube.com and although the code is published into the post content area, my testing of the plugin on my own blog revealed that the YouTube videos would not display. However, when I would add Youtubes own embed code into my post content, the video would display just fine. Not sure if there is a bug or an error on my setup but beware of that inconsistency.
Wikipedia:
During my trial and error of using the Wikipedia search, I discovered the search worked just fine but when I clicked on the icon to add the link to the search result into the post, the action did not work. However, I was able to manually copy the URL and place it into the post. Again, not sure if this is a bug or an error with my configuration.
Google:
When using Insights, I find it really convenient that even a mini Google search is built into this plugin. That means I can perform all sorts of research from within the Write panel or at least, link to other articles on the same subject.
Also, if you happen to have a Google API key which can be obtained for free here, you can access Google maps from within your write panel allowing you to easily publish maps or directions.
Conclusion:
Despite the hiccups I encountered, Insights provides functionality to the write panel that I have been wanting for quite some time now, especially since I can now easily access my blog archive from the write panel itself. Being able to easily add images, video or Wikipedia links is also a nice touch. All in all, the plugin provides users the opportunity to spend more time creating your posts rather than browsing and copying links from various places. Definitely a time saver for me and I’ll be using this plugin on my own blog from now on.
WordPress Plugins Released During September
During one months time, there are many plugins that are released for WordPress. At the end of each month, I’ll be compiling a list of plugins that have been released during the month that have caught my eye. This compilation is for the month of September.
Apache Google 404 – AskApache Google 404 is a must-have WordPress plugin that uses some ajax and a couple tricks to display a very helpful and SEO Error Page. The default displays Google Search Results for images, news, blogs, videos, web, custom search engine, and your own site.
Search Engine Keywords – A WordPress plugin that can be used to correlate the keywords used to find your web page on the search engines to a box where you can put anything you want, for example your affiliate links.
Tweet This – A plugin that adds a Twitter icon to every post and page, so your readers can share your blog entries on their Twitter accounts with ease. Shortens URLs in advance. Tested in WordPress 2.6.2, 2.0.11, and 1.5.
Favicon Images for Comments – Favicon Images for WordPress Comments lets you add favicon images to your blog comments using the URL of your visitor’s website.
Post Ticker – Displays a scrolling list of post titles and excerpts with links to post.
TimeZoneCalculator – Calculates different times and dates in time zones with respect to daylight saving on basis of UTC.
Vipers Video Quicktags – Just simply click one of the new buttons that this plugin adds to the write screen (rich editor included) and then paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box — easy as that. You can fully configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, colors, alignment on the page) and much more. Your site will even stay (X)HTML valid unlike with the code provided by most video sites.
Insights – (I’ll be reviewing this plugin for an upcoming Performancing post) Insights brings a powerful new way to write your blog posts. It increases productivity and at the same time the appeal of your posts.
Auto-Close Comments, Pingbacks and Trackbacks – Automatically close comments, pingbacks and trackbacks on your blog. This helps reduce the amount of spam aimed at old posts.
Progressive License – Progressive license is a plugin that gives authors an opportunity to put Creative Commons or Custom Licenses on their content.
Interactive Video – Enhance your blog with both basic and advanced video capabilities. Upload/ record/import videos directly to your post, edit and remix video content, enable video responses, manage and track your video content and much more.
WP125 – The WP125 plugin can help you manage your ads more efficiently, leaving you with more time to write new posts.
WP Calendar – Calendar is an events calendar for WordPress that allows you to publish a monthly breakdown of your appointments and important dates for your blog readers to view.
wpSEO – The wpSEO plugin helps you optimize your blog for SEO purposes by eliminating issues with duplicate content and specifying meta tags and page titles for the different pages of your blog. Page in German
Feed Pauser – Feed pauser, pauses a post from being made available through RSS.
MTR Podcast Recorder – MTR Podcast Recorder offers real-time recording that is saved on the same server where WordPress is installed. All recordings will be saved into the MP3 format using LAME encoder.
Find and Replacer – Find and replacer is a powerful search plugin for replacing tags and text throughout your blog installation.
Tabbed Widgets – Tabbed interfaces are the most common on newspaper type website where they can save a lot of vertical space and make it look less cluttered. This plugin allows you to create them.
WordPress S3 – This WordPress plugin allows you to use Amazon’s Simple Storage Service to host your media for your WordPress powered blog.
Smart 404 – Instead of quickly giving up when a visitor reaches a page that doesn’t exist, make an effort to guess what they were after in the first place. This plugin will perform a search of your posts, tags and categories, using keywords from the requested URL. If there’s a match, redirect to that page instead of showing the error. If there’s more than one match, the 404 template can use some template tags to provide a list of suggestions to the visitor.
wpAFFI – Simple and rapid technique to hide your affiliate links.
