But our little blog gets a lot of attention from spammers. We are listed on web pages that pin point nofollow blogs for spamming, splogs regularly repost our content and send us trackbacks and well disguised comments are often adorned with links to completely unrelated sites. Moderating comments takes a lot of effort from all of us (we are working on making this process simpler, stay tuned) and even then, some weirdness and mistakes slip past us. We have recently started noticing a lot of comments that seem mildly relevant but link to SEO sites or completely unrelated content that keeps changing.

Do you change your commenters’ URI often when posting comments? Are you under the impression that leaving comments with different links will give those links more exposure? Do you use Short URLs to get around comment spam restrictions? More importantly, how many of you force yourself to comment to just spread your links around? Have you ever left a comment just to increase your comment count? Are you an SEO professional who regularly comments on blogs for SEO purposes? You might be doing yourself (and us) more harm than good.

While we try our best to allow any and all relevant comments to be posted, we do actively remove suspicious comments. We make spam/spammer judgment calls every day, but spam is annoying and nasty and in my opinion, spam is like a leech that sucks off the goodness and leaves the host with nothing in return. It often clogs up the conversation and reduces relevancy. Just look at the latest comments on any old(er) blog with a popular post that has not been pruned and taken care of.

We do however, actively promote, reward and encourage passionate comments. If you feel that we have missed a comment that should have been posted, please contact us. However, if you are changing your link on every comment and linking to various websites around the internet who have paid you for your SEO services, please do not send us an email asking us to approve them. Mostly, dont be evil and smug!

How do you treat suspicious comments that have not been caught by Akismet? We manually visit every comment waiting for moderation and actively remove suspicious comments and any older ones that might be related. It takes time but it is worth it.

How do you reward your commenters? We use Highlight Author Comments and hacked up versions of various plugins for heuristics.

Do you import comments from other places on the web? No. We do not import comments from anywhere. The conversation is much more focused and we concentrate on quality versus quantity. We hope that our content, subject and demeanor encourage and crystallize commenting and participation. Other conversations about our posts on apps such as Digg, StumbleUpon and Twitter add nothing but noise wherein the real conversation in live comments get drowned out. I used to think that Trackbacks belonged in the comment flow. I have since changed my opinion after dealing with some posts with hundreds of comments.

Do you turn off comments on old posts? No. Old posts are gems. Conversations can get started on old topics and need to be allowed.

What do you do?

The act of adopting an abandoned plugin reminds me of adopting an orphaned child. On the one hand, the new parents are taking on someone who they didn’t help raise thus far, which forces them to “learn” the ways of the new child to communicate well with them. On the other hand, the new parent is left with the fear that there will come a day that the old parent will come to claim their rights on the child.

The analogy I brought can go some way in building an intuition about the problem of orphaned plugins, but if we want to go beyond just intuition we need to take a more in-depth look at the subject. I hope such a look will inspire a discussion that will benefit us all.

The chase for a faster plugin installation

My prime example for an orphan plugin for this post will be the “Improved Plugin Installation” plugin. What is it:

This plugin is an improvement to the current WP 2.7 plugin installation methods. It allows you to install one or more plugins simply by typing their names or download URLs in a textarea.
This means you can install all your favorite WordPress plugins in one go!
Furthermore, a bookmarklet is included which lets you install plugins directly from an external plugin download page. (See screenshots tab)

Sounds heavenly. Why? because the “add a plugin” feature that Automattic introduced, And the already existing, “One Click Plugin Updater” – where both lacking in exactly what “Improved Plugin Installation” came to solve. That is – they didn’t allow for a massive, fast, easy way to upload a lot of (predefined) plugins in one time. This is, to my opinion, the biggest cost effective solution for a bottleneck in today’s WordPress installation, and it was solved! Or was it?

After the release of WP 2.8, me and others suddenly discovered that “Improved Plugin Installation” stopped working. 5 Months later, after seeing that no programmer came forward to fix the problem, I published the cry on the forums “An orphan plugin is looking to be updated: “Improved Plugin Installation” “, 5 days have passed, and no one replied.

So what do you think should happen next?

