Weblog Tools Collection

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I have added a few plugins and tweaked a bit of the code on WeblogToolsCollection to keep things fresh and new. Here is the list.

WhoSeesAds: I have been meaning to wean out the Google AdSense ads for my regular visitors and Ozh’s plugin was the ticket. If you have not used it yet, you are missing out. It is one of the finest pieces of useful and well thought out code for WordPress bloggers. I have the ads set so they only show for posts older than 30 days or if you are not a regular visitor. I like the lack of distractive AdSense blocks. There is also a distinct benefit that I had not anticipated. The best paying AdSense block on this blog has also been the most obnoxious that regular readers have complained about. I can now display those ads to people that happen to stop by from search engines and on old posts. This has increased my click through rate almost five fold! (though that is not saying much, AdSense is pretty much useless on this blog and the revenue doesn’t even cover half my monthly server fees, let alone anything else). Thanks Ozh!

Easy Gravatars: Dougal released this plugin a few days ago and I was itching to install it. I muddled with his original code a little, played around with my own CSS, tweaked the next plugin to work with Gravatars and viola! Thanks Dougal! PS: If you do not know already, Gravatar is now owned by Automattic and response times for loading the Gravatars is minuscule. After I installed the plugin, I did not even have to check to see if I had a Gravatar. The system had already picked up my profile from WordPress.com. Do you have your own Gravatar yet?

Highlight Author Comment: I have always wanted a plugin that would somehow highlight comments from authors. When this plugin was in the daily list of updates, I knew I had to try it. I think it adds quite a bit to the conversation. I now have to tweak the CSS a little but that can wait (suggestions are welcome).

MyTwitter allows users to display their recent Twitters on their WordPress site.

WP Tag Manager aims to provide tag management that seamlessly integrates into your WordPress admin.

XmasB lets you add and show random quotes to your WordPress blog with ease.

Bloomingday is a 3-column, green theme with flowery header.

Brownie is a 2-column theme with a header image guaranteed to tickle your sweet-tooth.

DGA Design 01 is a 2-column, Adsense-ready theme with blue color scheme.

Godfrey is a single-column, gray-and-red theme with custom shaped content areas and dual bottom information areas that display Recent Posts, Categories, Search Bar, Blogroll, and Meta Information.

InKarm is a 2-column theme with red, black, and white colors predominant.

Star’eve is a 2-column, dark theme with minimalistic design.

WordPreciousss is a 2-column, minimal theme that uses skins to change, layout, and format.

I decided to use Project Wonderful for a month before I would say anything about the service so that I could talk somewhat intelligently about it. Project Wonderful lets you sell ads on your blogs in a new way. They use something called an “infinite auction” model that allows you to continue to sell your ad even after it is sold one time. In other words, the ads are sold on a per day basis and the highest bidders’ ads are displayed on your blog. The system has its weaknesses but it does work. You sign up just like any other advertising service and wait for them to approve your blog. Then you decide what kind of ad blocks you would like to display, setup the code and then add the code to your blog. The process of setting up ads and displaying them is a learning experience, but more on that later.

Pros:

• Account setup is relatively easy.
• Once the ads are setup, there is little to be done, low maintenance
• Could be better money than AdSense for some blogs
• Google friendly
• Multiple types of ads
• Very, very versatile advertising system
• Infinite auction has its advantages

Cons:

• Setting up ads and generating the code is confusing and cumbersome. I am not sure why ad details such as size, colors and ad text are on the ad code that needs to be regenerated after the ad is tweaked. Ad code generation leaves a lot to be desired.
• Infinite auction, though “innovative”, is confusing to advertisers. Selling more ads on your blog when an ad is already being displayed becomes difficult. There is a high learning curve for both advertisers and publishers. Casual ad buyers are wary of the infinite auction model.
• The site is slow when logged in. It is a pain to allow a pending bid when it takes over 30 seconds for each page to load. The ads themselves are displayed without much of a lag, which is nice.
• There are few advertisers on the service at this time. Most of them are t shirt sales or “blooming tea” sales and a few web comic sales ads slip in from time to time. Once this cadre of advertisers grows, the services’ potential will also increase.
• You need to be patient with the ads and the advertisers. You do not sell your inventory on the first day you put up the ads.

I tried various different pricing models and various different prices (on various different blogs and pages). If you do sign up, start with a lowball number for the bidding. That helps to get the attention of the few advertisers on the service. My prices were a slippery slope. I sold very few ads on the higher end of the price range and most of my ads ran empty if I put the them for auction at a going price I thought was fair. The site has a lot of good help files to guide you on price and the number of ads that are worthwhile. One thing I can say for certain. If you have AdSense on your blog and are making very little money from them, Project Wonderful is worth a shot. Chances are that you will make more from them, however slight that increase might be. The service did not work well for me but you might have a different experience with them.

Have you used Project Wonderful in the past? Have you advertised with them?

