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I was preparing the following post as a speech for an event, but since I already used the above quote in a comment and the event did not pan out, I would like to post it for my readers. This version is smaller and is modified to suit the medium but I have tried to keep the message as close to the original thought as possible. I hope it helps at least one WordPresser help another WordPresser.

I started on my Masters degree in Computer Science after having worked in the industry for over four years. I decided that my education in Physics was not enough because it did not give me the ability to make enough of a difference to the people that I worked for. I could solve their problems and try my very best to make them smile when I left their establishment (I worked as a computer tech, making my way up to service manager when I quit) but I did not have the ability to help change their computing world and make them more content with their technology. I was just a fixer and could not enable change. So I quit my job, took out some loans, borrowed some money from my parents and went right back to school.

When I started school, I was fresh to programming. I had written some code in C for my undergraduate thesis and had taken one programming class at Wooster. However, truth be told, I was a real newbie in the programming world and was faced with a complex and advanced Computer Science curriculum that scared the living snot out of me. While searching the web for a project to sink my teeth into, I ran into blogging, then into b2 which finally led to me WordPress and a lanky kid from Texas with a lot of ideas and some fantastic leadership skills. I figured I would start two blogs to dip my toe in the water. One would be my personal blog and the other would be a log of all the programming work that I was doing. I figured it would help me get my arms around code, would help me help others and I would chronicle my journey in programming.

When I downloaded and installed WordPress, I had no clue about PHP, SQL, web servers or about most of the other technologies that I worked with. I huffed and puffed, stumbled and fumbled, tore my hair out and swore like a pirate almost every night when I sat down to play with my PHP scripts after finishing my Knowledge Based Systems homework. After much learning and quite a few painstaking weeks, I put together a few ‘hacks” for WordPress to make it do the things I wanted it to do and posted them on the support forums and on my blog.

But I quickly learned that the magic was not within me. The magic was within the community, the ideals championed by the community and benevolent nature of the community. Every hack was welcomed with open arms. Every tip that I posted made me more friends. Every theme I hacked up with my color blind eyes made me more popular. People started to recognize my name in the forums. I regularly received emails and conversed with folks from across the world. Before I knew it, I was a part of a fantastic community where I was more than just a nickname. The experience was sickeningly satisfying. The WordPress bug had bitten me and I could not stop scratching.

But the community was growing very quickly. I was not the only person that found solace in being within the community. There were dissensions, disagreements, flare ups, trolling and everything else in between. In watching various events unfold that first year, I learned my first lesson in community building.

Everyone speaks a different language even if we all speak English.

This is a well discussed and researched topic so anything I say has probably been said more lucidly in the past. But here is why I think our community works in spite of all our differences.

We have a glue. The glue is WordPress.

Why are we all such fans of a piece of software? I am a fan because it has helped me promote myself and my work. My dad is a fan because it helps him teach others about his fascinating ideas on alternative medication and spread wellness and news on staying healthy.

WordPress is a gift that keeps on giving.

WordPress is not just a one time pleasure. It continues to give me a lot for next to nothing. My ROI on WordPress is just massive. If you think for a few minutes, you might see your ingredients for the glue. I would love to know what WordPress gives you back.

Take a penny, leave a penny.

To me, WordPress represents everything that is fundamental to the Open Source movement. It represents a virtuous circle. Every WordPress personality keeps harping about how every user should think about giving back to the community because it will pay them back. Here is how I think of it. If all effort and resources were like a little penny holder in a store and we believe that all people, in their heart of hearts are good people (which I do), then every penny that you leave in that penny jar will make the jar look more full. An overflowing penny jar gives the person who needs a penny the confidence that if they take a penny, the jar will not become empty. It also gives the person who has a few extra pennies the desire to do what other good people have done in the past. WordPress enables us to feel good about ourselves.

We are all wellwishers.

I think we as human beings tend to forget that most people have good intentions. I also know that knowing that is not enough. It is very difficult to see the other person’s point of view. This is especially true if you feel very strongly about your opinion. That brings me to my next point.

We eat our own dog food.

Even core WordPress commiters have disagreements. However, I believe that we as a community have matured enough that we know when to give in. We have given WordPress the ability to be molded and shaped in the way it needs to be in order to make ourselves happy. Most features in WordPress can be removed, changed or enhanced to suit individual needs and abilities. There are plugins developed by core WordPress folks that get around certain features which they did not like but did not have the reasoning to enforce a global change on. Even in its failures, WordPress shines through.

That brings me to my final thought and the title of this post.

Be kind, educate.

