Weblog Tools Collection

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I’ve been reading a very interesting discussion over on the IntenseDebate blog with regards to the question, Who Owns Your Comments? IntenseDebate is one of three major third party commenting systems available. The other two are Disqus and CoComment.

Before I dive into the WordPress aspect of this question, you need to know that IntenseDebate is asking this question because they are a third party commenting system. Therefor, they act as a link between the blog and the commenting system which is outside of the in-house solution provided by publishing platforms such as WordPress. Because of this fact, IntenseDebate needs to figure out how comment editing between the two will work out for the best.

However, the question IntenseDebate raised can be addressed to the realm of blogging in general. When you browse around WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress powered blogs and leave a comment, who really owns that comment? You or the blogger? Or should there be shared ownership between the two?

A number of interesting points were made in the comments of the ID post. For instance, some users didn’t care who owned their comments just as long as they couldn’t be changed by the blog author. Others believe that because of the way U.S. copyright law works, commenter’s retain the ownership and copyright of their comments. While still others believe that a Creative Commons commenting license is in order for Blog owners to display on their site.

Where do I fall on this issue? Bloggers have had the ability to edit comments for quite some time now. I believe that editing a comment to misconstrue the original comment is morally wrong. In fact, I believe the entire issue of what bloggers do with comments after they have been posted comes down to morality. In my own experience, I have only edited a few comments due to misspelling or the posting of personal information such as phone numbers or email addresses.

I don’t believe a commenting bill of rights needs to be created in which all blogs should follow. However, I do think that each blogger should create and make publicly accessible a commenting policy. This policy should clearly explain what you as the blog author will do with comments posted on your site, who retains ownership of those comments and explain circumstances which would require you to edit an end user’s comment.

That’s what I think. Let me know what you think in the COMMENTS!

Asides from having one of the simplest looking websites on the net, Yougler is a newly launched service which aims to provide bloggers the ability to establish a professional looking profile along with other perks. Using Yougler which is pronounced (Yoo-Guh-Ler) users can create profiles that bloggers can link to for spam free contact information. One of the long standing problems that bloggers have faced is the way in which end user’s can communicate with the blog author. Usually, this would consist of typing out your email address as so ( blabla at blabla.com). Replacing @ with at was a very inexpensive way of defeating the spam bots which would scrape the content of websites looking for printed email addresses but this method creates a few caveats. The first, user’s need to manually type out your email address which is far less convenient than clicking a link. The second, the look of the email address doesn’t look very professional.

Creating A Profile

There are two types of profiles you can create. The White Pages Profile is for those who want a presence on the Internet, more or less to be found within search results. The other is the Blog or Blogger Profile which is tailored specifically for blogs or bloggers. This is the profile you would want to use if you want an easy way for your readers to contact you which I’ll explain in a minute.

For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on the blogger profile.

After typing in your information, you’ll be greeted with a CAPTCHA image which is used to prevent automated bots from creating Yougler accounts. I’m sure those profiles would be rather interesting to see. After the CAPTCHA process is complete, Yougler sends you a confirmation email which you’ll have to confirm in order to activate your account. Once your account is activated, it’s time to download and then install the Yougler WordPress Plugin.

The WordPress Plugin

The plugin provides an easy way to provide a contact link which is attached to the top of a post and then at the bottom of the post. The link forwards people to your Yougler Profile Page where readers can get a gist as to who you are via your profile and then, send mail-forwarded mail. Providing a means of communication in this way is supposed to keep communication between the blog author and his or her readers easy while at the same time, blocking unwanted spam.

Installing the plugin:

1. Download the Yougler plugin to your desktop. Upload the entire Yougler plugin folder to your WordPress plugins directory under wp-content/plugins/.
2. Activate your plugin under the WordPress Plugins tab.
3. Click options, click Yougler, set “add signature and Yougler link at end of post to yes.” Enter whatever signature you would like to add to the end of your posts in the box provided or you may leave this blank. Click update and you are done.
4. The Yougler Plugin will now create a link to your Yougler Profile page at the end of all your posts. The link name will be your “Display name publicly as:” setting under the User’s tab in WordPress. Yougler will display the author’s name and url on each post so if a blog has multiple bloggers this should not be an issue.Your Yougler page will provide a form mail page for your readers to contact you. On your Yougler page you can also tell your readers a little about yourself or your blog. You can also add a picture (and maybe some more things in the future).

