Weblog Tools Collection

Thanks for visiting! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. This blog posts regular Wordpress news, updates of themes, plugins, ideas, hacks, quick fixes and everything about blogging, especially about Wordpress. Go ahead, subscribe to our feed! You can also receive updates from this blog via email.

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?

15 Websites / Services I’d Actually Pay For Ryan lists fifteen websites/online services he would be willing to pay for, if they were not free. Worthy of note is the following in the list: Wordpress.org: The benefit of blogging with WP is so significant (SEO, functionality, flexibility) that it’s well worth paying for. I’d probably pay a $200 for an installation… which makes me realize how much I rely on the product.

This is an incredibly interesting line of thought and I am sure a lot of Web 2.0 companies/services would kill to have more user data and input on this. I strongly believe that revenue models and monetization techniques are the stuff that make or break a company in spite of the fantastic idea/concept that it might provide. In that spirit, here is my list of 12 things online (15 things were hard to find quickly) I am willing to pay for.

• GMail: Without a doubt my one most used tools online. I returned to GMail a few years ago and cannot imagine my life without it. Add other services such as Google Reader and Google (outside of google search, without which I would be completely lost, at least for a few days) is indispensable to me.
• WordPress: I would pay for it undoubtably, but I think the allure would be gone if I had to pay. Whenever I think WordPress, I think GPL and Open Source and I just cannot imagine the two apart.
• Firefox: This was a tough one. I would pay for it, but look at #2. I would however, be willing to pay for the Web Developer Toolbar extension, the colorpicker extension and a few others that I use everyday.
• Akismet: I do pay for Akismet. The service has caught 3,263,951 spam on this blog since I first installed it.
• SlickDeals: I am an addict. If I had to pay to be a member, within reason, I would pay for it.
• StatCounter: Their free service is great, but if they started charging for their basic service, the switching cost of years of accumulated data would force me to pay.
• Techmeme: Nominal, yearly charges would be fine by me, especially if it removed those sponsored posts. I use it too often.
• Skype: Again, nominal yearly charges would be acceptable for the basic PC to PC calling. I already keep my account topped off for when I call international phones once in a while.
• Craigslist: If I had to pay a small fee for the listings, if the charge was only initiated for items that are sold (which I understand would be hard to monitor), I would pay for it. Craigslist is a much better place to buy and sell everyday used items than eBay and I have made better deals via Craigslist than any other online selling venue.
• Woopra: I am getting addicted to the Woopra fever. As I have expressed in the past to JohnP, Elie and others, I would be willing to pay a reasonable fee for it.
• Various WordPress Plugins: I have paid and have dontated to the developers of various WordPress plugins that I find extremely useful and which have become completely indispensable after I have installed them and used them. They include OIOPublisher, Ozh’s Who Sees Ads, Mark’s Subscribe to Comments etc.
• Feedburner: Now another Google service but Feedburner reduces the traffic load from feed readers and I would have paid for the service if it were not free.

What would you be willing to pay for? If famous OSS programs were not OSS, would you pay for them? Does the cost of software make it less or more attractive (not the relative cost, but just the fact that it is not free)? Would you pay for Twitter? How about Flickr or Google Analytics? What if TechCrunch went to a registration model? Would it still be as popular? How much do you spend on personal online services every month today? Are online vendors sharing more of your wallet today than say, two years ago? Do you think this trend will continue to increase?

These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night.

Woopra was opened up to the world at the Dallas WordCamp where I met John for the first time. His talk was not on Woopra but he introduced it to the event in a very short, three minute spiel. Since then Woopra has generated a tremendous amount of buzz in blogging circles. In short, Woopra is a stats tool for websites that lives as an application on your desktop (among other places) and can provide live webstats on your visitors. I like it since it is fast and since the developers gave me an opportunity to look at the insides early on, I have developed quite a fondness for it. They are in growth mode and with the recent upgrade to their desktop client, they can support more locations and are in the process of approving a large number of new users for their service.

All of that being said, with my previous knowledge of Woopra and its capabilities, I was literally floored this afternoon by a flood of new “stuff” that I had either completely missed or capabilities that were added in this new release. So if you are a Woopra user (or if you are not, just sign up), pull up a chair, grab a cup of your favorite beverage and read on. This is pretty cool.