I adore Lorelle. To me, she is the embodiment of our community in everything she does and in every action she performs. She is supportive and critical at the same time. She embraces and challenges in the same breath. She sticks her tongue out and throws her arms wide open all in one swoop. I believe what makes her approach so nice is that she is kind to the people that can enact change and she loves to teach other people to do the things she does so well. She is a WordPress enabler.

I wanna be like her. So I pledge to be as kind as I can be and I promise to educate everyone that cares to listen. While I am at it, I hope to learn a thing or two along the way. Will you help me do that?

So what do you pledge to do for WordPress and what can WordPress pledge to do for you?

I never get this right. There are times when I will be reading a post and it feels as if the chronological order of comments would make better sense. At other times, such as the comments on this post on IP Democracy (which has newest comments on top), seems opposite. I actually found it quite difficult and counter intuitive to read through the comments on that post to follow the story as it unfolded. Scrolling upwards on a post is just plain weird. On more popular posts, readers tend to complain when the list of comments grows beyond a certain number and they loose the forest for the trees. The TechCrunch comment threads are simply useless if you want to follow any part of the discussion and I tend to just read the highlighted ones from Michael or the other authors. On the other hand, comment reply threads are unwieldy, take up too much space and somehow fail to mirror forum discussions. Alternatively, outsourcing comments to a third party is just not an elegant or attractive solution for most people.

I feel that commenting systems on blogs need to evolve some more. Some blogs have decided to spin off comments to forums. Others have moved their comments to external services such as Disqus. Yet others like TechCrunch move comments to a linked forum for further discussion after the post has become somewhat stale.

What do forums have that comment threads on blogs do not? Are paged comments a good idea? Should comments threads be pruned by type? Are you more willing to participate in a forum discussion than post a comment on a blog? If that is the case, how could we enhance commenting on blogs to mimic the reader involvement of forums?

I don’t think there is a single right answer. However, I do consider our readers’ comments to be the lifeline of our blogs and shy away from shipping them off elsewhere. That being said, Disqus and Intense Debate have the right idea but the execution takes away from blog ownership. Comment editing and tagging, and comment to post and comment to commenter relationships need a lot more TLC if comments are to become as ubiquitous and as widely used as forum posts. Gravatars go a long way in bringing those relationships closer to a global audience but more needs to be done.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the present state of comments in the blogosphere. Did you come across a commenting system that bridges some of these gaps? Was there some feature that stuck with you or made you go Hmmm? What would make commenting less of a hurdle for you?

This post is not written by me but is reproduced, with permission, from a post in the Weblog Tools Collection News Forums. It was written by Weathervane. Since  Frank has downloaded 530 plus plugins, and most of his thoughts are well expressed and documented, this post might trigger some good conversation. Please chime in.

As a new WordPress blogger, I wanted to customize my installation, so I began a review of the available plugins. My first installation of WordPress was version 2.3.1. Because this version was a significant change, there was a list of v2.3.1-compatible plugins, of which I downloaded and tried most of them.

Since then, I’ve downloaded 530± plugins (this was what’s left after deleting extensions of commercial services), and tried/tested most of them. Five-hundred± is an incredible number and rivals, I think, Photoshop actions or plugins—and there are lots of those. The WordPress plugins community is impressively prolific.

Whenever I’ve had a problem with a plugin, I’ve added a text file to the plugin’s folder. (If it was a “Fatal Error,” “Warning,” SQL error, etc., I’ve pasted the error in the file.) Then I’ve gone to the author’s site and added a comment telling them about the error, including my version information for WordPress, MySQL, PHP, server, and browser. (I’ve frequently heard back from the author with their help.)

About blog comments for plugin pages: It sure is nice to have lots of comments but there are two issues that make them tedious when they’re about a technical issue: trackbacks, praise.

Maybe praise could be responded to with a thanks and deleted; it just clutters the list when you’re also using the comments for technical support. We have to scan through all that before we find answers. If we can find the answer, we won’t waste your time duplicating a question you’ve answered, and being disappointed when you don’t respond. (How ’bout using a rating plugin so visitors can leave behind evidence of their appreciation.)

Those trackbacks/pingbacks are the most unusable gibberish. “[…] blah blah, yada yada […]” makes no sense to the average person. (Developers/engineers talking amongst each other has been an obstacle for computer users since the microcomputer was popularized by the IBM PC and the Apple.) I understand that authors want traffic to their site but it’s just as easy to do by adding your URL to your comment entry—most comment forms have a “your Web site” input.

