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How do you get the word out about great content? What’s your primary form of online marketing?

Practical Blogging Tips: Jazzing Up Your Images in WordPress

In my followup research after posting 48 Unique Ways to Use WordPress, I came across Jason Schuller’s new WP Elements blog. Jason has some very cool WordPress plugins, an excellent free magazine theme, Massive News, and another theme for a video gallery on the way.

Two things caught my eye on Jason’s blog: the Fancy Zoom plugin and the Featured Content Gallery plugin. The latter is a plugin version of the gallery box that appears in his Massive News WP theme.

Both plugins can really jazz up your WP blog’s images.

Fancy Zoom

Fancy Zoom is a sexy variation to other “lightboxed” image plugins. The basic principle is this: show a relatively small image on a post and link it to a larger version. With Fancy Zoom installed, you’ll see an animated “zoom” to the larger version without a browser refresh. When you close the lightboxed image, you’ll see an animated close. (Watch out; clicking can be addictive.) Here’s a screen grab after a click, but to see the full animated effect, go visit Jason’s 32Eighteen site and click on one of the images in the middle column.

Featured Content Gallery

Have several feature articles on your site and want to make them prominent? Jason’s Featured Content Gallery plugin lets you set up a sequence of images, each one linked to a feature article. The result is visually stunning. Here’s a screengrab, below, which doesn’t do it justice. So go visit the plugin page for an example.

The gallery, while very attractive, has a drawback: updating the gallery is awkward. That is, if you intend to add new images and remove older ones on a regular basis, it’s a tedious process. Increasing the number of images in the gallery set is probably less work, but you have to manually tweak the plugin files – which cannot be done from within the WP admin panel.

Notes:
(1) You do not have to link the showcase images to articles. You can simply showcase images.

(2) Showcase images can very likely be linked to off-site pages, though I haven’t tried. If you own/run multiple blogs, this could be a nice way to use a “hub site” to showcase feature articles on your other sites.

Performancing Hive: The Weekly Buzz

The Hive, a project started by Performancing to provide a community for those looking to increase the performance of their blog/site, is steadily growing in numbers. There are many great things going on in the Hive, and I will take this opportunity to let everyone know what they are missing out on.

First, I just wanted to send a warm welcome to our latest member, preschoolmama. Welcome to Performancing Hive! We are fast approaching 100 members!

The First In-Depth Special Report

Chris Garrett of Performancing has released the first Hive Special Report. “Planning for Success: How to Build a Professional Blog” has a plethora of great content that explains in-depth on how to build your very own professional blog.

Here is just a tiny portion of the entire 33 page report:

Creating a Niche-Leading Blog

Here are what I believe to be the key ingredients of a great blog:

1. Credibility Why should the reader believe you?

You can project credibility through your writing, through your design and through your professional conduct. It doesn’t hurt to have some claim to fame of course. It could be that you have just “been there, done that”. Employees of Microsoft or Google are going to be credible when discussing those companies and markets. Why are you qualified to talk about your topic?

2. Authority
…

There are over 33 pages and 8,000 words of detailed information and insight from this report alone, but you will have to be a Hive member to check out the rest of this amazing work by Performancing’s own Chris Garrett. The PDF file is available to download in the Hive, and there will be much more to come.

Revenue Resources

Ryan Caldwell of Performancing set out to find which sources of revenue worked best. People have disclosed the percentages and discussed which advertising networks and services they gain revenue from. It is nice knowing what works. If you were part of the Hive, you could see what works for others as well.

Special Jobs

The Hive’s marketplace is buzzing with great opportunities. From great advertising deals to amazing work opportunities, the potential to make money is here. After all, earning $1,000 for a single article is no joke — there is serious money to be made. Also, you have the opportunity to post opportunities that the professionals will see.

Professional Advice

You simply won’t find this amount of personal detailed advice anywhere else on the web. There has been question after question posted in the Hive, and people are finding the answers they want. This is what it is is all about! The professionals are helping those that are in need of help to grow their own business. People like Raj Dash, Chris Garrett, Ryan Caldwell, James Mowery (myself), and all the other great members of the Hive are here to help you with your blogging needs.