Here is a screenshot that showcases a Yougler configured plugin in WordPress. Click the image to see the full size.

After the plugin is configured, each post will contain a link to your Yougler Profile page at the end of your posts. The link name will be your “Publicly displayed as name” which is configured under the User’s tab in WordPress. Your Yougler page contains an avatar, a small bio section and a form for people to contact you. Aside from that, readers can insert their own Yougler Profile URLS in their comments so others can contact them as well without worrying about spam.

Yougler is free at the moment and it looks like it will continue to be free. The site/service is still in it’s early stages of development which is why Pete is taking comments and suggestions via his own profile link Yougler.com/pete.

Overall, I think what Yougler is doing is a novel idea. However, as far as the spam communication goes, I think the same affect could be accomplished by publishing your email address in the form of a picture that when clicked on, opens up your preferred email client. Also worthy of noting is that, if you were to browse someones About Me page on their blog and that page had a contact me button or form on that page, would there then be any reason for you to use this service?

I think the true strength of this service is for multi author blogs where the about me section is usually limited to the information about the blogging network or the domain and not the actual blogging authors.

If you happen to use this service, I’d be very interested in knowing what your experience is like. I’d also like to know how you have implemented this service into your blog/blogs.

Six Apart created the Trackback specification as a way to enable bloggers to communicate between each other via a link or acknowledgement.

My question to the reader: in what ways do you use Trackbacks?

Do you still find Trackbacks useful? With the growing Trackback spam, how do you keep up with legitimate bloggers?

Welcome to part two of a two part series of articles that will guide you through the process of installing a fresh copy of WordPress or your public WordPress blog to your local machine. The first part of this series covered the installation and configuration of WampServer. Now it’s time to move on to the hard, technical stuff.

Installing WordPress Fresh:

One thing you must know before we move on is that, by default, your database username is ‘root‘ and the default password is blank. In other words, there is no password assigned to the username of root. This would be extremely insecure if this web server were made available to the public but because it’s assigned to the local address of your machine, you have nothing to worry about.

To begin, left click on the WampServer icon and select PHPMyAdmin. Where the text labeled CREATE NEW DATABASE is located, type in the name of the database that will house your installation of WordPress. For simplicity, I normally call the database wordpress. Then click on the Create button. We now have an empty database that the WP installation files can work with.

Download the latest version of WordPress, then extract the files to your desktop. Open the WordPress folder and look for WP-Config-Sample. Open this file in your preferred text editor. The DB_Name is the name of the database you created for WordPress. The DB_User is root. The DB_Password is blank. These three values are the only ones you’ll have to change. Once those changes are in place, save the file as WP-Config.PHP

If you want to install WordPress into the ROOT directory as you would on a public web server, take all of the files and folders within the WordPress folder and move them into the WWW folder. WWW is the same as Public_HTML and is the folder which houses all of your web documents. If you don’t want to install WordPress into the root directory, create a new directory and place all of the files into that one. Just make sure the files are within the WWW folder, or else they won’t be accessible.

Once that’s finished, point your browser to http://localhost/wp-admin/install.php Follow the directions as they are pretty self explanatory and when your finished, you’ll have a fully functioning, fresh install of WordPress that you can do whatever you want with.

Migrating WordPress From Public To Localhost:

Migrating an existing WordPress install onto your local computer is not as easy as a fresh install. If you haven’t already, make sure you have made the appropriate PHP.ini file changes that were explained in part 1. If you don’t, you will run into numerous errors about the SQL file being too large to import.

In my circumstance, my webhost offers it’s customers Cpanel as a means to control all aspects of my Webhosting account. Cpanel provides me with a way to generate a full backup of my domain. This backup includes all of the hardcoded directories and files attached to my domain as well as any databases I have created. After you create a full backup of your domain through Cpanel (if you have that option) download the backup to your desktop. Once downloaded, open up the file and browse to the Public_HTML directory. Extract this directory’s contents into the WWW folder on your hard drive.