Your blog should be as creative as you want it to be when it’s blogging but it needs some standardizing when it’s about technical content, like plugins. A lot of plugin authors are already good about how they prepare their downloads. Establishing a standard, however, is mostly for the user. Below is a short list of recommendations for plugin standards—from a user’s point-of-view.

Naming Conventions

1. Do not append your WordPress plugins with “wp-“ or “wp_.” We know it’s for WordPress, it was in your description. Use an evocative name even if it’s only “joe’s-.“ It’s not just you. When ASP was popular, everything (it seemed) was called asp this and asp that (as in asp calendar, asp blog, asp faq, and on and on).
2. Tell us where we’ll find your plugin access. If your plugin options are in the Admin Area under Options, say so.
3. Don’t create an Admin. Area menu item. Your plugin access has a home in Options or Management or within the other existing Admin. Area menu items.
4. Do not add your plugin access in an unexpected Admin. Area menu item, such as a Plugins submenu item.

Operations Convention:

1. It would help us if authors would either agree to include update notice capability in their plugins or let us know if it does not have it. This way we can schedule to occasionally visit their site’s plugin page.
2. It would be a great help if plugins were always updated and tested in the latest version of WordPress. Too often a plugin is said to be compatible with version 2 or higher but activating it in version 2.3 or higher fails.
3. Clearly state any conditions required for your plugin. Some plugins must be in their own folder (even if it’s only a one-page plugin); state if the folder must be named the way you provided it in your download file. Also state whether or not a one-page plugin can be renamed.
4. Clearly state—in user language—what we need to do to get your plugin result. Please don’t say, “Place the if (function_exists(’timeofdeath’)) {timeofdeath(); } function on your page.” We’re not savvy enough to know that what you actually want us to put in the page is <?php if (function_exists(’timeofdeath’)) {timeofdeath(); } ?>.
   And let us know where in our template to insert your function. An instruction such as, “Once it’s activated in WordPress, you can call it from your WordPress template using the yada_yada() function” is unhelpful to the untutored.
5. If the operation of a plugin is theme-dependant, how will we know that? There seem to be a lot of questions (usually as comments in the plugin’s page) whose answer relates to the blogger’s theme. Can the author can help us identify what needs to be in our theme/template for the plugin to work?
6. I’ve begun to learn enough PHP to appreciate the value of “if (function_exists ….” That helps to gracefully fail the function if something’s happened to the function.
7. If your plugin requires a Key or API or database file (for your IP-related plugin), as you know the URL to get one could you include the URL? We can go hunting around, say Google, until we find the Google Map API but it would be thoughtful to include that URL.

Structural Conventions:

1. Have a unified file set for your plugin. You may have instructions at your plugin page but including a readme file and a link file in your download helps.
2. The structure of the download file really helps us identify the nature of your plugin files and how to install them:
   * If your plugin is only one file then put it in a subfolder called “plugins.” Everything else should be in the root folder. When your plugin download is uncompressed we’d have a folder with your readme, a URL shortcut, and any screen capture files. Within this folder is a second folder called /plugins containing your plugin file. * If your plugin has multiple files, then instead of /plugins, your folder would have an expressive name. It would help if the name of the subfolder was the same as the name we’re going to see listed in the Admin Area Plugins list.

   * Now for the biggie: Some plugins have files that go into multiple folders (/plugins, with others going elsewhere, like /wp-admin). The plugin could uncompress to a folder called /installation with two folders in it: /wp-admin and /wp-includes/plugins, containing their respective files—or something like that. With this structure I only have to drop the folders in /installation into my WordPress folder and it’s done.

3. It would help us users if readme files contained a standard set of topics:

• Plugin name (as we’ll see it in the Plugins listing)
• Plugin version
• Plugin URL
• Demo URL(s)
• Author
• Author’s URL
• Author’s email or contact page URL
• WP Version compatibility
• System requirement(s)
• Description
• Features
• Release notes (what you’ve changed since the last version)
• Screen capture description(s) (if you included captures)
• Installation instructions (including structural requirements, if any)
• Configuration options (including where to find the option/management form(s)
• Usage (function parameters, with output examples if practical)
• Donation URL (if you’ve got one)

If these topics are clearly written, there’s no need for a FAQ.