Join Performancing Hive today, and see what all the buzz is about!

Will Digg still be a little boys’ juvenile gang center in 5 years?

A Gadget That EVERY Professional Blogger Should Consider Having

Do you come prepared? Interestingly enough, many professional bloggers are not prepared for professional work. One single simple gadget can help in a myriad of ways, but unfortunately, people seem to under-estimate its use. When you have that killer idea, interview opportunity, or chance to become a live reporter, you must be prepared.

Digital Voice Recorder

Right now, you should invest in a digital voice recorder. It does exactly what its name implies — it records voice and sound. You might have seen old school voice recorders with cassette tapes, but today this type of technology is becoming quite impressive and reliable. Some might think this is a waste of money, but I strongly disagree. It is a tool that could potentially be one of the greatest investments to a professional blogging career.

digital voice recorder

You might think it is easier to remember or write down information, but even if you have superhuman memory or pen and paper, there are certain things you can’t do in a reasonable and timely manner. A digital voice recorder can.

Interviews

A digital voice recorder is the ultimate gadget to have when an interview needs to be done. You might, for example, bump into someone of important interest while being out and about. Let’s say you are at a blogger’s convention and have a few moments to talk to Darren Rowse of ProBlogger — wouldn’t it be a wasted opportunity if you couldn’t record an interview with him? Your readers might appreciate something like that. Depending on the type of blogs you write for, that missed opportunity could be very painful.

Ideas

You and I know that we have both forgotten some great ideas in the past. There have been several times previously when I was laying in bed thinking about article ideas and would have forgotten them the next day. Realistically, how many of us are going to go through the effort to turn on a light, grab a pen, and jot down those ideas? Not many of us would. A digital voice recorder by your side could result in this never happening again. The first night I was hired for Performancing, I had recorded over 70 article ideas. This article was one of them.

Live Reporting

Another great use would be to report a developing or live event. You know those people that take their video cameras with them everywhere to find great news? You could think of a digital voice recorder as the same thing. Who knows when something like just being able to record and report a live event could turn out to be one of the greatest moments in your life.

Other Uses

Reminders
Goals
Dictating blogs/articles

I have an old school cassette based digital voice recorder/player. I also have the ability to record unlimited audio on my cell phone. I have used these features many times when I simply have an amazing idea. There are plenty digital audio recorders available. Some are more fancier than others, but pick up one that is good for you.

Now, sure, you could take a pen and notebook everywhere you go, but this is the 21st century. It is a fast and impatient world. Things are forgotten and opportunities are missed on a daily basis. Don’t let it happen to you. Those that are prepared and take their job seriously are those that succeed. Remember that.

Interview with Mr. Larry W. Phillips, Editor of “Ernest Hemingway on Writing”

It is a pleasure and honor to welcome Mr. Larry W. Phillips. In 1984, he was the editor for a book that has become an essential tool for the contemporary writer: “Ernest Hemingway on Writing.” The book is available on Amazon.com.

Preface to his Book on Mr. Hemingway

“This book contains Hemingway’s reflections on the nature of the writer and on elements of the writer’s life, including specific and helpful advice to writers on the craft of writing, work habits, and discipline. The Hemingway personality comes through in general wisdom, wit, humor, and insight, and in his insistence on the integrity of the writer and of the profession itself.”

Similar Career Path as Mr. Hemingway

Mr. Phillips, a native of Monroe, Wisconsin, began his writing career as a reporter for the United Country Courier newspaper. Before focusing upon books, he authored many magazine and newspaper articles.

Published Books

Covering the Second Coming
F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing
Ernest Hemingway on Writing
Madison Retro
The Tao of Poker
Zen and the Art of Poker

Ernest Hemingway and “The Old Man and the Sea.”

Larry, please accept a warm welcome.

Thanks, it’s a pleasure Steve. I’m just going to write the answers to your questions off the top of my head– which may be the best way. I’m a big believer in “free association” (as distinct from stream of consciousness).

You were born and raised in Wisconsin. What attracted you to the writing profession, and who were some of your early mentors?

