Weblog Tools Collection

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For those who are not completely happy with the usability or the look and feel of the back office in their blog, there are a few plugins around, compatible with or made for Wordpress 2.0, that rework or enhance the admin area. I’ll name :

• Paged Comment Editing
  By default, “Manage Comments” only list the 20 last comments. What if you were on offline holidays for a month and have a blog that receives quite a few feedback ? This plugin allows browsing of older comments with paging through them.
• Cat 2 Tag
  If you create a lot of categories, this plugin makes selection easier when writing a post : a handy “tag cloud” avoids cumbersome scrolling through a long category list. There is also a fancy “suggest category” feature that proposes categories as you type them.
• Wordpress Admin Drop Down Menu
  The lazy and the productive will love it : you can go from any to any admin page without having to stop by the “top level” page first. For instance, no more loading “Manage” first , and then “Comments”, since all admin links are available in a CSS driven drop down menu (demo). Admin menu the way it was meant to be (and even compatible with Tiger Admin)
• Tiger Admin
  While adding no particular feature, this plugin completely revamp the admin part of your blog by heavily tweaking the CSS, giving your admin pages a brand new look (for Safari, Camino and Firefox only)

If you are using a plugin that adds functionnalities or redesigns the admin interface, feel free to pimp it in the comments. Also, I advise plugin authors to update their plugin descriptions over at WP-Plugins.net once the administration pages will include “Wordpress 2.0″ in the compatibility check list.

Yes, I lifted the idea from another blog since their focus was somewhere else.

Here is my blogging wishlist for 2006. Tell us what you wish for or trackback this post from your blog.

• Since this is going to be the year of the aggregator (FeedDemon, Dave Winer’s effort, MSN, Google … ) I would like to find, try and settle on (maybe pay a small monthly fee) an aggregator that makes me feel as much at home as the Wordpress Write page.
• I would like to see the search engines treat splogs worse. Period.
• In addition, I would like to see the blogging world treat plagiarism with scorn. I would like to have more transparency and less dishonesty in popular “moneymaking” content. Search engines could also play an important role in this.
• Since blogging is already popular, I would like to see corporations using existing blogs to leverage sales and tweak their offerings to make bloggers happy. Hint: Search for your product on the web, find bloggers who talk about your product, make these bloggers happy and your product will get free and positive advertising.
• I would like to see bloggers make more profit from their blogs. Adsense is already very viable and many bloggers are already making a killing, but there is more money to go around. Advertising and profit sharing with bloggers would make casual bloggers very happy. Happy bloggers == better content == better blogosphere.
• I was wowed by Flickr and Memorandum. I would really like to see more innovative apps that focus on the blogging world and the social network that is blogging.
• Podcasting is nice in its own arena, but I just dont think I want every blog to become a podcast. Yet, I crave multimedia in blogging. I would really like to be surprised.
• MSN Spaces scare me. Asian blog networks are even worse. Not sure what I wish for them, but I have yet to read a single blog on any of those networks that I come back to.
• Less network, more blog.
• I really would like to see Wordpress do better, even better than it already is. This is a personal wish. I am not sure why I have this affinity towards Wordpress et al, but I do.
• Akismet is just frickin wonderful. This time next year, I hope to be deleting even lesser spam than I do today.
• Yahoo! has the right idea when they added Wordpress to their hosting lineup. I would like to see larger financial players help out and spread the wealth among Open Source initiatives in the blogging world and beyond. Free work for OSS is nice, but a little money to ice the cake is always just that much better.
• Finally, I would like to see more and better content. Well written personal blogs are refreshing reads.

How Big A Problem Is Blog Plagiarism? I have written about this in the past and used to have very strong views about it. In the past couple of weeks I have been alerted by readers and friends of quite a few other blogs that are copying my content (among others) and publishing it as their own. The number is surprisingly large. I stand on the fence on this issue. I love this comment on the Techdirt article. I came here from memeorandum, which is another site profitting from your content. That’s how the blogosphere works. I think our view of IP in the blog world will have to go through some major upheaval (like Om’s discussion) and might even need a few big lawsuits before bloggers know how far they can go without getting making people angry.

As of this post, Wordpress 2.0 is out. Go get it!
PS: Check out the new site design while you are at it!

I received some books in the mail today from Intel on IA-32 Assembly language development and the sheer weight of these books reminded me that I was likely to never actually read them, let alone leaf through them when I actually needed some reference. I tend to just go to Google and search for the topic before I ever pick up a book anymore. In spite of the ease of reading stuff on the web, it is still less satisfying and intuitive (and in many ways, less informative) than actually reading the book. I like Google Print, but that is a teaser without a carrot at the end of the stick.

I know that there are eBooks and there are a variety of other electronic publication services, but could one of the big poobahs (Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc.) come up with a searchable online library of books that could be “checked out” on a time sensitive basis. The service could be charged per book, per epoch or otherwise. I sure would get a subscription! In this age of the iTunes, RIAA and legal music downloads, I am surprised that there is such lack of interest in monetizing the online library.

The existing services are poor and fragmented at best and they leave a bitter taste with their high prices. Not only that, buying an eBook is a little like shopping for gifts on the 23rd of December; you have to visit twenty different stores, stand in line for hours and face the wrath of bad drivers (have you noticed that everyone but me is a bad driver?) in the parking lot. No one location/site has a good selection of stuff I want.

While they are at it, could they also come up with a better format for publishing books online?

For those of you that pay extra close attention to what you read through your feedreader (or are just obsessed with looking at links and how they work) you might have noticed that I have switched the feeds for Weblogtoolscollection to Feedburner. This gives me better control over the content, asssures that the content does not get lost when and if my blog is down and gives me cool reports such as the graphic here. I do miss being able to instantly modify my feed without having to ping Feedburner over and over again.

I personally (still) use Feed on Feeds and since Alex did not offer me the chance to alpha test FeedLounge (just kidding Alex, no hard feelings at all) I have modified FoF to suit my tastes and my needs.

As I’m sure everyone in this business is aware, the feed reader market has heated up considerably. There are new players such as Google, MSN (though still quite annoying to use) and of course the old skool players such as bloglines and Rojo. Most of these have their set of benefits, but from my traffic stats, it looks like Bloglines is winning hands down.

What feed reader do you use?

Mullenweg launches Automattic: There are times in ones’ life when they kick themselves for not having done something that was staring them in the face, feel like they have let themselves down but are still incerdibly happy for the way the cookie crumbled. This happens to be one such situation for me. Congratulations Matt! This is well deserved and I laud you (and your cohorts) and your efforts.