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Guided Tour Of The WordPress Theme Directory

The guys behind the WordPress project announced on July 18th that the new theme repository was online and operational. This brings a sigh of relief towards theme developers as they now have a central location to manage all of their themes.

I’ve been looking for a reason to publish my first screencast and the new theme repository fit the bill. I’ve embedded my first ever screencast which was produced within Camtasia Studio 5 exported as a .m4v file. As for the video host, I’ve chosen Viddler as they have in video comments as well as a nice upload/encode feature. I realize that I’m not the most articulate person and there are indeed a couple of points in the video where I screwed up, but I finally broke my video/screencasting cherry and it feels pretty good.

Please let me know what you think of this first screencast and let me know if you would like to see more of these in the future here on Performancing.

A Guided Tour Of The WordPress Theme Repository.

Three Newest Members To Join Hive

Back on July 9th, I asked the Performancing audience to answer three questions in order to provide feedback for the future of Performancing. In return for your time and your valuable feedback, three hive accounts were up for grabs. Today, I’d like to congratulate the following contributors as they have become the three newest members of the Hive.

Recruitment Nick
Karen
Missy

These three individuals will be contacted within 24 to 72 hours in order to get your accounts setup. So please keep an eye on your inbox.

Thanks again goes out to everyone who took the time to provide us with some valuable feedback which will be used as part of our plan to revamp Performancing.

The Lazy Blogger’s Way to Write a Creative Post

Photo by gregwestfall

In today’s blogosphere, creativity is a great asset to have. There’s even a book that says right-brainers will rule the future. Great book, by the way.

The internet is getting more and more crowded with webmasters and bloggers looking to make money with their site.

To stand out from the crowd, you’ll need creative ideas. But what about writer’s block? It seems to come a worst times, right? The bloggers in your niche are publishing creative posts while you can only think of stuff to say that bloggers have already said many times over.

You want to come up with something conceptually new. You want to come up with something people don’t expect.

Here is a simple tip for lazy bloggers looking for a creative spark:

Think of another niche that people can relate to and connect it with your niche.

Examples

Have a car blog? Connect your niche with Hollywood and write “The 10 Most Famous Cars in TV and Movies”.

Are you in the saturated metablogging niche? This blogger connected blogging with haikus.

Do you blog about personal finance? Connect finance with travel and you can publish “25 Creative Ways to Save Money for your Next Winter Vacation”.

Got a celebrity blog? Ryan, owner of a celebrity blog, wrote about his most successful linkbait. He connected his niche with sports and The 50 Hottest Women of Sports got over 1.4 million pageviews.

Why This Tip Works

The reason this tip works is because there’s nothing really new under the sun. My theory about creativity is that most things we consider creative are basically connections that weren’t seen before by the general public. Someone came around and said “what if we connected these things?”

Think about the sandwich. There was a time in history when the sandwich didn’t exist. But someone saw the connection between bread, vegetables, and meat. And voila! Something creative that has brought a smile to the world 🙂

The guitar is an amazing instrument. Think about the connections someone had to make to create the first guitar. And then in the 21st century, you add electricity and you’ve got the rock and roll movement.

The Risk in Being Creative

There will always be risk in being creative, in making connections other people don’t see. In your attempt to be creative, some of your posts will fall flat. However, the alternative to not risking out is being boring. Boring gets lost in the blogosphere.

Bonus Benefit

Because you’re targeting another niche, these type of posts can get you links that you would not get otherwise.

Your Turn

What post will you publish that will relate to another niche?

Blood and Laporte Discuss Blogging Ethics: What Happened?

Earlier, Leo Laporte and Rebecca Blood (I love the name), author of The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog, discussed blogging ethics on TWiT Live. The brief discussion primarily focused on what bloggers should do when they need to change their content. Jeff Chandler recently covered part of this story when John C. Dvorak was involved—John frequents the TWiT network—and the conversation has been carried over.

An Overview

Note: my responses are formatted in italics.

Unless under extreme circumstances (e.g., when personal information about someone is disclosed), content should not be removed from a blog. People should utilize the strike formatting and add the alterations after it.

I completely agree with this! If you are going to be completely transparent with your bloggers, you should never attempt to make something magically disappear. What happens if someone links to your post because something you wrote, and it isn’t in that article anymore? You will have upset your readers, those visiting your blog from the linking site, the author of the linking site, and maybe more than you bargained for if your article receives plenty of attention.

Major media and news outlets have recently promoted this practice with their journalists’ blogs.

