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Archives for September 2008

Transform WordPress With 12 Plugins

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WordPress is great and fits the bill for most people out of the box. However, there are plugins available which take WordPress to the next level in terms of publishing. Here are 12 of my favorite.

WP AJAX Edit Comments – Allows users and admins to edit comments on a post inline using AJAX.

WP Comment Remix – Adds much needed comment functionality to WordPress such as the ability to reply to comments already made. Also has the ability to display a Quote link which allows users to easily quote each other when making a comment. Also provides functionality where you can reply to comments from the administration panel.

YACTP – Yet Another Comment Threading Plugin allows visitors to reply to existed comments and present them in a threaded fashion to make following multiple conversations easier.

All in One SEO Pack – Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

WP Super Cache – WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.

Popularity Contest – Keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular.

Custom Query String – set the number of posts (custom queries) for every single page on your website like categories, archives, or search results pages.

KB Advanced RSS Widget – A WordPress widget that gives you complete control over how RSS feeds are parsed for your sidebar.

Share This – Lets your visitors add your post to various social bookmarking sites, or send a link via e-mail to a friend.

Vipers Video Quicktags – This plugin provides buttons to the visual editor which make it easy to embed videos from a myriad of different services. No more copy and paste of embedding code!.

AskApache Google 404 – Adds Intelligent SEO Ajax-powered Google Search to 404 pages

WP-Polls – Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page.

If you have a favorite plugin that you install on with every new WordPress installation, let me know about it in the comments.

You Can Learn A Lot In 1,000 Posts

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It is always good to learn from experience. The Online Journalism Blog has put together 100, (I know it says 1,000) things they have learned since starting out with post number 1. I think I’m on the same track as OJB as I’ve learned pretty much the same things they have.

One thing to note about this post is that it makes for great link bait. Although it hooked me in, check out how almost every post links back to an article within the archive which delves into the subject matter in more detail. This is a great example of not only producing great link bait, but it is also a good example of a list post that taps into their valuable archive of content.

What are some of the things you have learned thus far in your blogging ventures?

Newcomers Take On The Blogosphere

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I’ve been doing this blogging thing for some time now and I’ve lost my ability to see things from a different perspective. RJ on the other hand has participated in blogging for only two weeks and has already published a post asking, is blogging a waste of time.

The post goes into what RJ is learning in class as it pertains to citizen journalism but he also shares his opinions on what blogging is actually doing as it pertains to America. This post has a political feel to it but I tend to disagree with his overall opinion of blogging.

I think RJ needs to step out of the political arena and check out some blogs that are anything but political. There are plenty of people out their who are behaving in a civilized manner and engaging in meaningful discussions.

Be sure to read the comments attached to his blog post as they contain some interesting responses.

Do you feel that blogging or for that matter, commenting is a waste of time?

Health Blogging Is A Healthy Niche

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Thanks to a study conducted by Envision Solutions who is a health care marketing communications consultant, it appears as though blogs about health are doing quite well. According to the study, just about half of all American adults have written a health related topic on a blog while 60% of those individuals write primarily on health related topics. The study also shows that an estimated thirteen million Americans posted at least one health related item to a blog between February and August of 2008.

While one-third of the respondents said they were blogging to educate others about a condition or malady, 21% of them said they blogged primarily for marketing purposes, such as a doctor who looked to increase business for his or her practice, or a health care consultant wishing to demonstrate expertise in a subject or health policy.

If you’re interested in seeing more numbers, Mediapost.com has an excellent post detailing the results from this study.

One thing about this study which I found to be rather interesting was that, only 15% of readers believed bloggers’ statements should be taken at face value. This was a decrease from 23% in 2006 which is a good sign meaning confidence is growing amongst health blog readers.

I’m not subscribed to any health related blogs in my feed reader but then again, I’m not dealing with a particular health issue, neither are my immediate relatives. But if I were, I would certainly be blogging about it while trying to inform others of the condition and treatments. Thanks to blogs and new media, we can read, see, and hear first hand experiences from those who are going through treatments or who are part of medical breakthroughs.

Are you subscribed to any health related blogs? Have you thought about starting one yourself? What do you think of this recent survey?

Perfcast Episode 2 Now Available

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The second episode of Perfcast is now available for consumption. David tries out Xlite as a means of calling in and although he sounds better in terms of audio quality, there appears to have been a technical glitch which caused him to fade out every once and awhile during the show. Despite those hiccups, we had an interesting discussion about WordPress 2.7 and the following news stories.