This question is directed at you, the reader. But with your permission, I will assume my prerogative.

The first one is that there is a need for someone (who knows plugin programming) to take on himself to fix “Improved Plugin Installation” for WordPress 2.8+. This conclusion is the easy one.

The bigger question here is what is the pattern behind the story. What is missing in our community that we do not adopt orphaned plugins? My personal answer (and I hope for yours as well) is the further improvement of the “Compatibility” section in the WordPress Plugin Directory.
Up until now the Compatibility window gave an action item for just two audiences: The plugin users (don’t download the file) and the plugin authors (Maybe I should fix my plugin). But there is a third audience who are not being addressed. That is the other developers in the community. Imagine that a plugin is voted incompatible (above X consensus level), for T amount of time. I hope that there is a system e-mailing the plugin author letting him know that his plugin is having issues (I don’t know if there is). But what if the problem persists longer? Maybe we should have another page, for other developers to let them know that a plugin is suspect of being abandoned.
Maybe developers should commit, when uploading a plugin, to saying after what amount of time, should the system consider their plugin as an orphaned one – and to go look for someone else to be its parent.

I don’t have the right answer, but I hope one of you will.

About the author:
Tal Galili is passionate for WebActivism, WordPress and Statistics. He was proud to have helped with the organizing of WordCamp Israel 2007 and WordCamp Israel 2008, and is hoping to see another one in 2010. Tal Galili writes (about the web and beyond) in Hebrew, and will start writing (on statistics) in English at Statistics and R

In addition to the above suggestions, I would like to add a few of my own. Please feel free to add others in the comments.

• Make your titles short, sweet and eye catching. Long titles lose their punch.
• Proof read. As Michelle says so well, write for yourself and then edit for your readers.
• Don’t be afraid to type it out and read it aloud. Sometimes a blank slate can be vanquished with a quick swipe of the brush.
• Punctuate and format. Big blocks of text are easy to gloss over and lose interest in.

How much time do you spend on average, on writing a post?

• Lloyd’s analysis on GPL and themes
• Daniel’s view from the other side of the fence (be sure to read through the comments, there is a lot of wisdom there)
• WPTavern’s forum post on the blog dev blog post and the forum post(s) leading up to it
• Brian Gardner wants the community to move on
• Other miscellaneous posts on the issue

I am a huge proponent of the GPL and consider it to be one of the primary pillars of WordPress, both as a piece of software, and as a community. This debate has, from time to time, devolved into whether the GPL is a valuable licensing schema for software such as WordPress. I have seen/read quite persuasive arguments on why a more liberal IP licensing could be beneficial for the community and for the software. But in all of this debate and conjecture, I could not help thinking about how it would affect one group of people. Our users.

I help make “business happen with software” at my day job. My team supports a couple of hundred thousand users in helping them perform mundane (to them) tasks. We also try to help our small company cope with the technology needs of a cutting edge industry and compete on that edge with corporations that have IT budgets that parallel our company’s entire revenue. We are so small and so busy that as long as we are complying with the licensing of a particular piece of software, we are good to roll. We use GPL software, we use proprietary software, we use CC licensed software, we use Apache licensed software and everything in between. The funny thing is that our users could care less what we use, as long as they can do what they want to do without having to call the help desk or spend too much time doing it. That is exactly where WordPress proudly shines like the Sun.

Matt’s vision for WordPress is to make it invisible, to help its users do what they do best without having a single thought about the tool they are using. To that goal, the GPL has no effect except for circumstantial reasons. The creators would also like the software to be freely available to anyone, for any purpose. The software should be open to modifications and freely distributable at no cost and without permission from the creators. The software should be extensible in so much that the core code does not have to be modified for cursory changes. The GPL as linked with WordPress, has unequivocally helped WordPress and its community get where it is today. It is not the only thing WordPress has going for it (thankfully), but it certainly is here to stay and has proven itself over and over again for us. It is just a licensing schema that bolsters the core philosophies of the people behind the code and helps them accomplish their goals with the software, get “business to happen” so to speak.

In all of our vacillations, are we getting away from our core philosophies? The freedoms that the GPL and WordPress have offered to the folks who choose to make money from WordPress, are also designed to help another, larger group of people. The people who use the software.