All of the following assumes that you have an active Woopra account, are using WordPress, have the WordPress plugin installed and have the Woopra application (1.1.1.0) installed on your machine.

• With Woopra, and the Woopra WordPress Plugin, you can monitor all your registered users and all your commenters. This sounds obvious/relatively mundane until you install the plugin on your WordPress blog and create an event notification on the application. Follow the bouncing ball.
  • Open up your Woorpa application, click on the manage tab on the left and then click on Create a new Event Notification.
  • Then type in “Known Visitors” into the label box, click Next.
  • On the next window, click and activate the checkbox next to “Visitor is tagged or is a member” and click next until you come to the “Edit Notification’s look and feel” screen.
  • Here click on the “Notification’s Icon” dropdown to click on “visitor’s Avatar” and then paste the following in the “Custom notification message” box: Visitor %NAME% is viewing %PAGETITLE% Then click on Apply Notification button

  Now you will receive a notification on your desktop whenever a registered user or a user who has left a comment, visits your blog. This gets even cooler when you notice their gravatar shows up on the notification and you are now able to track these known visitors are they traverse through your blog. You can even choose to initiate a web chat with these visitors through the Woopra application. The chat shows up on their browser. This is cool and scary at the same time.

• Another cool new tool I discovered today was the little map of the world on the top left corner of the “live” tab. Now I had noticed the map there but had not looked into it much. Look for a small arrow on the top right corner of that map. Once you click on that arrow, the map opens up to a full screen view and now you are able to use your mouses’ scroll wheel to zoom in on any part of the map and use your cursor to identify users. I could spend hours doing this on a busy day.
• I had noticed the small column of labels at the top right hand corner of the Woopra desktop application but had not paid much attention to it. The lowest item on that list is called “live” and once clicked it shows the number of  users on your blog on a moving bar graph, much like whos.amung.us
• The analytics tab has a bunch of hidden gems. Some newer features were also added to the items on this tab. Click on the Analytics tab on the Woopra application and look for the following:
  • The “referrers” tab now has a few new subtabs. They include regular stats stuff like webpages, domains and search engines. But now this tab also include Feed Readers, Emails, Social Bookmarks, Social Networks, Media, News and Communities. Each one of these intrigued me and the I was taken aback by the breakdowns of referrals from various applications. The Email tab gave me the most food for thought. If your blog has email readers or you publish regular newletters via email, this tab could help you identify reader populations from various email services. Clicking on the graph part of the display brings up a historical view.
  • The “pages” tab breaks up visitors by subdirectories. With WordPress’ permalinks, you can now determine how hard your yearly archives are working for you. Apparently, over a thousand people looked at my archives from 2003 this week. As your data grows, this tab could contain breakdowns by tag, by author and any other permalink features that you have enabled through your blog. I wonder why our WordPress tag is so popular?
  • The last tab to point out is “systems”. Now this data can be mundane and almost all stats programs offer some sort of systems breakdown. Woopra adds to this functionality by letting you find permutations of systems options. This blog receives more Chinese speaking, Internet Explorer 6 users on Windows XP than any other language. I will be using that information to my advantage, I am sure you can find your particular niche to help or enhance.

Woopra is a great tool. It is even better with these little tidbits. There are literally thousands of different ways to enhance your stats and understand your reader population better. I have just outlined a few that I had completely missed till today.

Have you found any cool new tricks for Woopra that you would like to share?

I had this interesting thought which I am sure can be easily defeated but definitely points towards the success of WordPress.

I was searching the web for something inconspicuous as the “iWrap” and I came upon some interesting results. While browsing the results and then switching back to the search results page, I realized that the first page had at least three results that were either related to WordPress or were on a WordPress blog. I repeated the search for completely inane search terms and had at least one result show up on every search I performed from a blog that used WordPress as the blogging tool. I have had this happen in the past with various other queries but had not quite put two and two together. So my hypothesis is that a WordPress blog or a link that is somehow related to WordPress, shows up on the first page of results on every search performed on Google.

Do you have a search term or phrase that proves otherwise?

[EDIT] Since there seems to be some that do not, conversely, what percentage of search results do you think has WordPress in the first page of results?