STORIES THAT WERE DISCUSSED –
Blogging Through A Disaster – TheBlogHerald
First Look At WordPress 2.7 – WeblogToolsCollection.com
WordPress.com Hits 4 Milliong Hosted Blogs – WordPress.com
BackType is a service that lets you find, follow and share comments from across the web.
Twittad Another Way To Monetize Twitter Usage – BloggingTips

LISTENER FEEDBACK – Jacob Santos lets us know that Lloyd Budd is actually not a core developer. He does work for Automattic but does not have commit access to the code. Lloyd is still cool though! 🙂 – We love hearing what you, our audience, thinks of the show, as well as the blogging industry. If you have something to say, please contact us at (perfcast at gmail dot com)

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 – Green/Eco on a Budget Blogger with Simply Good Media. No word on pay rate.

BLOGGING CHALLENGE ENTRIES FROM THE PREVIOUS WEEK:
Jeffro2pt0 – http://www.jeffro2pt0.com/thank-you-commentators
David – http://xfep.com/community/thanks-to-august-comment-creators/

BLOGGING CHALLENGE – The challenge this week is to create link bait.

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 – 56 Minutes

NEXT EPISODE – Thursday September 11th, 2008 at 7 P.M. EST

MISC STUFF MENTIONED IN THE SHOW:
Blogosphere News

DOWNLOAD THE SHOW: PerfcastEpisode2.mp3

LISTEN TO EPISODE 2 OF PERFCAST:

Using MSN’s A-List To Blog On Recurring Themes

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I’ve been monitoring MSN’s A-list for a while. And I think that all bloggers should consider using it as a compliment to Google Trends.

MSN’s A-list is basically a blog where MSN posts links to specific searches in their search engine. Big deal right? Well, the thing about A-list is that most of the links are for very popular, specific phrases. Many of these phrases are not one time events, but phrases that will be just as relevant next year as this year. So unlike Google Trends which mostly captures topics that fade with time, MSN’s A-List captures many topics that will recur on a cyclic basis.

Blogging Tip: Create posts that use the same phrases that MSN A-List uses for their links.

By doing this, you will be positioning your blog to gain search traffic in the future. Hopefully for a long time.

Let’s take a look at today’s A-list and how you can use it to create content on your blog.

I see the following searches linked:

Sarah Palin and vetting
Background checks
Research your house history
“Murder Houses”
Seller disclosure rules by state
Credit checks
Better Business Bureau
Neighborhood crime statistics
Local school information
Rotten neighborhoods
Federal gun background check requirements
Online encyclopedias

Now if I were a blogger, I’d take this list and work up a list of titles that incorporate these phrases:

Sarah Palin, Vetting and The Truth: Even if she was vetted, it’s the impression that counts
Background Checks 101: Which organizations are most likely to dig up dirt on your past?
Why You Should Research Your House History Before Purchasing
What exactly are “Murder Houses”?
How to find seller disclosure rules by state
Credit Checks Matter: What you need to know

etc.
etc.
etc.

8 Fail Safe Tips On Creating An Awesome 404 Page

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Oh the 404! Such a wonderful error to come across while browsing the web. Some are funny while others are helpful. Don’t get caught with a rudimentary 404 page which does nothing to aid the user in finding what they were looking for. Instead, use these tips and plugins to create a kick ass 404 page that helps more than it hurts.

Tips:

1. Create A Custom 404 Page – The default 404 page is usually not very helpful. Creating a custom page allows you to be flexible with how you help the web browser find what they are looking for.

2. It’s Not Your Fault – Whatever you do, don’t tell the end user that it’s there fault for the error page being displayed even though it most likely is. Give them an apologetic message and point them in the right direction.

3. Link To Your Site Map – Most blogs/websites now have something called Site Maps which are basically your entire site in an easy to digest format. Point users to your site map and let them browse around.

4. Add A Search Box – I don’t mean add any search box, add a search box which is tied into your blog. I’ve been to a few websites where the search box is nothing more than a Google search and I become that much more frustrated.

5. Do More With Less – There is no need to make the 404 page fancy or filled with images or videos. Be precise and to the point. If possible, remove the navigation links from your 404 page as you don’t want to have more links to dead pages and this will also help in minimizing distractions.

6. Rename 404 – Despite the fact that the Internet has been around the block a few times, there are still a large handful of people who don’t understand what a 404 error is. Do them a favor and get rid of the 404 and replace the error with a common sense definition.

7. Possible Matches – Even though the user didn’t find what they were looking for, try to display a list of five or so results of related or possible matches. If you use WordPress, you could easily add a function to your 404.php page which could display the last five blog posts or the most popular blog posts.

8. Contact Information – Although it is not the end users job to look around your site searching for 404 error pages, if they happen to come across one, make sure a link to your contact form or an email address is published so that they can easily notify you of the broken link.

WordPress Plugins:

AskApache 404 Plugin For WordPress – AskApache Google 404 is a WordPress plugin that uses 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.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

Broken Link Checker – This plugin is will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found. The broken links, if any are found, will show up in a new tab of the WP admin panel. A notification will also appear on the Dashboard.

Services:

Google 404 Widget – The 404 widget is a quick and easy way to embed a search box on your custom 404 page and provide users with useful information designed to help them find the information they need. Where we can, we’ll also suggest other ways for the user to find the information they need, thus increasing the likelihood that they’ll continue to explore your site.