Once thats finished, look inside of the mysql directory within your backup file. This directory contains all of the MySQL databases you have created through your webhosting account. Extract the SQL file that pertains to your WordPress install and place it on the desktop.

Ok, before we move on, lets review where we’re at. We backed up all of the files related to the hosting account and then downloaded that file to the desktop. We then extracted all of the files within the Public_HTML directory into the WWW directory. We then looked inside of the backup file and extracted the SQL file that pertains to the WordPress installation. At this point, the folder structure within the WWW folder on your hard drive should mimic that of what you would see within the Public_HTML folder on your webhost.

Now, left click on the WampServer icon and click on PHPMyAdmin. Click on the link that says IMPORT. Click on the BROWSE button and locate the SQL file you extracted to your desktop that pertains to your WordPress installation. After you locate and double click on the file, click on the GO button. It might take a little while, but the import process should be successful. If you receive an error that states the SQL file was too large, please re-visit part 1 and make sure the changes were saved to your PHP.ini file. Also, I wanted to share that if you have the SezWho comment rating plugin installed, you may receive errors that are related to the plugins database tables. If this is the case, you will need to open the SQL file in a text editor and remove all of the lines that pertain to those tables which are usually prefixed with sz_ and then try to import the SQL file again.

If the import was successful, pat yourself on the back because were almost through with this process.

If you do not want to do the next step through the database you can instead, add these constants to your WP-Config file and they will perform the same function as the database edits.

define('WP_HOME', 'localhost' );
define('WP_SITEURL', 'localhost');

In PHPMyAdmin, the database you imported will now be selectable in the drop menu that is located near the top left portion of the webpage. Click on the drop down arrow and select the database you just imported. Near the top center of the page, there will be a series of tabs. Click on the SEARCH tab. In the search box, type in the full URL to which your public WordPress install refers to. In my case, I typed in http://www.jeffro2pt0.com This will search the entire database for entries of that domain. The search results should find entries related to that domain within the table WP-OPTIONS. Click on the Browse link to dig into this particular table.

You only need to concern yourself with the top two entries, SiteURL and HOME. Click on the Pencil icon for SiteURL which is just to the left of the X icon. This will open up the editing page. In the large text box on the bottom, change the URL to http://localhost then click on the GO button. Now do the same thing for HOME. After you change HOME, you can exit out of PHPMyAdmin.

If you have never opened the .htaccess file to hard code redirection attributes, you can skip the next step and you are essentially finished.

The last thing to do is to edit the .htaccess file and remove any hard coded redirection attributes. If you don’t do this, each time you try to load your blog on your local machine, it will automatically redirect to your public blog or which ever URL you configured in your .htaccess file.

Victory Lane:

If you’ve managed to read this far, congratulations. After all of that, you should be able to access and browse your blog on your local machine exactly how you would in a public domain. This guide is by no means a cure for all. This was my detailed approach as to how I migrated my public install to a local install. Some of the actions I performed may not have been necessary, nor required, but this is the way I did it and it worked!

If you have a correction or a different way of doing things, by all means leave a comment. I will edit this article as corrections come in so the most accurate information is presented.

Also, now that you have the ability to dig around the ins and outs of your blog through the database, you’ll be able to see some things that you might not of known about before. Stay tuned for another article which highlights a VERY important issue pertaining to plugin developers that needs to be discussed. Perhaps we’ll be able to come up with a solution.

Welcome to part one of a two part series of articles that will guide you through the process of installing a fresh copy of WordPress or your public WordPress blog to your local machine. The first part of this series will guide you through the installation and configuration of a piece of software called WampServer. Why would you want to do this you ask? Having your WordPress blog installed on your local machine not only acts as a backup, but it gives you the option of really digging into the inner workings of your blog without having to worry about it breaking and therefor, rendering the thing useless to the public. Not only that, but it’s much faster to play with things on your local machine than it is with a LIVE site on the internet.

For this article, I am using Windows XP Service Pack 2 and something called WampServer. WampServer is a piece of software that installs everything you need to turn your PC into a webserver. This includes Apache, MySQL, PHP, SQLitemanager and PHPMyAdmin. Before we get started, head on over to the official WampServer download page and grab a copy of WampServer 2.