Nice Gestures

1. User testing. In business, there’s User Requirements Testing (URT). The people who commissioned the work test the application to ensure it meets the application flow they described in their requirements. There is another testing format that seems to have disappeared from the corporation, let’s call it Real Time Testing (RTT). I wrote about my experience with a plugin I really liked, Thinking It Through: The DG Review Site Plugin. I wish the author had given the plugin to a non-coder, blogger friend to try-out. The plugin’s a real nice idea but ….
2. If you include images that you made using software that stores it’s originals in a specific format—like Photoshop, Illustrator—include them so we can customize them for our site design.
3. We should maintain a list of existing plugin names, so that authors won’t duplicate plugin names. Microsoft did this a long time ago for various Windows objects/components. It cuts-out confusion.
4. Someday, it would be nice if the WordPress would focus on plugins. Say, something that assists in installing them. A Manage or Options submenu, with a browse button to select the file or the folder to be added to /plugins. It would require some thinking but the WordPress people are pretty good thinkers.
5. You should be using your plugin on your site, if for no other reason than to show us it works—it gives us courage. If your plugin page says, There’s an example of my plugin running in my sidebar, then have it running there. Occasionally check your plugin page to see that everything is up-to-date and correct.

Admittedly, this must seem ungrateful of me. Authors took the time to code, freely offered their work, and I’m suggesting a little more work. I think some standards would cut-down blogger frustration, requests for help, and give us all more time for blogging (or coding).

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.

More appropriately, does Techmeme Leaderboard threaten Technorati’s Pop Blogs? Technorati’s descension from their once heralded position has not been lost on me. I think this might be the death knell but I do not understand the point behind the other observations. In reading through the commentary, it seems that everyone agrees that Technorati is on the chopping block but the people that were on Technorati’s Pop list and not on the Techmeme Leaderboard have a more negative take on the new product.

The epitaphs levelled at Technorati range from “Attacking Technorati’s Stronghold” to the new bandwagon of “Techmeme list heralds the death of blogging“. Duncan claims that taken in context, this means that “ … New verticals (are) on the way“. You can follow the rest of the conversation on Techmeme.
The primary theme of all this diatribe is that multiple author blogs have better coverage, content and attention and that old media such as newspapers and magazines dominate the new list. If a blog rises to the level of content assimilation and dissemination as TechCrunch or ReadWrite Web, it will become more than what a single person can handle. I would expect them to have more than one person help source, gather and pontificate on the information since otherwise they would lose their edge. Its a no brainer. I would assume that highly successful single person blogs also have back end support people who are not publishing articles directly. The more (useful) people you have, the more ground you can cover and the less thin you spread your quality time and the better your blog reads to your audience. If your blog is about a singular purpose and much of the content is self motivated, you might be in a better position to run single handedly but then you do not list on “hot news” lists such as the Techmeme Leaderboard. I am not sure this emergent conversation is saying anything that we did not already know. If you have a team of seasoned publishing professionals, you will have more content, better content and more eyeballs than if you do it yourself. However, how does this reduce the power or the propensity of single person blogs? We can beat this horse till the cows come home and sniff the glue but remember the long tail? (too many idioms in one sentence, I know)

Oh, and since I have made the trademark mistake myself in the past, I would like to point out that it is Techmeme and not TechMeme, however 2.0 the second version looks.

11 Jobs: I was writing an article/paper on social media and blogger jobs and by some unknown quirk of fate, I decided to search Monster for jobs with the word “blogger” in the title. It returned 11 jobs (!?!!?). The number of results left me dumbfounded. Is corporate America really that naiive? Is blogging still a fad that cool CEOs just happen to do when they feel like berating their closest competitor? Is blogging a niche that only matters if you happen to be in an industry that directly benefits from it? Are we, as a community of bloggers, doing enough to tell the corporate world that blogging is important, useful and finally a very powerful and personal means of communicating directly with your customers? I believe that much of corporate America still thinks that blogging and bloggers provide a slight competitive advantage and nothing more. There are some people making an independant (spelled entrepreneurial) living on blogging but I think the benefits are lost in translation.

I break because I know that there are many important blogs in the blogosphere. Some of these get the requisite amount of interest and attention that they deserve from their corporate beneficiaries. However, when will it become important to recruit talented folks that can help those important blogs become that much better or start a new blog to communicate real intent and direction to their customers? When will corporate America realize that a good blogger is just as much of a catch as a good programmer or a fine marketing exec?

Blogging is mainstream, folks. Wake up and smell the eyeballs and opinions. Your company will be that much better for it.

How to Design Your Own Minimalist Wordpress Theme: Here’s a simple trick* for creating your very own minimalist Wordpress themes, as discussed endlessly by Diggers. First, download and install your chosen theme from any of the various Wordpress theme sites. Next, accidentally on purpose delete the themes image folder. View your blog with all of the theme’s original images missing. Interesting thought.

I love bloggers, they are very good people. But even the most kind hearted and best intentioned bloggers sometimes either misinterpret or misread information and the piece ends up very different from where it started its life. This somewhat macabre movement of information from one person to other with slight mutilations is very interesting to me. All of us have studied or read about it in one form or fashion.