As the consumption of information I read from news outlets disintegrates, the amount of respect I had for them goes as well. Thanks to the blogosphere, news organizations are, somewhat, more accountable for their own reporting (or at least people know their jobs are on the line), but who really cares about them anymore? Okay, so, we do need these news organizations, but, I rarely pay attention to them anymore.

Correcting typos is okay, and does not require notification to the user, but this is only true if the meaning of the sentence remains the same.

I agree with this as well. Something as little as using a future-tensed word instead of past-tensed word could seriously change the entire meaning of a statement. There are numerous examples, but you just have to be careful.

If you remove an entire post, make it known that the post was deleted, and, if possible, give a straightforward reason for it.

I am of the opinion that a post should never be deleted. Ever! But if it must be deleted, at least let your users know that it was taken down, and have a great reason for it as well. I’d never want to be subscribed to a blogger who did otherwise.

Instead of creating a new article, update the old one instead.

I wrote about this not so long ago. I am of the opinion that if the content must be changed because of a new important development or something similar, a new post should be assigned to it. The previously written post should have a note at the top and/or end of the post linking to your new article with a teaser of what has changed (this could promote more pageviews). However, if it is an extremely popular article, I’d suggest just updating that instead of taking away from its greatness. That is just a personal thing though.

Rebecca Blood says that BoingBoing mishandled the “Violet Blue” issue. The deletions went against what the readers expected. There weren’t as straightforward as they could have been.

Jeff Chandler previously touched on this issue, and I think it was reason enough for people to discredit BoingBoing. Stuff like that should not go unpunished. Incase you didn’t know, an author of the BoingBoing blog was fired, and all her work written on the BoingBoing blog disappeared. Regardless, it was a stupid move by BoingBoing, and I’m disappointed that the blog has, utimately, benefited from all the publicity.

[Update: Leo Laporte has said that the segment might be placed at the end of the upcoming This Week in Tech podcast (#152). I’ll update this post with a link if/when that happens.]

The Best Comment – Akismet Configuration

If you run a WordPress powered site, you’ll know first hand how awesome Akismet is. However, it’s not perfect and although it does a great job out of the box, here are a few configuration tips you can use to not only cut down on the spam in the queue, but also aide in moderation of comments.

Configuring Akismet:

In all actuality, there is very little to configure in terms of Akismet. But there is a configuration option which has drastically cut down the amount of spam which ends up in my moderation queue. That option is: Automatically Discard Spam Comments On Posts Older Than A Month. Before I enabled this option, I would look at my spam queue everyday and see hundreds of spam comments. The reason this configuration works is simple. As you blog, more and more content ends up in the archive. Once your archive reaches hundreds or thousands of posts, that is a lot of content for spammers to feed upon. The way I see it, most people will comment on blog posts within the first week or two of being published. Therefor, this option is perfect as it takes all of the spam comments which are aimed at the archive of your blog and discards them before they reach the queue. It’s much easier to browse the moderation queue when it contains 10 entries rather than 100.

Configuring Comments:

You can configure comments in WordPress by browsing to SETTINGS-DISCUSSION in your administration panel. There are an abundant amount of options within this section but I’ll only be covering what you need to know. The section I want you to play particular attention to is BEFORE A COMMENT APPEARS.

First off, the more popular your blog becomes, the more time you spend moderating comments and that time could be better spent writing content. Thats why I’ve left the first option unchecked. The second option is there for accountability of the commenter as well as the fact that spam bots will need to automatically populate those fields. If they don’t have to populate those fields, you’ll see a major increase in spam. This third option is one that has really cut down on comment moderation. If someone leaves a comment on your blog for the first time, they will be placed in the moderation queue. However, if you approve their comment, anytime they leave a comment in the future it will be published immediately. So although you’ll spend time approving their first comment, you won’t have to do it again in the future.

One last option you may want to configure is how many links a comment can have before it’s placed in the moderation queue. On my blog, I’ve chosen 2 or more links. Spam comments generally contain more than one link so this option cuts down the link spam.

Conclusion:

This is by no means a comprehensive list of blocking spam or configuring the way comments are handled but the methods I’ve described above have helped me out tremendously when it comes to dealing with spam and comments. I’m sure you have your own configuration techniques to handle spam along with comments so let’s hear them!

The Ultimate WordPress Commenting System

For those of you who have left comments on articles published here at Performancing.com, you’ll already know that our commenting system is not the best. Although it has yet to be confirmed, there is a chance that Performancing will be moved over to WordPress. If this were to happen, here is the group of plugins I would use to provide Performancing.com with the ultimate WordPress commenting system.