WampServer Installation:

The installation process is pretty simple. After accepting the license agreement and specifying where the WampServer files will be installed to, the installation file will be unpacked, doing all of the heavy work for you. Using a software application such as WampServer to install all of your webserver needs for you automatically, is the easiest way to turn your machine, into a web server. Once the installation is finished, you’ll be prompted to locate your default browser executable file. In my case, I had to direct the install to my FireFox executable file which is usually within the Mozilla folder.

One of the first things you’ll have to configure is the PHP mail parameters. For SMTP, the default value of localhost is correct. As for the email address, you can choose to type one in, or not. This can always be changed later. Once this setting is configured, you’ll be greeted with a confirmation box that tells you the installation of WampServer has been completed. Leave the option “Launch WampServer 2 now” check marked and click the finish button.

Configuring WampServer Files:

One important piece of information I have to mention. The webserver acts on port 80 which is the port responsible for HTTP traffic. If you are running Skype with it’s default configuration, you’ll notice that your Webserver is offline once you start the program. This is because by default, Skype uses port 80 and 443 for incoming connections. You can either change the port that Skype uses or you can close, then re open Skype after your Webserver is online, forcing Skype to use a different port. In essence, make sure port 80 is clear before you launch WampServer or else the Apache web service will not run.

I’ve also been informed by ayusli that will you also need to disable IIS if that is running on your system. If you don’t, you may not be able to access localhost.

Once your WampServer is online, you’ll need to edit a few files to change the configuration to allow for larger databases to be imported. These changes will take place within the PHP.ini file. The PHP.ini file is a text file that contains the configuration for the PHP programming language. The first thing you’ll need to change is the upload_max_filesize attribute. By default, this is set to 2Megabytes. This is too small of a value, so increase this to 50 or 100megs. It doesn’t need to have a specific value so long as it is larger than the size of the database file you will be importing later on in this guide. The other setting you’ll need to change is post_max_size. By default this is set to 8Megabytes. Change this to the same value as the upload_max_filesize limit. After you make this change, reboot your computer. This will ensure the changes you made to the php.ini file take effect.

End Of Part 1:

If you plan on doing a fresh install of WordPress, you won’t have to worry about making any changes to the PHP.ini file after you install WampServer. However, if you plan on taking a copy of your public blog and transferring it to your local machine, the changes described above need to happen or else you will likely run into problems such as your database file being too large to import.

Part 2 of this series will go into details on how to install a fresh copy of WordPress as well as how to transfer your existing WordPress blog on the internet onto your local machine. It’s not as easy as transferring the database and then extracting a backup of files into a folder. There are a few more required tricks that need to be performed before a public blog can be successfully transferred. Look for these tips in part two which should be published in the next few days.

Those in the blogosphere will at one time or another hear of a service called Technorati. What is Technorati anyways? Technorati is a search engine for blogs that scours the web to try and tell you what’s being said about what and by whom. In order to tell which blogs are the more popular of the bunch, Technorati uses a ranking system that determines how many people have linked to a blog which is called (Authority) and how many people have added that blog to their Technorati favorites.

BlogStorm has published an interesting post which clearly illustrates the need for a major overhaul of the Technorati ranking algorithm. In this article, BlogStorm describes four different blogs that have a high authority level and at times, a ranking of 1 within the Technorati ranks. Two of the blogs mentioned are authored by two of the biggest names in the WordPress arena, Matt Mullenwegs Photomatt blog and Alex Kings Denver Web Developer blog.

These two blogs have been removed from the Technorati Top 100 list because they didn’t get to that position naturally. By natural, I’m talking about someone linking to a specific post on their blog which would be a natural link. In the case of the Photomatt blog, Matt Mullenweg has the advantage of being linked to by default with any new WordPress installation via the BlogRoll. As for Alex King, he makes some of most popular plugins for WordPress, one of which is called Popularity Contest. According to BlogStorm, Yahoo reports 1.7 million links to the plugin home page.

If you still don’t understand what’s going on here, I’ll make it really simple. When you create a theme for WordPress, you usually add a link to your blog or homepage as a means of giving credit to yourself. If this theme becomes popular, each blog that the theme is installed on will have your link on it. Each blog that has a link to your site on it will bump up your authority ranking on Technorati which leads to the fundamental problem of the authority ranking system.