Who Comments on Blogs, and Why?: I realize there is a selection problem here: anyone who responds to my question about why commenters comment is, alas, a commenter. Which means that regular commenters will be overrepresented in the comments — unless, of course, a whole bunch of you who never comment decide to go ahead and log in and, in the comments section, tell us why you never comment. Or why other people do. I love the topic of this post on Freakonomics at the New York Times Blog. There is a lot of food for thought.

There are many reasons to leave a comment on a blog and the ability of readers to leave comments on a blog and the instant interaction and conversation that develops, is what attracted me to b2 and consequently WordPress. I tend to not comment on blogs where the comment form is hard to find or where I have to jump through a bunch of hoops to leave a comment (which is why I like extremely simple comment forms and dislike indiscriminate moderation). I also leave comments on interesting topics in the form of trackbacks and links. I gauge the success of a post and a topic by the number of comments left on it and actively try to encourage my readers to express their thoughts. I try to join in on the conversation in the comments and I consciously keep myself from modifying or censoring comments.

So do you comment on blogs? Why do you comment? If you have never left a comment on WeblogToolsCollection.com and I request you to comment on this post, would you do it?

WordPress.com as OpenCourseWare: Link to and discussion of using WordPress.com and consequently WordPress, as a platform for low cost, highly searchable and taggable OpenCourseWare type applications. The example blog is about blogs, wikis and such and might be an interesting read by itself. I have personally used the various iteration of educational CMSs such as WebBoard and WebCT and they have left enough to be desired that I have come running back to my beloved WordPress and bbPress to setup private blogs and forums for use by my classmates. Thanksgoes out to the work done by various educators around the world who are making good use of WordPress and thanks to Stephen for the news.

Extending WordPress Beyond the Blog: A good article on extending WordPress beyond “just a blog” with examples and a developer’s trials and tribulations along the way. Custom Fields in WordPress are the bomb. I have worked extensively with this feature set and used it to my advantage many times. WordPress Jobs makes use of the custom fields to store and produce the job listings. Our recent post on WordPress as a contact manager also uses Custom Fields. Heck there was a Contest at one point that awarded prizes to the best new use of WordPress’ Custom Fields. Along those lines, Andrew asks a question at the end of the linked article that caught my fancy and I wanted to ask our readers the same question. We might find some new uses for old code and spark new ideas.

Which are your favorite non-traditional sites that use WordPress as their publishing platform?

I receive requests from readers about plugins or modifications for Wordpress that they could use on their own blogs. I have been able to find them existing plugins in the past but I also write about them so plugin authors can get a chance to know what their audience is looking for or if I cannot find a suitable solution through my grapevine. I had a few questions this week that I could not find appropriate answers for. If you have other questions, please leave a comment and I will add it to the list. In the future, if you have questions on products, plugins or themes you are looking for and cannot find, please Contact us through the contact form or send me an email and I will try to find it for you or accumulate them for a post like this. If you have an answer for these questions or would like to help develop a plugin or a hack for it, please let us know.

Regular reader Michelle asks:

I’ve been looking around for a plugin that would allow me to do A/B testing on my clients’ sites. By that I mean something would would allow me to set up a “campaign” where one thing would change (on a page or across the site) and I’d be able to get results showing which faired better. For example, say I’d like to test the wording of a headline and I have 2 or 3 different versions. I’d like to be able to set something up where I could enter in the different options, then WordPress would automatically randomly serve up the different headings to people visiting the site. I could then measure traffic on that page or clicks on a particular link etc. These are common things that marketers like to do: test things on a page, or even different versions of a page. It would need to be pretty broad, allowing for randomization at different levels of content, eg entire pages/posts, blocks of text within a page/post or across the entire site, images, links, form buttons, even themes. I know it’s a big ask, but being able to test these kinds of things without getting your hands too dirty in templates would be great.

Also, Matthew asks the following:

Conduit allows a menu to be created which can pull from an XML file on the server. Well what if there was a plugin for WordPress that could dynamically generate the XML file, say adding WordPress pages or whatever from the blog? Maybe even links to the archives or whatever.
Don’t know if it’s even possible.

Finally Ricardo asked me for the following:

is there any plugin availiable that showcases WP-Themes in a single WP-Page? I mean something like… on the left side a preview screenshot, on the right side a small description with a preview link and the download link.

