Deborah wrote a thought-provoking piece a couple of weeks ago about whether traffic (visitors/readers) or money should come first when blogging. She also talked a little bit about a radio interview she'd participated in where they drilled for information about making money online.

Deborah's post struck a chord with me on two levels:

1. about the focus on money by the media, and
2. the resultant copycat bloggers who think it's a fast way to get rich

In this post, I'm going to talk about my personal experiences of both these points.

Passion Versus Profit?

Our story follows the blogging dream: we started a blog about something we loved, and after a while, visitors flocked to the site to comment and read our latest posts. The industry became familiar with our blog and started to cooperate with us, improving the information we were able to provide to our readers. We got interviews, exclusives, etc.

To promote the blog, we circulated some press releases to the media and secured a number of radio and newspaper slots on local and national programmes.

The single biggest question from all these journalists wasn't "how'd you manage your stellar success and build such an amazing website?" It was "You couldn't be running this website for free - how do you make money?"

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If you're a fan of social news and bookmarking sites, you probably have a number of accounts scattered all over the place.

Personally, I bookmark content on Digg, del.icio.us and my personal favourite, ma.gnolia. I also use StumbleUpon extensively. Because I use so many different sites, I found that my bookmarks were scattered all over the place. Where was that WordPress tutorial I found last week - Digg or StumbleUpon? You get the idea.

I came across SocialPoster via the Pronet Advertising blog. It's a free service that allows you to make the same submission to multiple social bookmarking sites.

You submit the URL using their bookmarklet, then add a descriptive paragraph and tags. You choose the services you want to submit to (up to 40 available) and it generates a submission link for each one.

You still have to visit each site in turn and make your submission, but SocialPoster pre-fills most of the information for you. This makes it much easier to ensure your bookmarks are consistent across the various sites you subscribe to.

On Ethical Bookmarking

I think most of us here at Performancing have a white hat approach. But it won't do any harm to state my personal bookmarking policy.

Basically, I enjoy participating in these online communities, and I love to seed links to great articles I've read. My RSS subscriptions almost rival Scoble's!

I don't believe in seeding my own writing unless I've written something that I believe other people will enjoy reading. I probably bookmark 90-95% of other people's stuff as a reward for writing useful content and to help people with similar interests to find that useful content.

Don't use SocialPoster to spam social bookmarking sites - all you'll end up with is a helluva spammy account that no-one will trust.

Gerard McGarry is a music blogger for Unreality Music and a web designer for Scribble Designs.

Ahmed wrote last week about what makes a WordPress theme great. In his post, he mentioned building a high quality generic theme and tried to define the elements that stood out in popular themes such as K2 and Cutline.

I've designed a few custom WordPress themes in the past using K2 as a base. The thing about K2 is that it has a strong semantic structure, and once you comprehend that structure, customizing it with CSS becomes much easier. If I were building a generic WordPress theme, I'd want it to have strong, clear mark-up (both XHTML and CSS) so that it could be easily customized by other developers.

In this post, I want to take Ahmed's thinking a little bit further and define what I think would be a definitive set of requirements for a high quality WordPress theme.

Structure Requirements

• Fixed width layout: Fixed width gives you better control over how content will be displayed. If you're planning to monetize the blog, setting a content width of 470 pixels and a sidebar width of about 300 pixels should fit most ad sizes in nicely.
• Two Columns: One for content, one for the sidebar. I have to disagree with Ahmed - I think the capability to add extra columns complicates things. A two-column layout should provide enough functionality for a generic theme.
• Proper Semantic Structure: The XHTML layout of most blogs has the blog title as a H1 on every page. This is wrong. The blog title should only be H1 on the homepage. On all subsequent pages, the page title should be H1, whether it's a category page or a single post.
• Extended Footer: I like the idea of an extended footer. It's an opportunity to keep the sidebar clear of clutter and - used correctly - could keep the reader on the site longer by giving them categories, related posts or perhaps some targeted advertising.
• Meta Information In Sidebar: I've always thought the lump of meta information after each WordPress post is a waste of space. In my ideal theme, I'd like to move this meta information (author, date posted, categories, etc) to the top of the sidebar.
• Content To The Top: I've always tried to design my themes with the content as high up on the page as possible. This means ensuring that the sidebar comes after the content in the HTML code. Positioning of the sidebar can always be achieved through CSS if you want to maintain the illusion of a left-hand-sidebar.

Semantic Requirements

I touched on semantic requirements earlier, but I want to give this area more thought.