404 Inspiration:

Sometimes, all one needs is a bit of a kick to get the creative juices flowing. Check out this list of 100 funny and unusual 404 error pages. Beware though, this page takes forever to load.

Interview With Brian Pipa of Teenormous

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Brian Pipa of the massively popular blog Candy Addict set out to do something I’ve only dreamed of doing: he’s created an amazing online tool that people will not only love but that will also end up being very profitable. It’s called Teenormous.

Here’s a bold prediction: Teenormous will be be a household Internet name in less than a year and within a few years will be a staple in the top 1000 Alexa sites. I feel that confident about the quality of this project.

Here’s my interview with Brian.

Tell us a bit about the history behind Teenormous?

I’ve always loved t-shirts. Once my candy blog, Candy Addict, took off, I noticed that my top performing affiliate “ad” on Candy Addict was for candy t-shirts. It far surpassed every other affiliate month over month. That got me thinking… maybe I should create a t-shirt site.

I started poking around and found loads of t-shirt blogs, and I didn’t feel like stepping into a crowded niche. About the same time, my buddy Tom Davies was having some success with his GiftHat site. We started talking about communities and how we could create a t-shirt site/community. Eventually, the idea for Teenormous became clear.

That was about two years ago. During that time, Candy Addict took off, GiftHat was going strong, and Tom had his first child. We didn’t *really* get started coding til January of 2008 and even then, we both have real day jobs and families so it was hard to find time to code.

What was the biggest challenge in moving the project from concept to completion?

Completion? We are nowhere near done. 🙂 One of the biggest problems is deciding when you’re done, or done *enough*. Launching the site even though it’s not nearly feature complete is hard to do. We have a bajillion ideas and plans for the site but if we waited for all the ideas to be implemented, we’d never launch at all. We finally whittled down all of the features to a bare minimum so we could launch. We settled on Teenomrous as a kick-butt search engine to begin with. That will be the basis for all the great features to come.

The other challenge is just finding time to code. If Tom and I didn’t have “real” 9-5 jobs, we could have had this done in no time. Trying to squeeze coding time in between the job, the wife’s demands, the parties my 7-year old daughter must go to, etc. is rough.

How do you plan to monetize Teenormous?

We’ve come up with a number of ways to monetize the site. I can’t give away all of them, but the main one is traffic plus affiliates. We’re taking the retailmenot.com approach. I read an interview with them that said that only 40% of their links are affiliates but because they are the market leader, it doesn’t matter, they still make plenty of money.

We will index ALL great/cool t-shirts sites (not just affiliate sites) and a percentage of the sites will have affiliate programs that kick some money back to us for each sale. Even though all of the clicks won’t make money, we will be the goto site for t-shirt searching, so the volume of traffic will make up for not monetizing every click.

I love the large number of t-shirts that you have indexed and the quality of your search results. How much work was it developing the search algorithm?

We used an open source search/indexing engine but we (Tom) really tweaked the settings all to heck to work for us and it has worked flawlessly. The search is much better than either of us expected. The one thing we have over the competion is complex filtering of your results. Say you get 88 Nintendo t-shirts. After the initial search, you can filter that down to something like blue Nintendo t-shirts for guys that cost less than $20.

The searches come back in order of relevancy. The first page of results should be right on the money and the further you go in the results the less they are relevant (but they ARE still relevant). We have come up with a way to make the results even more accurate (incredibly accurate) and we’re working to get that out soon.

Can you give us a glimpse of some the upcoming features you’ve been alluding to in various places around the net?

We already have something coded to keep all tees in the system up-to-date. We’ll be rolling that out in the next week or so. That will keep all of our info current and fresh. Tagging and user accounts/logins are also on the way.

We will also soon have a portion of the site for “charitees”… t-shirts from non-profits like the American Red Cross – http://www.redcross.org/. We want to help match up giving people with charities with great t-shirts. We’re also tossing around some other ideas for ways to give.

We have a couple more things planned that are unique and innovative and should make a big splash when we release them.

In my completely honest opinion, Teenormous is clearly the best t-shirt search engine, on almost all accounts (functionality, search accuracy, filters, etc.). But you are going up against a new competitor who probably has a marketing advantage (in virtue of the owners’ name recognition). How do you plan to handle this enormous hurdle?

We did all the heavy lifting of making the searching rock solid since it will be the foundation for the rest of the features we’re planning. As Google has proven, if you can provide a clear advantage in search capabilities you can knock out even proven or well-known competitors, even with a simpler interface. Just ask Alta Vista – http://www.altavista.com/.

Do you have any tips for bloggers who might want to try their hand at an online project outside the world of blogging?

Take what you know or what you’ve learned through blogging and apply it. Solve a problem/need you have and chances are, it will be useful to others too.

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