Now here is the idea for the meme: Read through the following news paragraph and recreate a post on your blog from memory if you will. Encourage your readers to do the same with a link back to your post.

Now, imagine throwing video into that mix. By the time I got the headphones on and the video downloaded, I’d be on to designing some new feature (or, more likely, answering more email). I’d only get to hear three words at a time, which just doesn’t seem very satisfying. I can sometimes have podcasts on the in the background, and those are easy to download and listen to at the gym. (I have a working shuffle! I can once again listen to things while I work out! And I can still do email at the same time.) But videos? I realize this is my own personal shortcoming, my short attention span that accelerates my multitasking tendencies, but why can’t all videos come with transcripts, like closed captioning for those of us with attention deficits? (I realize also this wouldn’t work so well with videos of cute jumping cats.)

I would love to read the third (or fourth and so on) reiteration of this paragraph.

Notwithstanding the results of this experiment, these human failings are just the reason us bloggers (and any media outlet for that matter) should pay very close attention to the originator of a thought or discussion and read the language and details quite closely before jumping to conclusions. We should be even more careful in reiterating these thoughts in our own words and make sure we link to the originator so their viewpoint is preserved and readers have the option of checking with them.

When the news or topic is hot, it is easy to fall into the trap of jumping on the bandwagon (first to market is a slippery slope, remember webvan?) but I think we owe it to ourselves and our readers to look closely.

Thanks to posts here on WLTC and around the blogosphere, the topic of “sponsored themes” is at the top of everyone’s minds. I thought this would be a good time to share my thoughts on the ramifications of sponsored themes, and what it means for our community.

For those who are new to the topic, in the past yew years a market has developed around advertisers that pay money to websites to have plain-text links back to their properties so they can rank better in search engines like Google for the text in those links. At some point the people gaming Google realized instead of buying links from dozens of individual sites, they could pay theme authors to bundle their links with their download and get hundreds or thousands of sites with their link for a small fraction of the cost. This is politely referred to as “theme sponsorship.”

Sometimes theme authors do this without telling their users it’s a sponsored theme before download, or use CSS or PHP tricks to hide the links or other ads in the template so most people will either never notice or not know how to remove the ads. I’m not going to talk about these folks, because they’re obviously unethical and should be banned in every way possible.

However there is another class of themes that disclose up front they’re sponsored, and generally appear on the up and up — what about those? I think there are three main issues we need to keep in mind:

1. Google penalizes sites that promote things Google considers spam. Because of the trend of paid links, even on respected sites, Google has publicly stated that they have taken measures to diminish the effect of these links by lessening the value of where they’re coming from. I don’t claim to know their internal rankings, but I believe this is related in some way to Trustrank — if you link to untrustworthy places your Trustrank goes down. (Just like if you kept recommending crappy movies to your friends they’d stop taking your advice.) I’d be the last to recommend any of us should tailor what we do to please Google or any other search engine, but at least on my blog it accounts for 60% or more of my traffic, so I’d rather stay on their good side. Once someone understands the ramifications they are welcome to make a link ad decision for their own site, but it bothers me when theme authors are making the decision for others.
2. Many users of WordPress probably don’t understand the above point or are not able to properly modify their templates to remove the bundled ad if they did. In fact, the economics of theme “sponsorship” depends on most site owners not touching the link. When advertising or something else unwanted is bundled with a desktop application and relies on most users not removing it we have a word for it — adware. (Sometimes malware.) It’s not illegal, and it’s certainly one way for software authors to get paid for their work, but it’s ultimately disrespectful toward the user and reputable download directories like Download.com ban it.
3. Finally many of these themes try to legally disallow you from removing the advertising link by claiming it’s part of the Creative Commons attribution to leave it. This is almost funny, because these themes are on shaky legal ground themselves. WordPress is Free, meaning you’re free to do pretty much anything you like with it. It’s under a license that encourages user freedom called the GPL, which says if you distribute something that links internal functions and data structures of a GPL program (like themes do with WordPress) that also needs to be Free. At best, theme authors claiming you can’t remove the link are ignoring or ignorant of the license issues, at worst they’re actively exploiting the work of thousands of volunteers that have poured their blood, sweat, and tears into WordPress.

There are other issues, such as a proclivity of some ad-bundled theme designers to value quantity over quality, but I don’t think those are as important.