• Using the_excerpt: By using the excerpt instead of displaying full posts in archive and category pages, you help prevent duplicate content issues. The only place you should be able to see the full post is on the single post page.
• Support For Common XHTML Elements: It's important to provide support for H1-H5 tags, making sure they diminish in size stylishly. Likewise, you should have proper support for blockquotes, citations and code snippets. It doesn't matter if you don't use these elements, you need to build in support for them for people who do.
• Microformats?: From time to time, Microformats make the headlines and we're told they're the next big thing in web design and SEO. Should our WordPress theme support Microformats? You decide.

Design Requirements

The striking thing about K2 and Cutline is how stark both themes are. They don't waste time on frivolous graphic elements - the design is purposely kept simple: users of the theme either keep it that way or use it as a base for further customization.

So, with the design, I believe we should:

• Focus on making best use of typography: good spacing and sensible font choices. I think a medium font size will be good for legibility without looking too chunky.
• Make the best use of whitespace to improve legibility.
• Keep colors and graphics out of the equation as much as possible. The more we embed our own color preferences, the harder it will be for others to customize the theme.
• I believe the XHTML should be of a high standard and it's important that the default code of the template validates.
• Support For Widgets: With WordPress widgets becoming a standard these days, it would be a major omission to leave out widget support in the theme.

Coding Suggestions

• Extensibility: Ahmed suggested building in theme support for a number of WordPress plugins. In an ideal world, plugins will conform to a What are the most popular plugins that might require theme support?
• Readable Code: In order to make the theme easily customizable, the code has to be easily understood. That means clearly structuring the HTML and CSS so that modifying and troubleshooting is straightforward!
• Documentation and Code Snippets: I think a decent readme file explaining the layout would be useful. Also some code samples showing how to implement code for supported plugins and common tweaks like moving the sidebar might be useful for the less technically inclined.

I think in designing something that will be easily customizable, we need to cater to the blogger and the theme developer. A well-coded and flexible theme is more likely to be picked up and modified than one which is a complete mess.

If anybody has other suggestions that would make a killer WordPress theme, let me know in the comments. Let's try and get together a definitive spec for a theme that would stand up alongside K2 and Cutline!

Gerard McGarry is a music blogger for Unreality Music, web designer and all-round Web 2.0 enthusiast.

Matt Mullenweg waxed lyrical recently about Windows Live Writer, and recommended it as a quality blogging tool. Somewhere in the back of my mind I remembered ScribeFire, or what you may remember as Performancing For FireFox.

ScribeFire has evolved into quite a nice system, one you should certainly look at if you write for multiple blogs. I've played with it for the last few days, and while I originally hated PFF, I'm gradually coming around to ScribeFire. Here's why:

• Excellent browser integration: I can see the page that inspired me to write a blog post in the same window, which means I can easily copy information from the original post without flicking between different windows. Not having to log into my blog's admin page means I can blog more spontaneously.
• Follow The Conversation With Technorati: The built-in Page Tools allow you to see who else is writing about this topic, so you can reference other bloggers and create a more informed and informative blog post.This service would be nicer if other services like Google Blog Search or Sphere were included.
• Easily Save Drafts: You can save any draft as a post and it goes into your Notes area. From the Notes tab, you can see all your draft posts. You can load up any draft post, finish it and choose which blog to publish it to.
• Easy Tagging: With advanced publishing options in ScribeFire, you can easily add a list of Technorati tags and automatically bookmark your new post at del.icio.us using the same set of tags. I seem to remember talk of integrating ScribeFire with the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin which would be much more useful.
• Better Focus: Sort of related to my first point above. How many times have you logged on to WordPress to blog and got distracted by your latest incoming links, new comments or your stats plugin? Because you're cutting out this step, you're more focused on the topic that got you fired up in the first place!
• Easily Edit Your Recent Posts: ScribeFire imports a list of your most recent posts, so you can make easy edits where necessary without having to visit your blog.
• Works Offline? I haven't tested to be honest, but I'd imagine ScribeFire caches your drafts locally so that you can work on them even if you haven't got an Internet connection. Useful if you're working on a laptop in the middle of a field...

There are other features I haven't looked at yet, like the ability to upload images to your blog through FTP or your blog's API (if it's supported).

I've found my WordPress accounts extremely easy to connect to. Drupal sites need to have the Blog API module switched on before they'll accept connections from ScribeFire, but otherwise work just fine. And of course, this post has been written entirely using...you guessed it.

Anyone else using ScribeFire or Windows Live Writer for blogging? Why not share some tips and tricks here if you are.

Gerard McGarry is a music blogger for Unreality Music, web designer and all-round Web 2.0 enthusiast.

There's been a lot of talk in the blogosphere and among the SEO crowd lately about the dominance of Wikipedia.

I blog in a number of niches, and it's startling to see how many different types of search Wikipedia entries rank highly in. On one hand, this scares the hell out of me, but on the other, it makes me wonder why wiki technology hasn't caught on in the mainstream.

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