‘Blogging Essays’ Category

Suggestions For Plugin Standards

54
responses
by
on
January 14th, 2008
in
Blogging Essays, WordPress, WordPress Plugins

This post is not written by me but is reproduced, with permission, from a post in the Weblog Tools Collection News Forums. It was written by Weathervane. Since  Frank has downloaded 530 plus plugins, and most of his thoughts are well expressed and documented, this post might trigger some good conversation. Please chime in. As a new WordPress blogger, I wanted to customize my installation, so I began a review of the available plugins. My first installation of WordPress was version 2.3.1. Because this version was a significant change, there was a list of v2.3.1-compatible plugins, of which I downloaded and tried most of them. Since then, I’ve downloaded 530± plugins (this was what’s left after deleting extensions of commercial services), and tried/tested most of them. Five-hundred± is an incredible number and rivals, I think, Photoshop actions or plugins—and there are lots of those. The WordPress plugins community is impressively […]

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The science of blog reading

6
responses
by
on
October 25th, 2007
in
Blogging Essays, Business of Blogging

The science of blog reading: Nick Carr gives us an executive summary of an article by a team from CMU (and Nielsen) and he explains their thesis with the following foreword: The problem of detecting contaminants in a public water system is analogous to the problem of figuring out what’s going on in the blogosphere. Any article that claims that the blogosphere is essentially a sewer, is worth the read. I whole heartedly disagree with the list of 100 blogs that “everyone should read” but the concept is amusing and the principles behind their claims might have some merits. But then again I disagree with any and all such lists because all blogs and their readers do not have the same interest in all subject matters. Also as an astute commenter on that post points out, some of the blogs on that list aren’t even updated anymore and thus their […]

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Techmeme Threatens Technorati?

10
responses
by
on
October 2nd, 2007
in
Blogging Essays, Blogging News

More appropriately, does Techmeme Leaderboard threaten Technorati’s Pop Blogs? Technorati’s descension from their once heralded position has not been lost on me. I think this might be the death knell but I do not understand the point behind the other observations. In reading through the commentary, it seems that everyone agrees that Technorati is on the chopping block but the people that were on Technorati’s Pop list and not on the Techmeme Leaderboard have a more negative take on the new product. The epitaphs levelled at Technorati range from “Attacking Technorati’s Stronghold” to the new bandwagon of “Techmeme list heralds the death of blogging“. Duncan claims that taken in context, this means that “ … New verticals (are) on the way“. You can follow the rest of the conversation on Techmeme. The primary theme of all this diatribe is that multiple author blogs have better coverage, content and attention and […]

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11 Jobs

14
responses
by
on
June 10th, 2007
in
Blogging Essays

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

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How to Design Your Own Minimalist WP Theme

18
responses

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

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He said, She Said Meme

7
responses
by
on
April 24th, 2007
in
Blogging Essays, Business of Blogging

I love bloggers, they are very good people. But even the most kind hearted and best intentioned bloggers sometimes either misinterpret or misread information and the piece ends up very different from where it started its life. This somewhat macabre movement of information from one person to other with slight mutilations is very interesting to me. All of us have studied or read about it in one form or fashion. Now here is the idea for the meme: Read through the following news paragraph and recreate a post on your blog from memory if you will. Encourage your readers to do the same with a link back to your post. Now, imagine throwing video into that mix. By the time I got the headphones on and the video downloaded, I’d be on to designing some new feature (or, more likely, answering more email). I’d only get to hear three words […]

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On Sponsored Themes

180
responses

Thanks to posts here on WLTC and around the blogosphere, the topic of “sponsored themes” is at the top of everyone’s minds. I thought this would be a good time to share my thoughts on the ramifications of sponsored themes, and what it means for our community. For those who are new to the topic, in the past yew years a market has developed around advertisers that pay money to websites to have plain-text links back to their properties so they can rank better in search engines like Google for the text in those links. At some point the people gaming Google realized instead of buying links from dozens of individual sites, they could pay theme authors to bundle their links with their download and get hundreds or thousands of sites with their link for a small fraction of the cost. This is politely referred to as “theme sponsorship.” Sometimes […]

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How to Start Your Own Blog

No
responses
by
on
March 1st, 2007
in
Blogging, Blogging Essays, HOW-TO, LinkyLoo

How to Start Your Own Blog takes a look at several blogging services both remote-hosted and self hosted. A good read for someone wanting to start their own blog.

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For Theme Authors

26
responses

My primary responsibility out here at Weblog Tools Collection is to keep a close eye on WordPress plugin and theme releases. One of the places I check regularly for theme releases is the WordPress Theme Viewer. I also keep track of updates via Google Alerts and more importantly our News section. I’ve lost track of the number of themes that I have downloaded, read about and previewed. While doing this, I have observed several different methods of promotion and distribution of themes by their authors; some highly effective and some so bad that I have had no option but to ignore the release. This WordPress Codex page has an indepth explanation on starting off with themes for public release to promoting them and is a recommended read. In this post I hope to address a few points that every theme author should consider when releasing a public theme. The Theme […]

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