The science of blog reading: Nick Carr gives us an executive summary of an article by a team from CMU (and Nielsen) and he explains their thesis with the following foreword: The problem of detecting contaminants in a public water system is analogous to the problem of figuring out what’s going on in the blogosphere. Any article that claims that the blogosphere is essentially a sewer, is worth the read. I whole heartedly disagree with the list of 100 blogs that “everyone should read” but the concept is amusing and the principles behind their claims might have some merits. But then again I disagree with any and all such lists because all blogs and their readers do not have the same interest in all subject matters. Also as an astute commenter on that post points out, some of the blogs on that list aren’t even updated anymore and thus their list should have been better researched or at least chronologically updated before publication. Some researchers (I have been guilty of this myself when I wrote my thesis) concentrate on the numbers so completely that they tend to forget the bigger picture and consequently lose some credibility in their folly. If you are interested in social behavior surrounding blogging, the article is called Cost-Effective Outbreak Detection in Networks.

Category Posts Widget displays the most recent posts from a specific category.

Easy Gravatars makes it simple to add Gravatars to your blog.

Hiddy is a captcha-like plugin to help fight spam comments.

Highlight Author Comments automatically displays comments made by a post’s author in a distinctive style with no need to edit your template files.

Random Categories with Random Posts picks random entries from random categories to display on your blog. (For WordPress 2.2.3 and lower.)

Sensitive Tag Cloud provides a tagcloud that shows tags depending of the current context only.

1 Blog Theme is a 3-column theme with horizontal menu and 3-column footer.

3MOS is a 2-column theme with orange background and collapsible header.

dfMarine is an attractive 2-column theme with 3-column header.

DivCubs is a 3-column, dark theme with a customizable About section in the sidebar.

Henrietta is a single-column theme with collapsible header that emphasizes your blog’s content.

LOTR Back to History is a 2-column theme with a Lord of the Rings design.

Mellowed is a nice 3-column theme with soft blues in the header and clean layout.

Shifter Fluid 180 is another 2-column theme that provides the option of switching which side your sidebar appears on.

Zen 8 is a 3-column, widget-ready theme with support for Adsense and SEO-optimization.

AdaptiveBlue SmartLinks for WordPress: AdaptiveBlue recently released their SmartLinks product for bloggers and also released a WordPress plugin that makes all of this easier to implement and manage. From the authors’ blog SmartLinks are automatically inserted, helping readers to discover, explore, and connect to relevant information from around the web. The links are to pages about books, music, movies, stocks, recipes, restaurants, gadgets, people, movie stars and various entertainment and media. Apparently SmartLinks is already in use on sites such as Amazon.com and Yahoo Finance. SmartLinks could be a cool way to display all the media that is related to a few words in your post but I believe this service would have a wider audience if one could include their Amazon Affiliate ID on the links that are generated.

[EDIT] Seems it can be done with a hack. WordPress users have to insert the following script into their template below the SmartLink script (inserting their Amazon Affiliate between the quotations):
<script type=”text/javascript”>
blueAmazonId = “my-affiliate-code”;
</script>

Custom Hooks for developers is mostly aimed at other plugin developers and it provides the manage_pages_columns and manage_pages_custom_column hooks, which are not present in WordPress, but have been requested often. The plugin replicates the custom column feature of the manage posts page. The new filters can can be used in the same way as the manage_posts_custom_column action and manage_posts_columns filter provided by WordPress.

The author has also written a tutorial on how to add custom columns to the manage posts screen which also applies to these hooks.

TAGStention for WordPress: TAGStention is NOT a WordPress plugin nor is it a guide, its a Dreamweaver extension that has helpful features for theme developers such as

• Wizards for tags with parameters
• Help button redirects to codex
• Support for 90% of the tags
• Insert basic loops (wizard)
• Insert headers (wizard)
• Ultimate TagWarrior tags supported (NEW)
• Help button (NEW)
• PayPal button at help screen (NEW)

Is supports Dreamweaver 8 and MX2004 and the author says that it might support some older versions. It is based on a CC license. Thanks to WordPress Candy for the tip.

Flash Video Player allows you to add videos to your blog.

In-Series lets you write series of posts in WordPress, without having to deal with the hassle of manually writing up tables of contents or “next” and “previous” links in each post.

Live Space Sync allows you to synchronized WordPress post to Live Spaces, facilitating MetaWeblog API.

Mini Mugshot allows you to add to a WordPress post/page the Mugshot feature of the same name.

RB Internal Links allows blog owners to easily link to posts and pages within their wordpress blog without having to enter the full URL.

Technorati Tag Cloud Widget is the widgetized version of the Technorati Tag Cloud plugin for WordPress 2.3.

ApploPress is a 3-column, widget-ready theme with an Apple-like layout.

DIYTheme is a 3-column theme with seven different header images to choose from.

Funkey Curves is a 2-column theme with pastel colors and a curvaceous content area.

Magtastic is a 3-column theme with a newspaper/magazine-style layout.

Mimbo has been updated to add a number of new features, including a third column, widget support, and others.

Shifter is a 3-column, minimalist theme with sidebar columns that can shift sides.

Sport Fishing is a 3-column, widget-ready theme with a ‘fishy’ layout.

Auto-Scroller makes it possible to scroll the posts easily and rapidly, with a click.

Intelligent Content Ad Insertion lets you insert advertisements in post, page and feed content without manual intervention.

Skin Tags allows a tag to break across the column, creating a more del.icio.us-style tag cloud.

TechTags adds a single line to a post or page to display Technorati tags.

WP-Offline lets your readers cache your entire blog for offline reading using Google Gears.