Do you know of any existing plugins that would accomplish the tasks for them? Are you in the process of developing something that works? Would you have use for the plugins(s) if they were developed?

Are people more polite in virtual worlds?: Choice quote - IBM has 5,000 employees in Second Life, and according to Wladawsky-Berger, “virtual worlds are a godsend for meetings.” He said that IBM has a code of conduct for staff in Second Life that they need to “be nice” and dress their avatars “appropriately” in meetings. But when among friends in the virtual world, they can do whatever they like, he said. So, do you think you are more polite in the virtual world? Do you feel compelled to be more polite because the person you are dealing with might be a complete stranger? Or are you more polite because in the virtual world, everything is recorded and traceable and your heated diatribe might come back and bite you later?

Many other interesting questions might be asked on this subject and I find the answers quite fascinating. A few socio-political studies have tried to pinpoint the nature of behavioral transactions in the virtual world but most of them have been restricted to very narrow points of view (such as the recently released study on Armed Forces participation differences in Facebook and MySpace, which is a fascinating read). At my day job, I like to reply to questions on the phone or face to face as often as possible since I know a lot can be lost in the translation. We have also had a lot of managers and business pundits preach the effectiveness of face to face transactions in the past. Is the above revelation contradictory? Are we truly more polite online and in being more polite, are we better at communicating with our peers in virtual worlds?

[EDIT] Thanks for the catch, the date was wrong. Links remain same, but the date changed.

10 Rules for your Small Business Website: Having worked for a small business for some time and with Wordpress being such a widely used tool for building small business websites, I think most of these are well thought out and make a lot of sense. My ex-employers website violates almost every rule mentioned.

Spotback provides you with a small script to embed on your posts to provide centralized and socialized ranking for almost anything. Visitors will also receive personalized referrals and recommendations from your site or blog. No Wordpress plugin available but I am sure the plugin programmers out there can whip something up quite easily with the Wordpress hooks available.

Perils of Problogging ia points out the Perils of “Problogging” and when I was notified of the entry, I almost felt like I was being singled out. Food for thought.

JS-Kit is another centralized ratings widget with commenting built in. Not sure how the commenting would help Wordpress bloggers but the ratings widgets are quite nice. However, the commenting/ratings widget might be used for static HTML pages quite conveniently and since JS-Kit uses Akismet to mitigate Spam, comments are bound to be spam free.

Amatomu and Afrigator are Two African blog aggregators with a variety of feed and channel features built in. I was pleasantly surprised to see the volume and quality of blogging activity going on in that subcontinent.

After reading MacManus’ post on BlogRovr I had to try it. I am a HUGE fan of Techmeme and any service that promises similar information with a personalized slant is something that I cannot wait to try. I signed up, downloaded the Firefox Plugin and exported/imported my feeds into the product. To sum up, BlogRovr is a vertical search engine, personalized from your favorite feeds that sits on top of your browser (FF in my case) and displays relevant posts about the page you are visiting from your feeds. The information is obtained real time and the display is fairly unobtrusive. For example: When I visit Photomatt.net, I get a series of 14 recent articles from my feeds, including tags from those items for links created to Photomatt for various reasons. For now, the plugin is not very processor intensive and MacManus has a detailed post on how it works and how it can be useful. I do not see the economic model yet but Activeweave, the parent company has some VC funding and is already running Stickis (on whose technology BlogRovr is built) so they have something in mind. Right?

I read this question in a comment and though I had an answer from my own personal preference, I think it would be really helpful for others to make this decision and consequently for theme developers to get a good feel for where and what they should concentrate on if there were some discussion on it.

I personally prefer one column themes with a minimal second column. Most information that is put on my sidebar(s) is extraneous and could be placed elsewhere. I have also found that some of that information deters from the original content of the blog. The landing page concept is nice for search engine traffic where extra links and information on the content might help you draw in the user to explore some more. However, the face of the blog is cleaner and chock full of good stuff to read with lesser distractions.

That being said, I have seen and read some really good blogs/sites that have made appropriate use of sidebar content including the venerable Slickdeals and the Wordpress Development blog.

Do you like one, two or three (or more) column themes and why?

