Weblog Tools Collection

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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.