Themes with bundled and embedded advertising will always exist, and it’s perfectly within the rights of the GPL for people to create them and even sell them. I also bear no ill-will toward theme authors who’ve succumbed to the attraction of the money, I disagree with their decision but people make mistakes and it’s not a personal thing. However as a community we should decide whether the slippery slope of bundled advertising is a behaviour we want to encourage and promote on our official resources such as WordPress.org and the Codex, and even on community hubs like Weblog Tools Collection.

I’ve seen some designers claim if we discourage bundled advertising with themes we’re taking away their livelihood and saying they should work for free. (Conveniently ignoring the fact that WordPress was built “for free.”) However just because you can make money from something doesn’t mean you should. Something doesn’t have to be illegal for it to be wrong. There are more important things in life. At every conference I go to I meet dozens of people who make their living with WordPress and manage to do so in a way that doesn’t exploit users or cross ethical lines, so I find it hard to believe that the lack of sponsored themes will hurt the WordPress ecosystem. Authors could also monetize their own sites with ads, instead of putting them on yours.

Finally, no one is forcing these people to make themes. In fact I would posit that it’s better not to release anything at all than to release a sponsored theme. Our design and theme community thrived before themes with embedded ads came along, and it will continue to thrive long after their gone. Embedding ads in themes is disrespectful to users, and creates confusion and uncertainty about which themes people can trust.

Two years ago I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life when I made a decision to accept a “sponsorship” on WordPress.org without considering the ramifications it would have for its users, our community, and the web as a whole. It pains me to see others going down a similar path. We should think about how these people are trying to exploit the WordPress community and good name instead of looking the other way because they’re paying.

Once you’ve had time to mull over the social and ethical issues of ad-bundled themes, I encourage you to vote on this WordPress Idea to remove sponsored themes from WordPress.org, rating it 5 if you agree and 1 if you don’t. Thanks for your time, and happy blogging.

My primary responsibility out here at Weblog Tools Collection is to keep a close eye on WordPress plugin and theme releases.

One of the places I check regularly for theme releases is the WordPress Theme Viewer. I also keep track of updates via Google Alerts and more importantly our News section.

I’ve lost track of the number of themes that I have downloaded, read about and previewed.

While doing this, I have observed several different methods of promotion and distribution of themes by their authors; some highly effective and some so bad that I have had no option but to ignore the release.

This WordPress Codex page has an indepth explanation on starting off with themes for public release to promoting them and is a recommended read.

In this post I hope to address a few points that every theme author should consider when releasing a public theme.

The Theme Page

What use is a theme if nobody knows where to get it from? One of the most important elements in marketing your theme is a static page devoted to it.

I’ve seen a lot of theme authors have a single page which will list all their themes. It’s good if you have a single, but what if you release two, or maybe five or maybe fifty?

Do you want your visitor to download your theme quickly or search through the list to find it?

One practice I follow is to make a seperate page for each theme and plugin I create.

Contents of a Theme page

The theme page could contain the following:

1. Short description of the theme
2. Features
3. Screenshot or a Link to a live preview (I prefer the latter)
4. Download Link
5. Changelog
6. Known Bugs
7. Things you can do with the theme. This should preferably be a list of links to different posts that explain in detail
8. Support Information. Make sure you specify how a theme user should contact you if you are offering support. If you are not, make this clear.

How a theme page helps

For one, it provides a quick and easy way for people to link to your theme, find the theme etc.
It also works well with search engines as it normally becomes the top result if someone is searching for your theme.

Additionally, the page is timeless, unlike posts, especially if you have a permalink structure with the date in it.

Individual Posts

As I mentioned above, the theme should be on a static page. However, you should use individual posts to market the theme.

Posts should be used for theme releases and updates. It should also be used to highlight things you can do with the theme, e.g. if your theme has a custom header image support, then a post explaining how to change the header will be in order.

Posts also appear in your feeds by default and if someone is subscribed, he/she will be able to keep track of your development.

Effectively using the WordPress Theme Viewer

The Theme Viewer should be the first place where you should be getting your theme listed. It’s one place many people, including us at WLTC, track new themes.

However, this should not be your only place. The theme page belongs to your blog, not to some other site.

Another point I noticed with the theme viewer is that though you get a link back to your site, you don’t have a link to your theme page. However, they do allow you HTML in the post.

When writing a description, include the name of your theme and link that to the theme page you created. Also, a good detailed description with features works well, especially for those reading via RSS where categories are not visible.

Make the contents of your theme clear

I’ve recently been reading about the controversy surrounding sponsored links in a theme. While some authors are for this, others are against.
Hence, if you are including paid links into the footer, make it clear to those who are downloading that these are present. Also make it clear if you need them to be there, because if you have an open license, the user is free to modify your theme and remove these links.