Their authority ranking is completely inaccurate. According to Technorati,

Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.

It is important to note that we measure the number of blogs, rather than the number of links. So, if a blog links to your blog many times, it still only count as +1 toward your authority. Of course, new links mean the +1 will last another 180 days.

Also worthy of mentioning is this bit of text;

The #1 ranked blog is the blog with the most other distinct blogs linking to it in the last 6 months. If your blog’s rank is, say 305,316, this indicates that there are 305,315 blog ranks separating your blog from the #1 position.

So if you take into account what authority means, you can clearly understand why Photomatt and Alex King were leading the pack.

At first, I want to call Alex and Matt cheaters for gaming the system to get to the top, but that would be a hasty mistake. The fact of the matter is, the algorithm is wrong and it should not count these sort of links. For bloggers trying to make their way up in the blogosphere, it’s really upsetting that while you bust your butt writing content while obtaining legit links from other bloggers, you will never show up on the radar because other bloggers have developed a popular theme or plugin with their own little credit link attached.

So instead of banning people, what should Technorati do? What would you suggest to Technorati in terms of changing their algorithm so it’s fair for all bloggers? Or do you think that hand editing is the way to go and Technorati should just remove those sites from the Top 100 list if they are receiving non-organic links?

Lets face it, you may think that Technorati is no longer relevant in the blogosphere but you couldn’t be farther from the truth. Their numbers, rankings, and search engine still plays a significant role in the blogosphere. This is why this is a hot button issue and something has to be done about it.

*UPDATE*

It has been brought to my attention by Mark that the links contained in the blogroll on a default installation of WordPress no longer links to individuals. I have confirmed this and have crossed out that line of text within the post. However, it is true that at one point, he and others were linked to by default in the blogroll and that’s the main reason why Matt had such a high authority ranking. As was brought up by (ThatGirlAgain) in the commenting area, Alex King was also a beneficiary of the default blogroll.

Also, “you will never show up on the radar because other bloggers have developed a popular theme or plugin” has been taken out of context. It’s not that I don’t want creators of these wonderful things not to receive credit, I simply don’t want Technorati to allow these links to be part of the Authority equation.

Top 10 Tips for New Bloggers From Original Blogger Jorn Barger: In many of my daily reads, I come upon an article or a link that makes me go Huh?!? “Original Blogger” Jorn Barger gives us his Top 10 Tips for new bloggers. Blogging has evolved a lot since he coined the term and intended it to be no more than a list of interesting links. Still, this post in Wired gives us an insight into what the original Weblog first was intended to be and prompted me to think about how it has evolved over the years. To me a blog is so many things at once that it is difficult to classify and the diversity of the term and the variety of purpose is what makes blogs so interesting to me.

What is your blog to you? What purpose does it serve?

I cherish the ability to communicate and I try to praise and imitate those who have the ability to communicate ideas lucidly and with alacrity. With that intent in mind, here are the Ten Reasons to choose WordPress. Aimed at the non-technical, could-be blogger, I could not have created a more succinct and convincing list myself.

I first found WordPress back when b2 was still alive, and had the WordPress bug bite me the minute I downloaded the zip file. I have not looked back since. What are your reasons for using WordPress?

OneClick Install Firefox Extension: Anirudh had written the OneClick Plugin for WordPress that allows a user to upload and install themes and Plugins to their WordPress blog with one click. But to make his plugin more useful and extensible, he has realsed a Firefox Extension for it as well. The Firefox Extension adds a contextual menu item to your Firefox that will let you directly install plugins and themes from their zip download locations. Just right click on the download link for a plugin for theme and install it on your blog with One Click. Thanks to Digital Inspiration for pointing out the extension.