Terms of Use – Instead of making the user agree to the Terms of Use when they join the site this plugin makes them agree to the terms and conditions the first time they login.
WordPress Menu Creator – The Brokers Edge developed this free plugin to provide website owners with true easy to manage easy to configure menu solution for WordPress or WordPress CMS sites.
DashboardZone – This plugin will help you and your readers to keep you on track for reaching your targets. We created this wordpress plugin that monitors the various blog goals and in an effort tries to engage your readers more effectively.
Information regarding plugin releases was taken from http://weblogtoolscollection.com
Should The URL Dictate Publishing Comments?
So far, there has been quite the discussion taking place on a recent post here on Performancing (Pros And Cons Of The URL Field) with many excellent points being made. However, a comment written by Ami Ohayon made me stop for a moment to think. In her comment, she states that:
I don’t think the URL necessarily renders a comment inappropriate. Surely the judgment is about the quality of the comment, regardless of the link.
If the comment is spammy, spam it. If not, it’s adding to the conversation regardless of where it came from, no?
I tend to disagree. Regardless of how relevant the comment is in relation to the post, if I feel that the URL provided by the individual is a questionable site (possibly spam) I am going to spam it. Perhaps I have been brainwashed, but if I receive a comment that is relevant to my post and the URL links back to a website which is strictly for a product or a service, I automatically send it to Akismet as spam. The difference between obvious spam and this form of spam is that the message was written by a human to the point in which the comment would be published. Now, if the URL links back to a personal blog or if I can somehow identify the site as being owned by the person who left the comment (and the site does not look like a marketing ploy) I’ll publish the comment.
The way I see it, I have the ability to control what is and is not published on my blog. Do I choose relevancy over quality? I’m not only doing things this way for my benefit, but for those who frequent my blog and participate in my community. I don’t want them clicking on user URLs which are nothing more than marketing gimmicks.
At any rate, that is how I feel about this particular subject but it is now time for you to sound off in the comments.
How To Save Time Commenting On Blogs
One thing I enjoy doing when I browse through the hundreds of news items in my feed reader is commenting on blog posts. However, entering my name, url, and email address each time I want to do so becomes a pain. Taking a page out of a spammers book, I have solved this dilemma by using a Firefox extension known as Autofill Forms. This extension has more features than I know what to do with but I’ll explain how to simplify things down so that you can use this time saving extension to comment on blogs.
Once you install the extension, a default profile will be generated for you. I recommend creating a new profile and call it BlogCommenting. This profile will only contain the rules necessary to comment on blogs. Typically, the fields used on many of the blogging sites across the web are labeled Name, Email, and URL. As you can see from the following screenshot, I already have these fields configured so that when I press Alt-J which is the Autofill Forms keyboard shortcut, it automatically fills in those fields with these configured values.
To add field rules to your profile, check out the How To Add A Specific Field Rule Form Field wiki page for detailed instructions. Once this plugin is configured, blog commenting is as simple as pressing Alt-J on the keyboard and then typing out my comment. I have to mention the fact that this process does not work for every commenting form that is available. For instance, this extension has no effect on the fields presented in Disqus or third party commenting systems. For most everything else though, this extension ends up saving me a ton of time over the course of a year. Combine this with the fact that you can add as many form field rules as you want and you have yourself a real winner here.
This article is an entry for the Perfcast Blogging Challenge as mentioned in episode 5. To have your entry viewed by David and I, leave a comment with a link to your entry on the Perfcast episode 5 blog post. You may be the entry we review on the next episode.
Live Interview With DebNg Of FWG Via Perfcast
DebNg who is the owner of FreelanceWritingGigs.com will be our special guest this Thursday at 7 P.M. EST on Perfcast. The interview will discuss aspects of monetization, applying for a blogging job, and of course, freelancing in general. Deb should be with us for about 40-45 minutes so come prepared with your questions as you’ll be able to ask them to her live either through the chat or by calling into the show. If you can’t make it to the live recording, leave a comment on this post with your question and I’ll do my best to get it on the air.
You can call into the show a few different ways. The first way is by using a cellphone, landline or SkypeOut and dialing (724)444-74444. The talkshoe prompt will welcome you to Talkshoe and asks you for the Talkcast ID number. The ID number for Perfcast is, 24073. After you type in the number, hit the # sign. For some of you, you’ll need to enter in your PIN. Your PIN number is usually your phone number or whatever number you assigned during the account creation process. If you don’t have a PIN Number, you can still dial in as an anonymous user.
When you call into the show, you will automatically be muted. If you are calling in to discuss a particular news topic or have something to say, please press *8 as this will initiate the Request To Talk feature which the host of the show will see. When you hear Talkshoe tell you that you have been unmuted, that means you are on the air.
The actual room opens up at 6:45 P.M. EST so be sure to get in early to grab a good seat.