I’d say Hemingway was an early mentor. And possibly Mark Twain. Also, as a kid I remember watching episodes of the “Twilight Zone” on TV and keeping a notebook and writing down the plots to each episode. It’s hard to think why I did that. It just seemed somehow so cool that a plot-twist in a half-hour TV show could have such a big impact on a person. I guess I got curious about that, and why it was.

One my favorite quotes by Mr. Hemingway was “Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.” Since you began as a reporter, how does that quote resonate with your own experience, and what lessons from that period assisted you as your career progressed into other areas?

This is a good question and a big subject. I think numerous dangers lurk in journalism for the writer who wants to go beyond journalism. Bloggers are actually closer to having the kind of freedom to really develop as writers, IMO, than journalists. I’ll give an exaggerated answer here, in order to show what I mean.

A journalist has limitations. He can’t use slang, he can’t use the way real people talk (often), he can’t (or isn’t supposed to) include his opinion, can’t mention personal beliefs or convictions, isn’t supposed to draw conclusions, can’t use obscenity, can’t use long, odd or quirky sentences, can’t say anything bad about a company or product (you may get sued), can’t make the story too long, and on and on—I could list many other limitations. It’s rather like a painter being told to go paint a picture, but without using yellow, blue, red, green, brown, black, or purple. This is an exaggeration, as I say, but it hints at what the problem is, and what Hemingway was getting at.

What were your motivations and goals behind the book on Mr. Hemingway?

My exact motivation, oddly (and laughingly) enough, was that I had a file of Hemingway quotes and I was looking for a couple of quotes and couldn’t find them. And this had happened to me before. I became so frustrated that I decided to start at one end of Hemingway and go through to the other and collect all the quotes. In the end I had enough to send to Charles Scribner’s Sons, the publisher. A motivation then was to create a small book for college students based on Hemingway’s observations.

Could you please share a few of your favorite quotes?

I think the Hemingway quote about “finding the thing that makes the emotion” is very valuable advice to a writer. And the one about “making” a scene rather than just describing it. The latter is kind of what journalism does, while the former refers to recreating in the reader what it felt like to be there. That’s the difference.

In your opinion, what was Mr. Hemingway’s legacy on literature and how we write today? For example, what might have been his perspective about the Internet and blogging?

Hemingway should be studied, I think, just to see how he did it. He has some rather amazing word constructions and turns of phrase. The lesson is not to write like him, but rather to mull over the act of writing itself, and think about it. What does repetition mean? What does page after page of just dialogue mean? What does paring things down to the bare essential mean? What do I have permission as a writer to do or not do? Hemingway’s style is not really the way people write these days, but there are things to be learned from it.

Two of the most influential American writers of the 20th century were F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Since you have written books about both men, and read many of their personal correspondence, could you compare and contrast their writing styles and personalities?

I think I wrote in the preface to the Fitzgerald book something to the effect that Hemingway was a “today-is-the-first-day-of-the-rest-of-your-life” kind of guy. He was always “breaking the plane” into the existential present. Fitzgerald saw things just the opposite, as a kind of “whole”, a kind of waltz on a yellow afternoon, seeing the whole of it, from A-to-Z. Fitzgerald’s particular writing trick– and a very difficult one to duplicate, even when you know what it is– was to “make things do things”. Shadows move against dressing-room blinds, stars “stir and bustle” and “neat sad waltzes” drift out through open doors. This is much harder than it looks to pull off. Fitzgerald also seems to key his writing to the continuation of a mood, rather than a plot. He’ll keep the same mood going, from scene to scene, and take up the book at whatever point necessary to do this, and the plot trails along almost secondarily. His books are the story of a mood (though the mood may change as the story goes along).

In your opinion, what are the necessary traits and attributes for a contemporary writer?

There’s a saying in the poker world, “It depends”. Should I raise, should I fold, should I check-raise in this particular situation? It depends. It’s the same for writing. It depends on what you want to get out of it. I read bits and pieces of a lot of blogs. Every so often you read one that is crushingly boring (for lack of a better word). You’ve all seen these. “I got up about 8:30 a.m. I made coffee. I moved the potted plant from the dining room into the kitchen. I called Julia. I looked out the window. About 11 o’clock I went to the grocery store.” And so on. Clearly, this person is never going to be ascending the steps to the podium taking down the National Book Award. But if this is what they want to get out of it– and maybe it is– it could be a form of perfection or something.