While you don’t have to account for each and every file in your theme folder, it helps if you have an explanation for a few critical ones. e.g. if you have an Archives template, let your visitor know.

Summary

To sum up:

• Create a page for your theme
• Use individual posts for theme updates and other information related to your theme
• Use the Theme Viewer effectively
• Make the contents of your theme clear

Do you have any other tips that you would like to share?
If you are a theme author, what have you done to effectively spread the word about your theme. Have you posted your theme in our News forum?

After much deliberation and tallying, here are the winners of the Blogging Essay Competition from Weblogtoolscollection.com

First Prize of $150 goes to The Private Intellectual for the essay Re-thinking Weblog Advertising.

Second Prize of $50 goes to Bes Zain for the essay Importance of Transparency in Blogging

An honorable mention goes to Ronald Huereca for the essay Things you should avoid blogging about for attracting the most attention in the competition. His entry was viewed well over 5000 times.

Congratulations to the winners.  All the entries were superb. I will email the winners seperately. Thanks to everyone for participating and for helping to rate the essays.

This is the Twenty Fifth entry in The Blogging Essay Contest from WeblogToolsCollection.com If you would like to participate, please email me your entry at mark at wltc dot net. Please rate this article using the star system below. The competition will be judged primarily on the input from readers like you. Thank you.

This is written by Bes Zain

Online users prefer sticking around sites which are written by people with clear intentions. Online users also like it when blog authors express things transparently. Being transparent on the web is vital for a site to succeed. When you are open to your users about yourself and your site, you will gain more trust from people visiting your site compared to if you made yourself and your site anonymous. You must practise and master the art of transparency in some area of your choice on your site if you want your site and your blogging to succeed.

What does practicing transparency mean?

Being transparent on the web is the same as being transparent regarding certain things with people in real life. Tony Hung on Problogger says that transparency “means that no matter what the blog is about, the readers know what they’re getting into.” Mentioning your personal details on the web is still considered a taboo by most people. While personal information should be kept private in many cases, giving users extra information that lets them know who they are indirectly interacting with is an excellent step towards establishing your credibility and making your blog better. Here I present to you some explanation of transparency by showing you how a company and an individual deal with transparency through a site and a blog respectively, and how I try to deal with transparency through different ways.

How a company website can show transparency

Any site on the internet can use the power of transparency to gain loyalty and trust. Whatever a site maybe about, the more information it gives to readers about the nature of the content offered, the better. Take Agloco as an example. It is run by the same founders who ran AllAdvantage. AllAdvantage became popular in 1999 because it paid online users to view ads. It closed in 2001 because of not earning enough money. Agloco explains this on its new site with details about the past and how the new model is more stable. This comparison is a form of transparency, where a company mentions the bad things that happened before and explains the current plans in order to regain any broken trust from previous users. This way, users can know about the risks involved when using such a service. Simply visit http://www.Agloco.com directly.

How individuals can practise transparency on blogs

In addition to content, it is sometimes important to make the online personality of an author transparent. When people read great content, they wonder about the author. The author, whether a single person or a company, becomes associated with the content in the minds of the readers. If users can trust the author, they will try to read more things written by that author. Darren Rowse is an example of presenting yourself transparently. The ProBlogger author talks about how much he earns from different advertising mediums and also about his personal life from time to time on his website. Users see Darren as someone who is willing to share something personal from his life which results in users associating his site with quality content and Darren himself with credibility. Because of this, Darren is trusted since users know who and what they are dealing with when they visit his blog.

John Chow recently launched a linkback campaign where a MiniTV USB was offered as a prize along with a linkback to anyone writing a review of his site. The review could be either good or back, and John explained in his post how this would benefit both his site and the site of the reviewer. This is transparency, where the users know exactly what the blogger aims to gain from the blog and what the blogger aims to give back to the users via the blog. The contest is now over at JohnChow.com and John is still offering linkbacks, so I thought of using this as an opportunity to use his site as an example of transparency on blogs and as a small review also.

My attempt at transparency

When you are doing something via your site that the users may not be aware of, it is best to explain things that may not be obvious. Take the Amazon links on my site as an example. Almost all of my Amazon.com links [except the one mentioned in this paragraph] have a referral id in them which allows me to earn referral commission from Amazon purchases by readers like you. This is stated in my About page also. Take this very post as a second example for this. I stated clearly earlier in this post how one of the links contained a referral id for Agloco while the other did not, and I did that on purpose to convey this example. Similarly, stating my intentions behind reviewing John Chow’s site while using it as an example for my post at the same time is my attempt at making this very post as much transparent as possible.