If in our exuberance to make everyone happy, we trip up and let our millions of users down, it would then truly be a catastrophe.

While I am not a big fan of government scrutiny and general “big brother” mentality, I do believe that this will add to the believability and authenticity of the blogging medium. We at Weblog Tools Collection try very hard to keep commercial interests completely out of the content that we generate and only rely on what we consider to be ethical ads to make ends meet. We also follow a strict full disclosure policy.

Bloggers who have regularly received freebies in the past and/or write reviews of products that they then received in lieu of the review (I was approached by a bean bag chair maker a couple of times, occasional reviewers need not care) might want to stay on top of this issue and practice full disclosure if you have not already done so. However in playing devil’s advocate, it would be very difficult to correctly identify the human behind the blogging persona without a criminal complaint and even then it might be in a legal grey area at the least (think DMCA). I am afraid that this level of scrutiny combined with general FUD might also dissuade some casual bloggers from posting reviews and reduce the general alacrity with which weekend bloggers post reviews. My thought is that the companies that offer the freebies (Lexus Automobiles?) and encourage non-disclosure should have to deal with the regulations and not the general blogging public (which is hard to enforce anyways). Techmeme has a bunch of good examples and discussion pieces.

All the transparency and legal issues aside, I think that this might be a good development if well defined and uniformly enforced. Writing reviews is a fun way to get into blogging and I would hate for things to get so formal that the casual reviewers get their hands slapped.

I am the owner of a midly popular community on Orkut with about 25k users. Since I was given the privilege of being a beta tester on Orkut, I had created a community called Calcutta many years ago and that community has since, taken on a life of its own. It is run by moderators who report to me and I log in every so often to perform maintenance and help the moderators out. My existence is not only a mystery to the members of the community, it is also the source of much speculation and conspiracy theories, which was fine and dandy.

The Orkut application itself is full of holes and though Google seems to respond to major public reports of vulnerabilities, they keep coming back. Support for Orkut from Google is almost non-existent with what appears to be zero accountability. If one plows through the Google help sections to try and solicit help, they are either faced with a page not found or convoluted help screens that barely ever actually lead to a form to request support. Pleas for help and more often answered by the “Orkut hackers” than by actual Google employees. The Orkut application is so dangerous that people do not click on any links that are not Orkut generated and even then accounts and communities are compromised all the time. Hacking scripts and techniques are easily found via a simple Google search.

Now I am just as selfish of an individual as everyone else. I barely cared about any of these issues until something bad happened to me that I needed help for. I was the target of a phishing attack on Orkut and I fell for it hook line and sinker. My Google login is associated with my Orkut login. As soon as I realized that I had just sent my username and password to a phisher (within a few seconds of me hitting enter), I changed my Google account password. But alas, the damage had already been done.

This is where things get really weird. Apparently, a group of “hackers” had taken over my Orkut profile and were making drastic changes to the Calcutta community. Emails, IMs and phone calls started to roll in and I was in full panic. I was immediately concerned that my Google account was still compromised and all my personal stuff in my email would be in jeopardy. I went into damage control mode. I changed all my authentication credentials for everything Google.My Gmail account seemed to be untouched but my Orkut account, which uses the same login credentials (I know that was my own fault), seemed to still be under rogue control.

In spite of changing my passwords multiple times, changing login names, changing email addresses and trying all authentication tricks to fix Orkut, the miscreants still regained control of my profile. Instead of falling for the FUD about viruses and worms on my computer (many well wishers who reported the problem to me suggested that I format my computer because i had a key logger that was sending my password to the hackers, completely untrue), I decided to do some research on the problem. The more I learned, the less confidence I had in Orkut and Google’s intention and/or ability to fix the problems.

Now the only reason I disclose this issue is because I have not only reported it to Orkut (and received no answer), it appears to be the same an age old vulerability and one of many similar issues that were purportedly fixed. You can recreate this at home if you please.