For everyone else I would advise: try to get down to the next level below the obvious level. There is a kind of obvious level that exists that we all operate on in our day, but just underneath this there are a lot of things going on of what we all really think. I’ll use an example from something I’ve been working on, about the decade of the 1950’s. The obvious level is the Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs level. The level just underneath that is the way Tinker Toys tasted when you bit into them, the wood smell of the can, the sound the can made when you were filling it up, and so on. There is a kind of secondary level like this to everything. Look for it. Proust, in particular, was very good at drawing the curtain back on this level. After you read some of him, you start seeing it everywhere– and you realize it was always there.

Let’s turn to poker. On your website, you describe it as your vocation. When did your passion for poker begin?

Oh, I’ve been playing poker since I was a kid. Somewhere about in my 30’s I thought it would be a good idea to start spending a lot of time playing cards on riverboats in the Mississippi. I find high stakes poker players and world class poker players to be very interesting people. It’s kind of like the old joke about the mafia. “How do you know if someone is in the mafia?” Answer: “Well, if they are sitting in a restaurant and the person next to them gets hit in the head by an anvil, and they don’t even look up, then they’re in the mafia.” It’s kind of the same with world class poker players. Something like that happens and they don’t even flinch. There’s just something interesting about it. It’s almost like professional actors who you might meet. Most of them are great story-tellers too.

After viewing the titles of your poker books, is it accurate to say that you view the topic as more of an art than a science?

It’s just something you never quite get to the bottom of. Just when you think you know it all, you confidently bet 40,000 chips in a tournament, and a young kid across from you wearing music headphones and a cap turned around backwards, lights up with an expression like, “Aha! I’ve finally got him!” and he reraises you all-in for 200,000 more… So you fold your hand, and he turns his cards over to show you that he had nothing at all. Two terrible cards. It’s like that. You just never quite get ahead of it, or learn it all.

Kenny Rogers wrote a famous song called, “The Gambler.”

“You got to know when to hold em, know when to fold em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table.
There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.

Now every gambler knows that the secret to survivin’
Is knowin’ what to throw away and knowing what to keep.
Cause every hands a winner and every hands a loser,
And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.”

Besides knowing when to hold them and when to fold them, what are other key factors for successful professional gambling?

Well, with regard to line 3 (above), you better count your money when you’re sitting at the table, especially if you’re playing any kind of big bet poker, such as pot limit or no limit hold’em. You need to know not only how deep your own stack is (for strategic purposes), but how deep everyone else’s stack at the table is, because it’s going to influence how you play the hand.

As far as professional gambling goes, there is very less of this going on than the lay person knows– the number of successful gamblers (over a large sample of time) is actually pretty small. This would include probably fewer than 10 or 20 people (if that) who actually know what they’re doing in sports betting handicapping, who wait for just the right spot to bet their money, and several hundred poker players and blackjack players that make a consistent living at a fairly high level.

You have been a newspaper reporter, magazine writer, and book author. If you were to advise a person who wanted to pursue a writing career, regardless of genre, what would you share with them from your own journey?

They should write to the level they want to get to and not feel like “failures” for not selling a million books or something like that. A lot of my writing just goes out to 5 or 6 friends. Maybe that’s all you need to do. Maybe that’s success. Maybe writing in a blog– or 2 or 3 of them fulfills you. I’ve stopped thinking that’s a bad thing– or somehow “not enough” in some weird Hollywood “success” kind of way. Of course, it would nice to sell a million books, but if you don’t, so what? Poets have moved the world with a few lines that didn’t even sell in their own lifetimes. Become more indifferent to the whole success thing. Write in your own voice. Be your own success.

Larry, thank you very much for sharing your insights and expertise.

Thanks Steve–
Take care–
Larry W. Phillips

About the Interviewer

Steve Amoia has published articles and book reviews about alternative health, art history, career-related themes, historical figures, Italian and international soccer, martial arts, psychology, and sport topics. His writing portfolio can be found here.

