Performancing Plugins

In the WordPress Tavern forum, I mentioned how I would like to see a plugin that would allow me to set a minimum amount of words a comment must be in order for it to be published. I’m sick and tired of the comments that have no meaning such as ‘Hi, Great Site‘ or ‘I’ve Subscribed To This blog‘. I’d rather have a way to simply discard these comments before they even reach my moderation queue.

Will Anderson stepped up the plate after some conversation as to what to create and he has since released the first beta of the plugin here. With this plugin, you can configure a minimum character or word limit before a comment is published. You can also enable client side javascript so when the end user tries to publish a comment not matching the required criteria, they’ll receive a popup saying so.

So far on my site, the plugin appears to be working just fine but give it a shot and let Will know what you think.

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview the author behind the plugin, The All In One SEO Pack. This is by far the most popular plugin downloaded from the WordPress plugin repository and within this interview, we discuss the topic of SEO, what it is like to manage the most popular plugin within the repository, configuration of the plugin and last but not least, we dive around the aspect of what could happen if you mis configured the plugin.

The interview is about 45 minutes long but it is filled with tons of great information as it relates to SEO, WordPress and plugins.

Download The Interview:

AllInOneSEOInterview.mp3

Listen To The Interview:

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.

There is quite an impressive amount of quality content that has been written in the past for Performancing. Just like any great site, we want to make sure that our great content doesn’t get lost simply because new great content is written. It would almost be criminal to do otherwise. To ensure this doesn’t happen, I am proud to present “Performancing’s Most Memorable.”

Over the next few months, I am going to be linking to some of Performancing’s best articles for each month. To kick things off, logically, I will start with January of this year. Once we are all caught up, I will then do the same at the end of each following month until we reach the end of the year, and when that happens, I will have an impressive article to recap the entire year.

If you are new to blogging, you’ll want to check out every single link within this post.

If you want to be a great blogger, you need to learn from the best. With our reader’s help, several bloggers were observed for their efforts. We begin with one of Performancing’s most memorable moments—the Performancing Blog Awards 2007.

Awards

Performancing Blog Awards 2007 Winners

Interviews

Performancing Interviews Jesse Nachtigal of Cigar Jack

Performancing Interviews Jon Phillips of FreelanceFolder

Monetization

7 Lessons From the Blogging Trenches: Cracking $200 per Month in Adsense

Blogging

A Quick Introduction to Twitter for Bloggers

Creating Better Page Titles, Post Titles, And Page Slugs On WordPress

6 Easy Ways To Get Eaten by the GOOG Monster

Joining a Niche Conversation, Part 1: Determining the Top Blogs In Your Niche

Joining the Niche Conversation, Part 2: Idea Generating for Bloggers

Joining a Niche Conversation, Part 3: Don’t Be Afraid to Edit Archived Blog Posts

Joining a Niche Conversation, Part 4: Making Your Blog Stand Out

Are Bloggers and Blogs Ruining the English Language?

Blog roll out: Developing a successful blog format

Helping Bloggers Become More Unique

Management

4 Tips to Help Manage Multiple Blogs

Other

7 Things I Want Google To Fix In 2008

I hope you enjoy seeing content from Performancing’s past. If you are new to Performancing, please subscribe to our content feed.

Have you ever wanted to rank the users of your blog based on comments and/or post contributions?

Creating a leader board for the users of your blog can provide incentive to contribute more often, and can also be used to offer performance based prizes.

Performancing is pleased to release UserRank as a free WordPress plugin that assigns scores to your WordPress blog users and outputs the user rankings with a simple function. Whether you are creating a personal journal or a corporate blog, the UserRank plugin will help you build an engaged community and ensure that the most valuable contributors are retained and rewarded.

The plugin was originally designed for a cash-reward contest that Glamorati will be having in the near future.

Click here for more information, and to download the plugin.

Some reading for the weekend:

1. Aspiring web publishers take note. Darren Rowse, one of the kings of blog networks, offers comprehensive advice on how he would build a niche-focused blog network.
2. Aaron Wall has added yet another tool, Rank Checker, to his Seobook site. Rank Checker, for Firefox browser only, tells you where your website ranks in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Live.
3. If you have WordPress design or programming skills,  or can provide support services, check out WordPressFreelance for freelance work opportunities. There are no initial fees, however after the trial period, they take the greater of $5 or 5%. [via: WPThemesPlugin.]
4. If you use social media, or have online friends submit your articles for you, Chris Winfield at Search Engine Land has some tips on making your content submit worthy.
5. Google has confirmed an algorithm change for their SERPs, which some members of the SEO community have codenamed Dewey. I haven’t delved into this, but if you’re interested, here are some references: Search Engine Land, Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Journal.
6. Moses at WP Themes Plugin recently released the free LightBreaker WP theme. He points out that it’s not a magazine-style theme, though I think it’s very professional-looking, and might suit a small network of sites. Or just one. It’s widgetized, allows pullquotes easily, and is ad-ready for AdSense and 125×125 px graphic ads.
7. Michael Gray, aka Gray Wolf, always has some sage advice regarding leveraging news events. Read his recent post How to Get 1 Million Dollars Worth of Links. It’s short but to the point.

The pMetrics plugin lets you display statistical information about your blog either privately in your dashboard or publicly in different places on your blog.

We think it’s a fun plugin, especially the way it gives you a quick glimpse of you blog statistics in the WP Dashboarad.

Yesterday, we launched three new one-click install extensions that we hope all pMetrics users have fun with.

Affiliate Image

Allows you to make money by displaying the pMetrics logo as an affiliate link.

Latest Locations

Displays the locations of your latest blog visitors.

Search Cloud

Creates a tag cloud of used search terms, and links them to the blog’s search function.

I’m sad to tell you that Partners has to close. While I have every faith it could have worked, it wasn’t going to happen fast enough. Without more money invested it wasn’t going to happen at all.

Any ads currently in the system will continue to run until the end of the month at which time the ad code will stop working. Please take your ad code down from your templates then. Remaining ad time will of course be refunded.

This news is surely not going to be popular. All I can say is thank you to all the publishers and advertisers who tried the service and to all the people in the forums who provided feedback and ideas. I am gutted I couldn’t have some time to act on your suggestions.