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Change Is On The Horizon

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

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!

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

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.

Rojo Is No Mo

Finally, a news item where I can have fun with the headline! Rojo, the self acclaimed “best free RSS and Atom feed reader” has announced that they will be shutting down their service only to replace it later on. The new version of Rojo will come with a new name, new way of bringing the news to you along with a new look. Rojo is owned and operated by Six Apart, the makers of MovableType and Typepad.

By the time Rojo comes back, everyone will be gone considering they have given users instructions on how to export their feeds to move somewhere else.

They may think Rojo was the best but I’ll leave my personal claim of the best free FeedReader to FeedDemon. Beg to differ?

Learning The Hard Way

Over the past few days, I’ve been busy Googling away, trying to figure out all of the various methods of migrating content from a Drupal installation into WordPress. The results are few and far between. I did find a MySQL script here and there to migrate bits and pieces of one version of Drupal to one version of WordPress but there are no tools available to make the process simple, manageable, or effective on the first try. I’ve looked all over the modules section of the Drupal website, along with the forums for help but I have come up empty. Drupal does not contain any way to export your data which makes me wonder why they prefer to have people locked into their open source software. When I say locked in, in this case I mean, not easily being able to leave their platform. This isn’t so much of a problem with WordPress.

Let me give you the summary of the problem in which you as a blogger must think about before publishing that first post. Performancing has been running on Drupal since 2005. This site contains thousands of registered users, thousands of comments, thousands of posts ect. At it’s current stage, Drupal no longer satisfies the needs of the site and the purpose along with the direction of the site has changed. Because of the enormous backlog of content, we have been facing a critical decision. Do we stay with Drupal, upgrade the software, redesign it and deal with it? Or, do we pay a freelancer or an established company to migrate the important data off of Drupal and into WordPress. This is a task which is by no means cheap. (I’ve come up with yet another idea but a little more research is warranted before I can claim that it’s doable.)

To bring things back full circle. If you are a beginning blogger, make sure that you plan ahead a year or so with whatever platform you decide to use. Before using that publishing system, check to see how portable your data is. Will you be able to easily take your data out of the publishing system and transfer it somewhere else? Check around on forums as well as the web to see how people have faired in transferring content from one platform to the one you are interested in using. Check to see if plugins, tools, or scripts are available to make the process easier. If none of these options are present, I highly suggest not using that software no matter how great it is. You don’t want to end up in a position where you are stuck, indefinitely with a publishing system.

Those of you who are established bloggers, (The ones who have been around the block a few times) have you come across these same crossroads? Perhaps you found yourself in a similar situation. If so, I’d love to hear your experience in how you solved the problem. Some bloggers start from scratch while others simply deal with the issues at hand until they have no choice but to do something about it.

Ever hear that saying, “The choices you make today help shape your tomorrow”. This rings true, even in the world of blogging.

Building RSS Group Writing Project

GroupWritingProjects.com is now holding their Building RSS Group Writing Project/Contest. The contest started on July 1st and ends on July 13th which doesn’t leave much time for you to get your entry in. The list of prizes looks pretty impressive with the chance of winning a 30 minute subscriber consultation with none other than Liz Strauss and a 30 minute design consultation with David Airey.

The goal of the contest is to create an awesome guide on how to grow subscriber numbers. They are aiming for the guide to be so good, every blogger will want to link to it or save it as a reference. Be sure to check out the site for more details.

Thanks to Perfomancing user jshare for pointing this out in the public forums.

Proof That You Don’t Have to Write on a Daily Basis to Be a Success

Think Simple Now—Tina Sue really has perfected the art of infrequent and successful blogging. Previously, she used to write around two articles per week, but now she writes around a single article per week. However, all of her content is absolutely phenomenal. It is very well written and presented. She also has a great blog design that I can see is effective at giving her traffic things to do on her site other than simply leaving after they are done reading an article. The fascinating thing is that I am interested in very little of what she writes about, but it so written beautifully that I just have to read more. If that isn’t a sign of amazing writing, I don’t know what is.

DoshDosh—Maki published around six blog posts per month. The DoshDosh blog features a truly unique style by associating anime characters with posts, and, ironically enough, it turns out to be a truly unique experience. As I’ve said before, it is up to you to find your unique style, and DoshDosh is a pure example of this. The content is also very well written. Again, I must emphasize that the posting frequency is low, but the content is great.

Self Made Chick—Christine OKelly has a wonderful assortment of in-depth blog posts about making money, working from home, and improving your life. The one thing that is consistent on her blog is the fact that all of the content is in-depth and detailed. Her posting frequency is very low for today’s standard, but it also proves that you don’t need to post on a daily basis to be a successful blogger. Christine also makes great use of pull-quotes, images, and lists throughout her content.

From Ordinary to Extraordinary

Ordinary people who are doing extraordinary things and experiencing success are those who take the time to create great content. There are many similarities with these blogs, but the one that stands out most is that the content is superb. This echos what I have been stating on Performancing that the quality, not quantity, has taken the leading role in promoting a blogger’s success.

What I am saying is to consider forgetting about posting frequency if it is going to prevent you from creating the highest quality content you can publish. After all, New York Times best sellers take months, even years to develop into what they become; why should this be any different with individual blog content?

Take as long as you need to write truly unique and quality content. Take that extra time to properly present content like Christine OKelly and Tina Sue now does. People come to your site for the words, and you have to be on your ‘A’ game to get there. However, adding those extra touches to emphasize your content is also an amazing skill all great bloggers should have.

From personal blogging experience, I have taken on these very same concepts with my personal blog. It is working just as I expected. Even more amazing is the fact that I don’t feel pressured to get something done and cut corners; I just write great quality content.

The previously mentioned blogs have reassured me that this is the future of success. Chances are just as high that it will work for you. If you blog on a daily basis, why not consider slowing down to every other day if you believe you could create content that is much better?

Think about it! Let me know what your feelings are on this subject in the comments below. Point out any other blogs that post relatively infrequent but create superb content. I’m interested in finding these types of authors.