48 Unique Ways To Use WordPress

WordPress, one of the most popular blogging platforms (if not the most), is capable of being more than just a blog platform. It’s capable of being a full-blown CMS (Content Management System). As someone who has both written small, custom CMSes from scratch as well as evaluated million-dollar professional CMSes for large corporations, WordPress‘ robustness never ceases to amaze me.

The key to many of the unique uses can be attributed to any or all of the following components:

Custom theme.
Custom code tweaks
Custom or widely-available plugins.
Custom fields per post.
Custom code to use the custom fields.

Why Use WordPress?

Not everyone is for the idea of WordPress as a CMS. Some bloggers point out a variety of technical issues (which I’m not getting into here). True, WP is not a high-end CMS, but it can get the job done, especially for low-volume use. The point is that with WP, you don’t always need to pay $50,000+ for a proprietary, difficult to learn CMS. And that’s for starters. Many of high-end CMSes require “seat” licenses. That is, a fee for each person that MIGHT use the software. Add maintenances/ upgrade fees, support licenses, training, etc., and most small businesses or online publishers are spending more than they have/ is necessary.

WordPress can do the job, and as has been discussed here and elsewhere many times, has a lot of community support, free themes and plugins, and is relatively easy to customize or to find someone who can for a fair price. Below are some ways that WP can be used.

Basic WordPress Uses

The uses in this section require the minimum amount of customization, often involving only additional available plugins.

Basic CMS for a traditional site or web magazine. One of the most common alternate uses for WordPress is to build a traditional website with no focus on chronological posts (blog) – that is, to use WP as a basic CMS. More recently, this approach is being integrated with a blog as well, particularly using “magazine” themes.
Some of the best visual examples I’ve come across are Twist’n’Shout and Simms Furniture Warehouse both designed by Charlene of Essentially Keystrokes, and Camacho Cigars. The latter integrates WordPress and Flash to produce a traditional site that you’d probably never know was built on WordPress if you didn’t check the source code. Another nice example is Ford’s Autoshow site. (This is not an endorsement of any of these sites, just simply an observation.)

There are reasons not to use WP as a CMS, but there are also reasons to use WP and many tutorials on how to do so. The fact is, you can use a Caching plugin to speed up the rendering of pages on your web server. If you prefer more traditional URLs, you can use an .HTML or .PHP extension.
City guide or geocoded news site. The Thunderbird, a college journalism site built in WordPress, has an excellent example of what I mean by geocoded news. News stories on the site (which uses one of Brian Gardner’s Revolution magazine themes) are represented by colored icons on an embedded Google MyMap map. Clicking on an icon displays an excerpt bubble, complete with a “Read more” that, when clicked, opens a new browser tab/ window with the story in question.
You could expand on this idea to build City Guides. Instead of news stories, publish reviews/ profiles of restaurants, nightclubs, businesses, as well as interviews of local celebrities. Then geocode each post into an icon on a Google map. (I’ll cover Google Maps and geocoding here on Performancing starting in the near future.)
History/ timeline site. Timeline from MIT is a visualization widget for time-based info. Event items are draggable, and clicking on one pops up a dialog with more detail, including links. Freshlabs offers a WP plugin that allows you to embed SIMILE Timeline windows into your posts. You could combine this with maps, video, images, and articles in order to create a history site. (E.g., a religion or dinosaur timeline.)
Image gallery or photoblog. There are a number of ways that you can use WP to create a Photoblog (such as by using the Photopress theme) or an image gallery. For the latter, there are lightbox-style WP plugins and widgets, or regular image gallery plugins.
Intranet. Intranets, in a nutshell, are websites that are internal to an organization, typically firewalled off so that only employees/ members have access. WP can be used for an Intranet that combines blogs, traditional sites, or pretty much any of the other uses described in this article.
Movie poster and trailer site. Sprout Builder
is a new web service (still in beta) that allows fast creation of Flash media content. You can use its image and video components to build movie Sprouts. Each Sprout would simply be embedded in a WordPress post, possibly accompanied by a review and/or ratings area. The reason for taking this approach is because Sprout Builder allows you to build in interactivity.
Network hub/ feed aggregator. Many bloggers have multiple web properties forming a blog network. Some also like to have a hub site that offers snippets of posts from across the network. A simple way to do this is to use an RSS feed importer plugin (such as the very cool WP-o-matic, which uses SimplePie) that automatically produces a new WP post snippet for each feed item. Hart’s Battling for Health hub site is an example of this.
Polling site. There are numerous WP polling plugins (such as Democracy AJAX Poll and WP-Polls) that can be used to produce a polling site. This could be a standalone site, or combined with a blog.
Real estate listings or guide. Take the idea of a city guide, mentioned above, and tweak it to build a real estate guide – possibly using a custom real estate WP theme (not free). Add maps, exterior 3/4 pics of a property, video, details and contact info.
Web Chat. Embed one of web-based chat services into your home page or the nav bar. There’s even a new one that will “ping” your AIM chat client. So site visitors can chat with you without having to download and install AIM. Something like this could even be used to give web-based advice by church ministers, on a church website.
Webcasting station. Imagine a main page with a single, large media player, with member “twittering” to the side. The best example of this used to be Evil Backwards, which used to use the very robust Splashcast Media player where the current video window is now. They’ve ditched the Splashcast player, so you’ll have to imagine it’s there. Splashcast offers embedded “channels” for video, audio and documents in a borderless player. A theme similar to Evil Backwards’ home page can be produced in WordPress using the Blueprint CSS framework (discussed below in the Techmeme clone item, in the next section). Of course, you can use a media player similar to Splashcast, but to my knowledge no other player offers embedded channels.