Build more Wordpress blogs. I tend to shy away from “me too” posts but I have to agree with this one. The more you Dive Into Wordpress, the better you get at it.

Inspired by Zeo who was in turn inspired by Warpspire.

OpenID According to Simon Willison, OpenID is a simple piece of infrastructure on which smart applications can be built and the buzz around OpenID is growing. This idea has been batted around for some time but the consolidation of ideas and a working version of the system really gives it some legitimacy. I still wonder what the uptake rate will be. If you are still wondering what OpenID is and what it can do for you, think of it as a decentralized authentication system much like Microsoft Passport but much less monolithic.

I can still think of various problems (Tim outlines some of those in his post). However, a good use could be in the Wordpress comment moderation system. Since Wordpress allows comments from previously authorized commenters, OpenID could be a way to positively identify a “valid” commenter on your blog forever. Of course, if any centralized whitelist type service is introduced in any form, that system could still be poisoned but that would be a weakness of the whitelist and not the OpenID platform. I also fear that since anyone can set themselves up as an OpenID provider, this could lead to a lot of confusion and possible weaknesses in the system. That is a discussion for another day.

At the heart of the OpenID system is the basic premise that only you have control over what shows up on your specified URI. As an example, if you have an LJ account and are setup with an OpenID for that account, you can specify your OpenID URI to login to any website that support OpenID. Once you specify your OpenID URI, you will be redirected to your site which will either ask you to log in or to authorize the website you are visiting to use your identity. (”no password” is slightly misleading)

There is already a lot of activity with openID in the Wordpress arena. Have you used OpenID yet?

TextMark SMS Alerts TextMark is going to announce a paid service that sends SMS alerts for breaking news from a blog. I simply cannot see people paying upto $9.99 for this service. TechCrunch says that the bloggers get to keep a third of the subscription charges but in this world of RSS and River of News why would …. ? Oh, well. Thats not the crux of this post.

I already run a service where users can send ringtones, pictures, applications and text messages to their cell phones from a browser as long as they have access to the Internet on their phones and can receive SMS/text messages. The code is really surprisingly simple and it has been running for years with very little input from me. Over a 20,000 unique cell phones have received files and messages from this service since the beginning of this year alone. The point is, someone with a little bit of time, my cell phone code, the Subscribe2 Plugin and some Wordpress widget expertise, could put together a widget that would easily rival everything that TextMark would offer and all of it would be free.

Oh, I wish there were more hours in the day!

WP Custom Fields Contest: Aaron Brazell, techie extraordinaire from Technosailor (also responsible for the technology strategy and implementations for b5media) is sponsoring a “Custom Fields” Contest for Wordpress. Basically, it is a contest to show off the best use of Custom Fields implementation in a Wordpress Blog. The results will be judged on visual aesthetics, code examples and SEO benefits derived from the custom use of Custom Fields in Wordpress. He will be offering cash prizes totalling $200 and is looking for sponsors and other cash and prizes for the contest. The last date to enter the contest is February 28th. It looks like he has some stellar help in judging the contest and that should make his life (and the contest) a lot easier on turn around time.

I remember how excited I was to find custom fields in the CVS when I was working on Pictorialis and used them to store EXIF information for the pictures in the database. Custom Fields are truly an underused but extremely useful and extensible part of Wordpress. At present I use Custom Fields on this blog to store various tidbits of data on posts and pages. With the recent MySql upgrade, I have been writing some gnarly code with views and triggers on this information that gives me a far greater insight into the various aspects of this blog.

WP Plugin: Custom Admin Menu This plugin will let you customize just about everything having to do with the organization of your Wordpress administration. You can relabel and rearrange menu items.
You can create sub-sub-sub-menus, or nest menus as deeply as you want! You can change the parent of a submenu item, or move a submenu item to the top-level menu. You can move something from the top-level menu to a submenu. You can hide any menu or submenu item. There is also a screencast for those interested in seeing its functionality.

Nicely done and a very cool plugin with a multitude of possibilities and one of those few pieces of code that made me say to myself, “I wonder what this looks like inside?”. The power of this plugin is not only in using it for your own Wordpress blog to bring most often used items to the top, but also in simplifying the menu for less savvy users for easier management and blogging tasks. I know my dad’s blogs are getting it as soon as I have a few minutes. Thanks Barun.