WP-Ajax Edit Comments

WP Ajax Edit Comments was developed by Ronald Huereca of RAProject.com. The plugin gives commenter’s the ability to edit their own comments in an ajax like interface. Although the plugin used to allow you to edit comments inline, the latest version creates a popup where the editing takes place. This plugin packs quite a feature set such as the ability to edit, moderate, delete or submit the comment to Akismet all from within the public comment area.

Comment Luv

CommuntLuv, developed by FiddyP is a plugin that displays the most recent blog post published from the URL which is defined by the commenter. Think of this as an ‘incentive to comment’ type of plugin. After installing the plugin, user’s will be presented with a checkbox near your comment form. If this is checked, when a user submits their comment, the plugin will try to parse their most recent blog post. So not only are they getting a link from their URL being displayed, but they also get a direct link to their most recent blog post.

Do-follow

This is one of the more simpler plugins. Once activated, it removes the nofollow attribute from the links displayed within comments. Thats all there is to it. This is yet another incentive to get people to comment on your blog.

WP Comment-Remix

If I had a favorite plugin, this one would be very near the top of the list. WP Comment Remix is a plugin developed by Jason of Pressography which is also an entrant to the WeblogToolsCollection plugin competition for 2008. This plugin is simply put, awesome. Once activated, it places a Reply and a Quote text link within each comment. When a user clicks on the Reply link, a text link will be created and their username will automatically be entered into the text field. The link is created as a means of discovering which comment a person is replying to. No threading functionality here, but this is the next best thing. The quote link takes the comment and automatically places block quote tags around the text. Does this remind you of a forum yet? The plugin also allows administrators to reply to comments from the administration panel. When you combine this plugin with WP Ajax Edit Comments, you end up with a really powerful commenting system. However, we’re not done yet.

Subscribe To Comments

Subscribe to comments developed by core WordPress developer Mark Jaquith takes care of the need to be notified of when a new comment is published. Once activated, a check box will appear near the comment form. If checked, the user will be notified via email whenever a new comment is published for that particular post. This works similar to the way you would be notified of a new post within a forum. The latest version, 2.1, offers a boatload of features such as the ability to skin the subscription management area of WordPress, security features, recognition of subscription status and much more. This is another one of those plugins that I install on every WordPress blog I create.

Comment Karma

This plugin is from 2006 so it may no longer work. But according to the comments on the release post, this plugin is still functional, even after all of the major WordPress versions which have been released since then. Comment Karma developed by Alex Bailey allows commenter’s to press a thumbs up or thumbs down icon which will either boost a comments karma or decline a comments karma level. This gives commenter’s the chance to moderate each others comments.

If you find this plugin to malfunction on your blog, give SezWho a try which is a third party comment moderating service that carries a user’s reputation along with the comment.

TinyMCE Comments

tinyMCE comments developed by Thomas Au provides a What you See Is What You Get editor for your comments. The editor provides standard functionality that makes it very easy to bold text, change fonts, create lists, etc. Another way of making things easier on the commentator!

Conclusion

As you can see, there are some really powerful plugins available for WordPress which can take commenting to the next level. With these plugins installed as a group along with built in Gravatar support, you’ll have yourself a hand dandy commenting system which will be a blast for your visitors to use. Not only will you have made commenting much easier for the end user, but you will have also provided non monetary incentives for being part of the community. If you ask me, this is a win win situation.

I’m curious to know which commenting plugins you are using for your own WordPress powered blog. If you had to create your own powerhouse commenting system without using a third party service such as Disqus or CoComment, how would you go about it?

On a final note, if Performancing were to have a commenting system which contained the features these plugins provide, would that be enough to get you out of your RSS reader and into the conversation?

Suggest A WordPress Plugin

It’s been quite awhile since anything has been posted on the plugins area of Performancing.com and I think it’s time we change that. Sometimes, plugin developers need some ideas or inspiration to get them going and I’m hoping you’ll provide those ingredients at the end of this post.

Here are the plugins we currently have available for download.

BlogNetworking Plugin: This plugin automatically creates a blogroll in the sidebar which will show the latest headlines from across a blog network. An excellent way to promote content within your network.

pMetrics WordPress PluginThis plugin ties directly into your pMetrics account, allowing you to view your blog stats right from your WordPress dashboard. This plugin packs quite a few features.

Now, as for the status of those two plugins in terms of which versions of WordPress they are compatible with and their future, I’ll figure that out and let you know. But until then, please give us some of your ideas/requests for WordPress plugins you would like to see Performancing develop. Since a large majority of you are currently using WordPress, take this opportunity to tell us what you want and we’ll see if we can fill that need.

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