Website/ Web Services Clones and Alternatives

The uses in this section are visual or functional mimics of popular web sites/ services. Several can be done with a combo of a special, available theme and plugins. Some might require a bit of custom coding.

Feedburner alternative. Feedburner, a web service that Google recently purchased, offers multiple functionality, but mostly the republishing of site RSS feeds and monitoring. Many bloggers say they don’t want to use Feedburner because Google tends to give the latter the search juice for an article. (There are feed direction plugins to get around that.) I like Feedburner because I don’t have to worry about server resources, and I can monitor my stats. But there is a WordPress alternative to Feedburner that uses a simple set of plugins to accomplish similar functionality (though not a visual clone).
Popurls clone. Popurls is a popular site that lets you get a bird’s eye view of several popular sites. This format is very handy and can be used to monitor the blogs in a niche or even several niches. Ericulous offers a handy free WP Popurls clone theme. (There are a few plugins necessary, but they’re included in the ZIP file.) While it’s not robust enough yet to handle non-RSS format feeds, it’s still an excellent launch point.
Techmeme clone. Techmeme is in my blogger’s toolbox as handy way to monitor the tech niche. It’s not as “bird’s eye view” as a Popurls clone, and it algorithmically follows a set of RSS feeds. If you blog is in the tech niche, it might be included one day in Techmeme’s stream and not the next (or ever again). You can solve that with your own Techmeme clone using WordPress and various plugins. Though there are two things to point out:
1. I haven’t come across a ready-made WP solution to Techmeme. The closest clone to Techmeme is Megite, which I understand is available for licensing at $15,000+.
2. Techmeme and Megite use “topic clustering” algorithms that are the core driver to how the story items are presented on both sites. I haven’t deciphered this yet, but I’m working on it.
Nevertheless, the basic idea behind Techmeme is a “river of news”. This can be produced using RSS import plugins and a custom WP theme – best created with the Blueprint CSS Framework and related tools (something I’ll try to cover in the future). You’ll end up with something like Techmeme River as a starting point. From here, you’d have to apply clustering algorithms, which are way beyond the scope of Performancing.
Twitter clone. Twitter microblogging has become something of a phenomenon online, with some people even preferring this mode of communication over blogging. But it has its drawbacks – namely a 140-character message/ tweet limit, no simple inclusion of visual media, scrambled URLs, etc. Sure, there are Twitter alternatives such as Jaiku and Tumblr, but if you want to do something similar in WP, you’re in luck. Matt and Automattic (makers of WordPress) have released the Prologue theme. It has Gravatar support and loads of RSS feeds, and is ideal for group “twittering” activity. (See the section below for specific uses of Prologue.) Their download site is down at the time of this writing, and apparently doesn’t offer a ZIP, so go visit Sizlopedia instead.