Blogging Productivity Tip: Clear the Rubbish
With the success of “multi-bloggers” like Problogger’s Darren Rowse, there’s a tendency for new bloggers to want to build ten, twenty or more blogs in rapid succession, hoping that the volume method of blogging will somehow pay off. It’s scary to some people to have to focus on just one niche, wondering if it can pay off, worrying about whether you’ll miss the boat if you ignore niche X.
One Niche, Two Niche?
However, here are a few things to consider. Firstly, Darren Rowse is a rare individual who could post up to fifty times a day on the weekends while holding down three part-time jobs. From all accounts, he had a lot of support from his significant other and he started early on (over four years now). The blogosphere is significantly more competitive now, and there’s no guarantee that building multiple blogs will result in better online career income-wise. Of course that’s true for building a single blog as well.
Still, my non-scientific research over the past four calendar years suggests that more bloggers who focus on a single blog tend to have greater success than most bloggers who do not. Focus allows you to be more passionate in your writing in general. It’s hard to be passionate when you write in ten different niches. (Even I rarely write in more than five niches at any given time.) Passion is what holds readers, not necessarily posts about “hot topic X”. This is something that all successful writers pre-Internet days understood: passionate writing works.
The Right Niche?
If you’re worried that you’ve picked the wrong niche, just know that various members of Performancing’s Hive have shown that earning $4-6K/month is possible in a wide variety of topics. I’m referring to real bloggers who’ve achieved some success and discuss what they are doing. (Join the Hive!)
Regardless of the topic you pick, the key to a successful blog is achieving high web traffic. Seems sort of obvious, right? That means that your blog can have either lots of posts per day or just a few per week. It really depends on your topic and how indepth you plan to get. Newsy sites simply must have lots of content daily, and because the posts are short, they’re easy to absorb for most readers. Indepth posts require more time to read, and sometimes read again. So you’ll want to limit how many indepth posts you intend to publish weekly.
Clearing the Rubbish
Are you having trouble focusing? Here are a few tips:
- Drop the clutter.
Do you have a lot of sites? No problem, but get rid of useless, non-performing domains and websites. They just clutter up your operation. It’s hard not to worry about the money and time you are putting into them. Even if you do all the writing yourself, you are spreading your efforts over everything. If you prefer to have a portfolio of websites, keep in mind that people who build stock portfolios regularly replace underperformers, and not necessarily with another stock. Sometimes they take the loss and put the money into a different investment vehicle. Maybe some of your money is better spent in a long-term, high-interest savings account. - Don’t try to be all things to all readers.
Don’t try to write about the day’s fad topic, just because 3,733 other bloggers did too. Focus on the topics you enjoy and cater to those readers who would appreciate your content. As mentioned above, focus allows your passion to come through, and passion makes readers feel like you care about the information you’re sharing. - Writers write.
Writers are people who write, not just talk, Twitter or Plurk about it. Likewise, bloggers are people who blog, not just plan all the posts they’ll write someday. If you’re having trouble writing, here are some tips for breaking writer’s block.
Ultimately, you have to decide whether you’d rather have a stable of blogs or to focus on just one. I’ve done the multiple blogs thing and realized it’s not for me, outside of freelancing work. So I’m brutally whittling down my own web properties and currently focusing on just one site, building up towards premium content. But that’s a discussion for another post.
Weekly Link Dump Four
Based on previous link dumps, it would appear as though you folks appreciate these types of posts. Therefor, I’ll continue to do them as long as you continue to enjoy them. As I’ve mentioned in previous link dumps, I have a ton of stuff in my RSS reader and I can’t possibly blog about every single item. For whatever reason, many blog authors scoff at the thought of linking out to so many different places but I think it builds community. At any rate, lets go around the horn.
Batch editing for posts and pages is officially in WordPress 2.7
We Are Who We Were – Thoughtful post by Liz Struass highlighting the fact that the past is who we are.
Know Your Performance Numbers – Lorelle Van Fossen expresses what she learned from the How To Hire A Professional Blogger For Your Business session at the Blog World Expo. Looks like bloggers have to know just as much about perfomance numbers as the blog owner in order to figure out what it takes to make money.
Old Media Purchasing And Syndicating New Media – ReadWriteWeb, Venturebeat and other GigaOmni network properties will be syndicated in the NYTimes Technology channel. That is impressive.
Twitter 101 – Connie Bensen describes how to find interesting people on Twitter, building a community through Twitter and also mentions the various brands on the service.
Entrecard Banned By StumbleUpon – Entrecard looks like they barked up the wrong tree as the Quick Online Tips blog discovers that the entire EntreCard domain has been blocked.
New Guidelines in store for bloggers in the Army – If you’re in the Army, blogging or conversing in online forums is not the wild wild west. Looks like there are new guidelines in store to differentiate what is and what is not acceptable for members of the military to write about.