Thanks to TipMonkies for the idea via Lifehacker

Bold: Alt+SHIFT+b
Italics: Alt+SHIFT+i
Link: Alt+SHIFT+a
Blockquote: Alt+SHIFT+q
Code: Alt+SHIFT+c
Read More: Alt+SHIFT+t
Unordered List (ul): Alt+SHIFT+u
Ordered List (ol): Alt+SHIFT+o
List Item (li): Alt+SHIFT+l

Here are a few of the others that I have featured here in the past:

Advanced Editor: Alt+SHIFT+v
Publish the Post: Alt+SHIFT+p
ins: Alt+SHIFT+s
del: Alt+SHIFT+d
Unquote/outdent: Alt+SHIFT+w
Undo: Alt+SHIFT+u
Redo: Alt+SHIFT+y
Edit HTML: Alt+SHIFT+e
Align Left: Alt+SHIFT+f
Align Center: Alt+SHIFT+c
Align Right: Alt+SHIFT+r

More from the comments:

Headers: Ctrl+[number] to get various header sizes on highlighted text. Thanks Henk

Have any more to share with us that we might have missed?

WordCamp 2007 starts today (well, there were some festivities yesterday) and since I have to miss it again this year, I hope some visitors record the presentations and provide podcasts for the rest of us. The speakers list includes some pretty cool people that I would have liked to listen to and meet but C’est la Vie. I hear there is going to be some cool schwag as well.

If you are at Wordcamp, did you hear or see anything cool? Are you having a good time? Please contact me with reports if you think they are bloggable. Just a word of warning, I am on the road, so response/posting will be slow.

Six Apart & Automattic Compared: A comparison of two of the three blogging juggernauts on the web. Though the comparison is mildly interesting from a historical novice’s point of view, I think the article is missing a few things. Since it was written by a business professor, I would have expected more analysis and forecasts rather than a rehashing of the past events in a company history narrative. Furthermore, a story of MT and WP does not make sense without Blogger and it should have been included.

There are very interesting business model and structure type details of all three companies that I believe are instrumental in their success in each of their arenas and the underlying competitive tension amalgamated with a deep sense of respect and jealousy among each of the competitors would have made for very interesting business reading. In spite of my perceived shortcomings, Carthik is mentioned in the article (which made my day) and it is worth a quick read if you are new to either company.

Bloggers want my steak baguette: If you’ve got a friend who thinks they can make money with their blog, get them to read this piece. Like all people who rise to the top of their profession, it demonstrates a simple truth: good bloggers work like dogs. You better believe it! Making a blog successful and making people want to come back for more everyday is more than a full time job that not only needs dedication but it needs a certain amount of eccentricity and obsessive devotion.

I guess the above is true for any successful venture that is built from the ground up but if you ever heard someone say that blogging is easy or takes any small amount of work, they are probably full of bees wax.

Index of /wp-content/plugins - Google Search: I am not sure what to make of this search but not only are there a lot of self hosted Wordpress blogs, too many of them allow their plugin folder to be indexed. I performed this search because I noticed a crawler on a couple of my blogs that was indexing my plugins and that alarmed me a little. I do not allow my plugin folder to be indexed since I consider that too risky. The homepage of the crawler lists various plugins and their propensity in the Wordpress Blogosphere. I imagine the crawler browses the plugins folder of each new blog discovered and if that folder can be browsed, it tries to crawl the various plugin php files it is aware of while looking for 404s and empty strings. I stop short of suggesting that everyone protect their plugins folder because if the plugins are written correctly and your server is configured correctly, there should be nothing to worry about. However, since I write or hack most of my own plugins and I am my own worst critic, I choose to protect that folder.

[EDIT] There have been lots of questions on how to protect the plugins folder and here are a few quick and simple answers.

• Add the following to the .htaccess file in your Wordpress directory
  

  Options All -Indexes

• Create a new file, call it index.php, leave it completely empty and upload it to your wp-content/plugins directory. [EDIT] It appears that a blank index.php might cause some trouble with the dashboard. You can use a blank index.html instead or opt for the .htaccess solution above.
• Make sure you have warning and error reporting turned to logging only. There are many tutorials to do this properly that are available on the web. If you are on a shared server, ask your host to turn them off if they have not done so already. I am guilty of leaving this turned on because I use this server for debugging at times and I get lazy. This is good security practice for all servers. I love how this option cannot be modified with ini_set on cPanel based servers.
• Refrain from going overboard and restricting/protecting everything. You might end up making your blog invisible to search engines and such.

A couple of people have also asked why this could be bad. My primary reason is that I do not like to air my (dirty) laundry. I would like to stay away from discussing this too much further. If you need clarifications or are concerned for a particular reason or another, please contact me and I will explain further.