Additional Uses of the Prologue Theme

The Prologue theme, mentioned in the last section for “Twitter clone”, is a versatile theme/plugin package with a lot of potential. Here are some additional ways you can use it. Keep in mind that for some of these uses, you might want to either password-protect each new posting manually, or write some custom code that automatically sets a post’s status to “private”. (That’s not covered here, but if you’re using WP 2.3+, it probably has simplified privacy options.)

Article assignment system. There are several ways to set up an article assignment system in WP. The simplest way is to use the Prologue theme. Each writer gets an account, and when the editor posts an available assignment, the first person to claim it by posting gets it. (Details of the assignment might be elsewhere.) The success of this approach depends on the discipline of writers not to post anything else except acceptance of an assignment. Questions can be posted as comments on the source assignment message, not as additional messages. Otherwise, the message stream will get cluttered fast.
Now, if you want something more sophisticated that sends out reminders, etc., you’d need to write custom plugins/ code to manage that information.
Confession log. People love to confess private things (or hear about others’ confessions.) Set up a site with the Prologue theme. Keep registration open (but possibly with email confirmation) and let people confess whatever they like.
Celebrity or political microblog. If you only want to post short newsy items about a niche (such as entertainment or politics) and don’t need to upload images, Prologue is ideal for this. Thrivecore is an example used for pop culture microblogging. (Just keep in mind that to include links to other pages, you need to enter the appropriate HTML code in Prologue’s textarea.)
Grocery list. Use the Prologue theme and enter grocery items. When you go to the grocery store, access your list with your Apple iPhone. (You can use other devices, but from what I understand, the iPhone is the best mobile Internet device around in terms of usability and readability.) You could also write custom code to tweak the list and convert it to some other format via a web API.
Log book. One of the biggest pains in the behind when you run your own business is tracking expenses and/or logging meetings. Use the Prologue theme and enter items AFTER they occur. Voila, an automatic logbook. If you have a mobile phone with Internet access, use it to enter items on the go. Later, you can use a desktop computer to collate the items and record them more permanently in a spreadsheet. If you’re a codemonkey, you can write a WP plugin to export items to a private Google Spreadsheet, a web calendar, or a web to-do list service. Alternately, you can use your log book site’s RSS feed.
Reminders. A Reminder system is similar to a to-do list but actually sends out reminders with a service such as Retweet’s Timer. Setup a Prologue theme as usual, but rig a Twitter stream using your site’s RSS feed. Use the necessary notation for Timer, and reminder items will be sent to you. Keep in mind that this shouldn’t be used for anything but items that are at least a day ahead, as it’s hard to predict when Twitter will check your updated RSS feed.
Review site. Use Prologue with a group of friends to easily share brief reviews of movies, music, books, etc. Browse through JakartaBar for an interesting example. Make sure to check the comments (labelled as “reviews”.) I’m not sure what plugin they’re using for their ratings, but here are a few places that you can find review/ ratings plugins: Dan Grossman, Paul Goscicki (movie ratings – compliant with hReview microformat), Sneak, Channel-Ai.
I haven’t tested any of these with Prologue yet, so I don’t know how they’ll look. (The movie ratings plugin is for the use of a post’s author, so may not suit Prologue use.) Which plugin you use depends on who will do the rating (author or reader) and what is being rated (the actual post or something referenced in the post).
Software bug logger. Are you testing web or desktop software with a group of developers/ testers? Setup a subdomain with WP, using the Prologue theme. Turn on “privacy” in your WP control panel so that search engines don’t know about the site. Give each tester an account and have them follow a specific notation that can be parsed into a web spreadsheet or some other bug log.
To-do list. Use the Prologue theme to post new tasks for yourself. It’s not elegant, but it’s easy to set up and use. It’s also available from anywhere that you have Internet access, and you can always pretty up the items later. In fact, if you can define a notation for items and use it consistently, you can send the to-do list feed through custom code (or a Yahoo Pipe) whose output works with the API of either a real web to-do list, calendar or spreadsheet service. (I.e., Google Calendar or Spreadsheet.) Check out Twittercal (and its Twitter bot) to get a better sense of this.