How Friendly Will A URL Ever Be? – Sam Phillips tackles the subject of friendly URLs but the post seems to focus more on domains than URLs.
FireFTP – The Best FTP Client I Have Ever Used
Before we get to the meat of the post, I have to admit that until I discovered Firefox and then FireFTP, I had used IE for as long as I can remember. However, even after I finally switched to Firefox, there was one feature that IE had that kept me using the darn thing and that was the built in FTP client. The built in FTP client in Internet Explorer was convenient to use when compared to dedicated FTP software. Despite its convenience, the client was far from reliable. For small files, IE fit the bill but for larger files, IE usually ended up timing out on me with no ability to resume. What a pain in the rear. Thus, I had to find an alternative. Over the course of a week, I ended up installing and then using CuteFTP, FileZilla, BulletProof FTP, and finally SmartFTP. Each one of these software solutions had their own problems which kept me from using them full time. For example, one client would upload files slower than molasses with no support for multi file uploads while another client would not exclude the public_html when linking to a file. This resulted in a lot of time wasting energy removing extra paths from a simple image URL. Introducing my saving grace, FireFTP.
FireFTP is an extension for FireFox which adds an FTP client to the browser. A great feature to have considering that is what kept me from using anything else besides InternetExplorer. Here is why I love FireFTP. For starters, it is added to the browser which means there is one less piece of software installed on my system. It is fast, supports multi-file uploads and includes resume support shall anything happen during the upload process. Another cool feature that FireFTP has is that you can configure the client so that the public_html is automatically taken out of links from a specified directory. Here is a screen shot of this specific dialogue box that should help explain what I mean.
I usually set the left side of FireFTP to display my desktop as that is where all of the images that I save from the web are stored. Once they appear on the desktop, I simply drag them from one side into the appropriate folder, right click on them and select COPY URL, then choose HTTP. I then can paste that link into whatever blog post I’m writing. It may sound complicated or time consuming but it’s really not. With FireFTP and a few other specific extensions, FireFox is my killer app for productivity. Although I am starting to use Windows Live Writer more than ScribeFire, combining ScribeFire along with FireFTP really is a productive combination.
FireFTP is free for download and is currently at version 1.0.2. I use it on FireFox 2.0.17 and according to Randa Clay, the extension also works on FireFox3. This is by far the best FTP client I have ever used and recommend it to anyone who feels that their dedicated client is not up to par. If you use something else, let me know in the comments.
Community Members Site Up For Sale
Those of you who participate in the Hive forum may know her as Katyinlasvegas. She is the one behind the domain, http://www.imbloggingthat.com Well, word has come around that she has put the domain up for sale and is currently looking for buyers. The domain has a pagerank of 4 and an Alexa Rank of 81,319. The content published within the site features some of Katy’s personal musings but also contains many topics related to blogging such as writing, pagerank, SEO, etc.
For more information about the domain or if you are interested in purchasing the site, please get in touch with Katy.
Perfcast Episode 5 Ready For Consumption
Episode 5 of Perfcast is boxed up and ready for you to unwrap! In this episode, David returns as co-host and describes his experiences at the Blog World Expo. We then dive into this weeks news, round things off with our blogging job of the week and hammer out the show with our new blogging challenge.
LISTENER FEEDBACK - None
PREVIOUS EPISODE COMMENTS – None
Each week, David and I like to look at the jobs available in blogging and related industries. We cover jobs that catch our eye, and hopefully don’t pay too poorly. We will feature one of these jobs on each episode of Perfcast.
BLOGGING JOB OF THE WEEK – b5media is looking for technology and beauty and fashion bloggers, so its more like JOBS of the week with seven openings. http://jobs.problogger.net/view/1663 http://jobs.problogger.net/view/1662
BLOGGING CHALLENGE ENTRIES FROM THE PREVIOUS WEEK:
Rob White – http://www.nmpnetwork.com/2008/09/13/review-audacity-free-audio-editor/
David Peralty – http://xfep.com/technology/ipod-touch-quick-review/
Jeff Chandler – Didn’t participate, shame on him!
BLOGGING CHALLENGE – The challenge this week is to write a HOW-TO. How To articles are not only good linkbait material, but they generally also serve as good search engine traffic thanks to the words "How To".
The blogging challenge is provided as a means of challenging yourself with a specific duty each week. David and I will be participating in each challenge and will be highlighting various entries from the previous challenge. To have your entry viewed by David and I, leave a comment with a link to your entry on this blog post. You may be the entry we review on the next episode.
LENGTH OF EPISODE – 1 Hour and 24 Seconds
NEXT EPISODE – Thursday October 2nd, 2008 at 7 P.M. EST
ITUNES – Click here to subscribe to the show via iTunes
DOWNLOAD THE SHOW: PerfcastEpisode5.mp3
LISTEN TO EPISODE 5 OF PERFCAST:
