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Archives for July 2008

Whats The Best Way To Correct Information

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While listening to episode 124 of the Cranky Geeks Podcast with John C. Dvorak, the topic of editing a post after it’s been published came up. John seems to think that if you correct the information within the post, that it is ok not to let anyone know with the exception of telling the commenter who notified him of the error that it had been fixed. If one were to do their research, he believes that the reader would see the note in the comment and notice that at one time, the post had contained misinformation.

Photo taken by uberzombie under Creative Commons 2.0

I think John’s method is terrible. I don’t think I have the best solution, but in my experience, I have always used the strikethrough function of my post editor to highlight which pieces of text were incorrect while then adding the correct information into the post. This let’s the readers know which information was wrong and that the editor must of taken steps to correct the post. At the very least, this lets the readers know to ignore the crossed out information.

This may not be the ideal method, but that is the one I use and prefer. How about you though? How do you deal with publishing information that turns out to be wrong? Do you simply leave a paper trail? Do you correct the information and then not tell anyone about it? What’s the best way to handle a situation like this?

Themattinator – Managing Multiple Twitter Accounts

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Intro:

The Mattinator is a nifty little web service which gives Twitter users a way to manage multiple twitter accounts. Unlike using Twitter directly where you would normally have to log in to each account separately to post a message, this web service gives you the interface to choose which Twitter account the message will be posted from.

The design of the website is pretty interesting in and of itself. It looks like something out of a cartoon dealing with spaceships and aliens. However, they have at least made the aliens highlight specific areas of the site and some of them are even helpful. Just don’t tick that monster off with three heads and razor sharp teeth.

How To Use:

To use themattinator, you’ll first have to give the web service your Twitter username and password for each account. Once logged in with each account, you’ll see a text area where you’ll type in your Tweet and then below the text area is a list of Twitter accounts. After you type your tweet, select the username in which you want the Tweet to originate from and click on the GO GO GO graphic. This well send your Tweet to a queue which will later be processed and thus, will be published on Twitter.

One of the quirks I noticed after the message went through is that, TheMattinator reported the post as being published (6 days, 16 hours ago). In fact, after sending a few tweets through the mattinator service, each one of them was reported with the same time stamp. I’m pretty sure this is a bug and might be the result of the service being built in only four days time.

Conclusion:

I like the idea behind themattinator and considering everything associated with the site was built within a four day time period, they did a wonderful job. However, the fact that you have to actually be on the website to use the feature is a downfall. Especially when you consider that Twhirl supports this feature out of the box. In Twhirl, you can dedicate an open window for each Twitter account. If you end up giving this web service a try, let me know how your experience went.

WordPress 2.6 Has Been Released

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As James mentioned just a few hours ago, the release of WordPress 2.6 appeared to be imminent. As I’ve just discovered, the dev team has released WordPress version 2.6 to the public. James has already covered the new features found within this new major release but Matt Mullenweg has published a video guided tour of the new version.

I’ve already upgraded my blog from WordPress 2.5.1 to 2.6 and didn’t encounter any problems. With the new post revision system, how long do you think it will be before a cool Wiki type plugin emerges, which makes extensive use of the revision feature inside 2.6?

WordPress 2.6 To Be Released Tonight? [Update]

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A few sites on the internet have been reporting that sources close to WordPress have intentions of releasing WordPress 2.6 tonight. This release would bring many improvements that have been widely asked for by the WordPress community.

There are plenty new features to keep your eyes on as stated on the official WordPress website:

  • Version/revision saves a copy of a post every time you edit it, allows you to view (not edit) each of those copies (revisions), Shows forward (in time) diffs between any two revisions.
  • Display captions of images alongside them in posts and pages.
  • Add paging of Themes in Design panel
  • Word Count displayed when writing and editing posts and pages
  • Press This bookmarklet
  • Add sorting to gallery
  • Export/import post excerpts
  • Theme Previewer
  • Check (assigned) Categories at top Category box in Write/Manage Post
  • Show when a term is both a tag and a category
  • Wider Profile fields
  • TinyMCE 3.1 [Maybe the horizontal rule issue is fixed]
  • Two categories can have sub-categories with the same name

For five long years WordPress has been the staple of blogging platforms, and we will soon is if this release continues that trend.

I only have one question—if WordPress 2.6 is released tonight, when do you plan on upgrading?

[Update: WordPress 2.6 has been released!]

Change Is On The Horizon

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Since 2005, Performancing has done a great job helping bloggers to succeed. Whether it be through our tips, reviews, suggestions or Performancing services, we have helped many people take their blogs to the next level. However, it’s 2008 and blogging about blogging is not the same as it was in 2005. It’s time to spice things up around here but before we do, the team at Performancing is requesting your help.

We have three questions that we would like you to answer.

1. What content are you most interested in seeing covered on Performancing? (e.g. monetization tips, web 2.0, online tools, sites and services, plugins, themes, news)

2. What services are you most interested in Performancing offering? (e.g. project launchpad, custom WordPress plugin development)

3. Last but not least, What would Performancing have to do, to encourage you to participate within the Performancing community. (e.g. portal like frontpage, easier commenting system, incentives)

In exchange for spending your time answering these questions, we will be handing out three free Hive Accounts to three random people who leave a comment, answering those three questions.

The time is near to reshape the Performancing mold and we would love for the Performancing community to partake in this transition. This post is the first in a series which will ask for your input on specific ideas as we come closer to the transition period. Your answers will play a vital role in the decisions we make.

What Does Success Mean To You

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This post is part of a series of posts called Water Cooler Monday. Every Monday from here on out, I’ll be publishing thoughts and topics of discussion throughout the day. If you have a topic or post idea to discuss around the water cooler, be sure to get in contact with us.,

One day, as I was sitting outside in my chair enjoying the weather, I began to think about what success meant to me. Thoughts of what might be considered a success started to wander through my mind such as: Would my blog be a success if it reached the Digg front page? What if my blog receives double digit comments on every post? As I started to figure out what would qualify as a success, I began to realize that what I thought was a success could be seen as a failure in someone else’s eyes. Thus, there may be a definition for the word in the dictionary, but it’s true meaning is different for every blogger.

Photo taken by aloshbennett under the Creative Comments License 2.0

In my mind, until I can create a vibrant community around a blog whether it be my own or someone else’s, I will consider myself a failure. Only when I am making a living from blogging while maintaining an active community will I ever deem myself or the site a success. Those are my goals and anything less is considered a failure.

So here at the Performancing water cooler, tell us what you define as success.

WordPress Development Team: Fix the Horizontal Rule Issue Already!

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I love WordPress. I think it is one of the best content management systems around (even though I am open to the idea of using others). But there are some ridiculous issues with the visual editor that need to be addressed, not ignored, by the development team.

The issue I’m talking about today is a horizontal rule bug/issue. If you insert a horizontal rule,

, into a WordPress post, it will destroy the formatting of the following paragraph (or entire post) if you use the visual editor at any point in the future for that post.

Let’s say I’m creating a post and decide to manually go into the HTML editor to add in a horizontal rule (which I do frequently on my posts):

The results are as follows:

Perfect!

Now, how what about when I want to continue editing my post (I primarily use the visual editor for all my work):

Looking good so far, but wait:

Hmmmm, well, that looks like an issue. You might not notice the subtle difference in line height at first, but just take a closer look at the second paragraph when compared to the result of the HTML editor.

WordPress has now replaced what I believe should have been a paragraph tag, which should be surrounding the whole paragraph, with no formatting whatsoever.

When you use the visual or html editor, you should notice that you are not required to type in paragraph,

, tags, but they are placed there automatically. So, I believe that WordPress forgets to insert those paragraph tags after following a horizontal rule.

Instead, WordPress thinks that the text following the horizontal rule is somehow attatched to the horizontal line as follows (note that I inserted the paragraph tags only for emphasis of what the true output is):

Leo Laporte regularly produces netcasts on his TWiT network and streams live video on his TWiT Live network. Mr. Laporte also has a talk radio show called The Tech Guy. He was formally a television personality for TechTV.

I am writing a whole bunch of content to simply point out the fact that a horizontal rule will screw up the formatting after I attempt to use the visual editor. Of course, many people say not to use the visual editor, but I say if they are going to include a visual editor, they need to make it work.

The rest of the content of this article

That is completely wrong.

It should format as follows:

Leo Laporte regularly produces netcasts on his TWiT network and streams live video on his TWiT Live network. Mr. Laporte also has a talk radio show called The Tech Guy. He was formally a television personality for TechTV.

I am writing a whole bunch of content to simply point out the fact that a horizontal rule will screw up the formatting after I attempt to use the visual editor. Of course, many people say not to use the visual editor, but I say if they are going to include a visual editor, they need to make it work.

The rest of the content of this article.

It just doesn’t make any sense, and it is even more disappointing to know that WordPress has still not fixed this issue.

So, I’m calling them out on this. WordPress, please fix this issue already. For someone that likes to use the visual editor, this just drives me insane. Personally, I would appreciate, but I also think that many others would appreciate the same quality with the visual editor. I’d also like to point out that I had no such problems with MovableType or Drupal.

So, if you believe that this issue should be fixed, feel free to Stumble or Digg this article so that the WordPress development team will take notice. Also, please let everyone know of any other quirks you have found with the visual editor in the comments section below. I’d love to know about them.

Displaying Ads With The Show125 Plugin

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One way to display ads on your WordPress powered site is to load up a text based widget with all of the HTML necessary to display 125X125 pixel banner ads. However, this can be cumbersome and a pain to manage. A WordPress plugin called Show125 helps take the pain out of displaying ads.

Show125 gives you granular control over your ads. Some of the features included in this plugin are:

  • Display from 1 to 8 ads
  • Available in English (default) or French
  • Display all your ads together, or in an eye-candy Mootools slideshow
  • Optionally add the target=”_blank” attribute to links, if you want ads to open in a new tab.
  • Show (or not) a title for your ads block
  • Clean code
  • Add custom css class to links for styling it your way

After downloading the plugin and extracting it’s contents to your desktop, upload the plugin into your plugins folder. Then, browse to your plugins area in your WordPress administration area and activate the plugin. The settings for this plugin will be located in, DESIGN-WIDGETS where you will need to add the widget to your sidebar. Once added, click on the EDIT button which will then display the widgets configuration options.

The configuration options are pretty much self explanatory.

While testing this plugin, it did give me a few issues in which I have yet figure out. For starters. after configuring the widget to display four ad images, the link to edit the widget disappeared. This means I can not remove the widget from my sidebar unless I deactivate the plugin or delete it from the plugins folder. I’ve tried deactivating the plugin, deleting it from the server but to no avail. The plugin appears to be *STUCK* inside of my WordPress installation. Even after deleting it completely from the server and reinstalling the plugin it appeared as though the configuration was still saved inside of WordPress.

At first, this seemed like an excellent plugin/widget to mange the display of multiple ads. However, looks like there is still work that needs to be done to the widget to ensure it works properly. Use this plugin at your own risk. If it works, it’s great if it doesn’t look for something like OIO Publisher which may be more than what you need.