Just like in real life, when people know more details about a person online, they tend to interact with that person more comfortably. I have noticed on my site that people contact me more when they know something about my site or myself compared to when they do not know anything about me or my site. Being anonymous is nice, but just like in real life, you must open up some part of yourself, directly or indirectly, or else risk alienating yourself from the world. Am I good at being transparent? No. I am still learning everyday on how to be more transparent and how to open up some parts of my personal life for the benefit of my site readers, and how to keep certain parts only to myself as I do in real life.

My conclusion : be transparent about relevant things

You do not have to be completely transparent on your site about everything related to you, specially when some things are not related to your site. While a reader may be interested in knowing who a site owner is, they will not be expecting to know everything there is to know about that site owner. Be transparent and be mysterious. Refrain from mentioning unnecessary details. Stick to the point and convey the point so well that the users know everything that is to know about the nature your site and the message conveyed through it.

Regardless of the nature of your site, users will trust you if they notice that you are willing to share something interesting with them. The more open you are about relevant things, the more trust you will get from your users. Transparency online is a good thing. The more transparent you are about yourself and your intentions on the web, the more respect and loyalty you will gain from your fellow blog visitors.

This is the Twenty Fourth entry in The Blogging Essay Contest from WeblogToolsCollection.com If you would like to participate, please email me your entry at mark at wltc dot net. Please rate this article using the star system below. The competition will be judged primarily on the input from readers like you. Thank you.

This is written by Sreejith Ramakrishnan

When I refer to this statement I’m talking about the westernised version of karma other than the traditional Indian word. Here, karma refers to the “do good things and get good things” approach. Before starting off on this topic, read through the lines which follow, and feel the difference between an idealised world and the real world. So, here goes a little recap about blogging.Many of you may feel that this is just article about the evolution of blogging. But, the point is that, reading this would help you conceive the theory.

Blogging evolved as a medium or platform for expressing opinions and circulating news. Within a short period of time, blogging has achieved “world domination” through it’s simplicity and power. Anyone, from teenagers to professionals, can be a journalist. They can publish and popularise their views, in their small corner of the blogosphere. This led to immense changes in the whole “feel” of the internet. Blogs became more and more common and it increased exponentially.

Search engines whetted their appetite on the rich content from blogs and blogs became “a search engine’s best friend”. But trust me, this is a much idealised description of what is going on. People, who knew the power of blogs and the advantage it had, over traditional websites, began to switch to blogs and started practising a lot of “tricks” to get attention. These tricks, eventually, became “parts” of blogging success.

Us bloggers started to manipulate the blogosphere. We started to steal content through RSS syndicated feeds and popularised it using bad SEO. We blended Ads with the page layout to rip off ignorant visitors. We, literally, sold our own views, through article directories.

But why ? Why should we be cheating, when we are already given equal possibilities ? Don’t you think we are competing on unfair grounds ? Well, we are. Some may think: “Dude, that’s the way it is. How am I supposed to make a difference?”. But, the fact is that, we can make a difference !! How ? By “blogging for karma”. You may ask: “Hey, you new age hippie freak, how are you supposed to do that ?

It’s easy. Do good things and get good things. That’s all. So, how to do good things ? Well, writing good articles which would help a lot of people from some kind of problem is a good thing. Just think of it like this : You’re helping out a lot of people who are in need of help. All for free !! So, you’re doing a big favour. And what do you get in return ? That’s the best part !!

When you blog for those of people, you’re actually helping them a lot of hours of struggling. So, when you write good content, obviously, people like it and you get “good karma”. Now, this “good karma” is going to be really helpful in the long run. When people like your content, they come for more and more of it. Thus, increasing your traffic.

Gradually, they become loyal to you. They will start trusting and respecting your opinions. They will recommend your blog to other people so that more people come to your site and feast on your content, thus leaving more good karma. And, as long as you keep doing this, you get more karma and this my friend, goes on and on !! And many a times, people may think your content is worth some bucks and may leave you some donation, that you actually deserve.

Gradually, search engines will also start trusting you, because of the traffic patterns to your site, and you will get ranked higher in SERP (Search Engine Rank Pages). After a long time, you evolve to become an “authority” in your topic, all because people trust you. And, the other “big guys” out there will say : “Hmm…who’s this new kid in town ?”. And HURRAY, you’re in their club !! You’re a blogging celebrity !!

But remember, all this comes from just one little concept: “Blogging is karma”. Though it may take a lot of time and effort to practise it, it is still worth it. Of course, karma isn’t the only road to success. But, this concept leaves long time results which can stretch to a lifetime of blogging success.