The Orkut application stores cookies in such a way that if your cookie is ever recreated by someone else or transmitted to someone else, they can use that cookie to log in to Orkut as you. forever. No matter how you change your credentials, you have no recourse of regaining control. So if you ever get caught in a phishing scam that sends your password to someone else and they recreate your orkut_state cookie, they can login as you forever. I will not go into the technical details but the link above discusses it. If you log into your Orkut account using Firefox, using a cookie editing plugin, look for a cookie called orkut_state and copy the contents. Then log out of Orkut. After logging out, re-add the orkut_state cookie to Firefox with the cookie editing plugin and then visit www.orkut.com You will find yourself logged back in. Now I have tried changing my password, using a different browser, using a different machine from another location and other tricks with the same cookie and I have been granted access in all cases. From my research, it appears that Orkut expires the state cookie after 1 day (other reports talk about a 14 day expiration) but that problem is easily circumvented.

So essentially, I am completely at the mercy of the people that have re-created my orkut_state cookie using my old password that I disclosed on the phishing site. I have tried to contact Orkut help, posted messages in the help groups, emailed and complained to Google, emailed and complained via the Orkut complaint forms and even tried sending messages to places that are not meant to be Orkut related. It has been over two weeks and I have yet to receive a single acknowledgment. Nothing, nada, zip.

I don’t mind telling you that it is despicable for a company like Google to run an extremely popular application with a complete lack of care for its netizens. While I acknowledge that Orkut is not the most important product that Google offers, I think Google should still stand by their product. I also acknowledge that the fact that I am in this mess is my own fault, but shouldn’t there be some recourse? Would Facebook or MySpace do the same thing? Are we all under the false hope that someone in these big companies actually cares about the people that use their products? Is the online world doomed to failure in circumstances or are we willing to make a stand only when it affects us?

Who can I contact at Google that can even pretend to help? I am NOT “negotiating” with the hackers who have control over my profile, which has also been suggested and immidiately turned down by me. Or is my community a complete loss because I made a mistake and fell for a phishing attack?

I am not sure how I feel about trusting my life’s contents to Google if this is how Google treats compromises in security.

WordPress Pumpkin by Eric Martin Displayed with permission

Let me start by saying that I am a huge proponent of backing up my blog. I put together the original WP-DB-Backup which has been enhanced and fixed through the years and is a fantastic plugin. I use it religiously combined with a couple of tricks I picked up from readers along the way. I have the plugin backup my databases everyday and email them to a “backup” gmail account. I also have filters setup in the gmail account to delete daily backups as they come in, thus managing space (gmail keeps deleted emails for 30 days). So I have a rolling 30 day backup of all my blog and all of it is automattic.

That being said, about two WordPress point releases ago, I had sat down to backup, upgrade and fix Weblog Tools Collection after the release of the major upgrade. This blog is not that big or popular but it is my baby. It has taken on a life of its own and I have mangled and modified the code in many places to do things my way. Even though the code is fun to play with, the modifications cause me huge headaches when upgrading (my own fault). So my obsession for the blog and the custom modifications combined with a large database and a complex theme structure makes upgrades harrowing to say the least. Heck Matt has goaded me to upgrade this blog many times in the past after I had failed to do so for many weeks after a release. So I have an established and documented procedure to upgrade this blog which I keep up to date with all the changes required to counter and/or fix the modified code. However, during this one upgrade, I somehow missed a crucial step. You see this blog uses a table prefix from the Cafelog days and I had forgotten to change it in the config file before uploading it. Some reader managed to run the “new” setup for the blog between me uploading the files and then going over to the admin panel to upgrade it.

I thought I had somehow lost my blog and that the original tables with my precious data in it had been replaced with fresh new ones. I remember my blood running cold and panic starting to set in. I know WordPress quite well and I know how it works. I had made a backup before I started upgrading and I had followed all the steps for the upgrade. But for a brief few minutes that Saturday morning, I was truly sweating bullets. What bothers me now is that I did not recognize the problem soon enough. It took me almost five minutes to realize what had happened and take steps to fix it. As a reminder of that day, i never deleted that set of tables and have left them intact.

What Scary Moments have you had with WordPress? What did you learn from them?

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 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?

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 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.

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.

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.