Note: If you’re serious about the above uses, get
yourself a personal domain (e.g., yourname.com) and create one subdomain per use. Or use a single subdomain and create a unique notation that makes clear what each posting represents. Then use a Yahoo Pipe or other code to filter the RSS feed, which then can be sent via APIs to a web spreadsheet or calendar.

Custom Sites

To my knowledge, the uses in this section are mostly speculative and thus require custom code, themes, plugins and/or web services.

(Note: Several of these ideas are taken from a blogHelper article.)

Article library. Set up WordPress so that the home page template displays no posts on the home page, only a static index of articles. Each article is a post with its own permalink page. An example is A-Level Econoref.
Calendar. You could drive your web calendar by using a Prologue-like home page (discussed indepth above), using a custom notation for items. The items would be parsed elsewhere and sent to a web calendar such as Google Calendar, or displayed on a calendar widget on your site. [This is an extension of the idea discussed for To-Do List and Reminder items above.]
Classifieds. Using the Edgeio Classfieds plugin, you can add paid or free classifieds to your WP site. This could be integrated with something like a real estate listings site, as discussed above.
Contact manager. As discussed in Pushing the Envelope of WP Functionality, Design Canopy is offering a WP-based Contact Manager theme (with plugins).
CSS/ Site awards gallery. There are lots of gorgeous CSS Gallery sites out there, and if you have the need to create a niche one of your own, you have several choices – including writing your own custom theme and plugins. If that’s too much work, Shabu at OS Designer offers a free WP-based CSS Gallery theme (with necessary plugins) that uses two columns. (Example: CSS Design Gallery.) If two columns are not enough, or you want some flexibility in item pages, Small Potato at WP Designer is selling a CSS Gallery WP theme. Both Shabu’s and Small Potato’s themes use a voting plugin whereby visitors can rank a site.
Ecommerce site. WordPress can be integrated with plugins or custom code, and PayPal, to produce online shops. An example is Filipino Artisans. (I’ve read that Moo.com also uses WP, but I think it’s for their blog, not their online store.) There are also code packs that allow you to integrate Amazon or other merchants into your own e-store.
Media collection manager. You’ll need custom code, but WP can be used to track your CDs, DVDs, books, software, collectibles. You’re basically using it as a database manager for a specific type of item, though you could generalize. Alternately, you can use a Prologue theme interface with a unique notation, then parse added items and send them to a web spreadsheet via its API.
Voting site. The CSS Gallery setup examples above use a voting plugin. You could tailor one of these for a more traditional social voting site, or you could produce a custom template like the one at N4G (News for Gamers) – though I don’t believe they are WordPress-based. But with all the components discussed in this article, a WP-based theme similar to N4G’s is possible. You could also combine the WP Prologue theme with a voting plugin to build a rudimentary voting site.
Web portfolio. Designers and other creative types might like to offer an online portfolio showcasing their past work. W web portfolio has elements of an image gallery and a CSS gallery but isn’t necessarily either. One example is Twist’n’Shout’s portfolio. Also, check out blogHelper’s two-part series (part 1, part 2) on how build a WP-based portfolio.

15 Additional Uses of WordPress to Explore

Here are some additional possible uses of WordPress that didn’t have time to research and write up, but wanted to share with you. Much of the technique you need to use WP this way is already discussed above in this article.

Church sermons.
Fark-like user-submitted links.
Forum. Sure, BBPress by Automattic is probably a better choice than a WP-based forum, but the fact is that you can do it.
Job listings site.
Music archives.
Press release site.
Project/ task management.
Resume.
Sales pages.
Social network.
Short film festival site.
Video sharing site.
Web command dashboard. (Private site to monitor your sites’ metrics, etc.)
Web directory.
Web soapbox.

Summary

These lists above are only a sampling of the uses for WordPress. So if you thought WP was only for blogs, hopefully you these examples stir up some ideas for your own projects. (Thanks to all the input by Hive members.) I’ll be covering a lot of these examples in more detail all this year.

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