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 […]
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Posts Tagged ‘brainstorming’
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.
[Continue Reading...]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 […]
[Continue Reading...]The Next Social Network: WordPress Nice article on WordPress as the next Social Network with a look at blogs being more important than an integrated social networking space. I personally like blogs better than any of the other social networking tools that I use but they serve their own purpose. I would have to work harder to achieve the same results as LinkedIn if I were to use a blog for that purpose. I guess if I were to look for the next killer app, which these alpha users seem to be doing, I would be looking at blogs (and WordPress) as well.
[Continue Reading...]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 […]
[Continue Reading...]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 […]
[Continue Reading...][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 […]
[Continue Reading...]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 […]
[Continue Reading...]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, […]
[Continue Reading...]About the Author
- Mark Ghosh
An avid fan of business, education, technology and finance. I lead a lean, highly focussed and capable team of Java Back End developers and Front End developers through a maze of complex software wizardry to fulfill the web maintenance needs of a large chemical manufacturer. As per Myers-Briggs Personality Types, I am an ESTJ. I pride in a project completed on time and according to plan. My hobbies include all kinds of technology, anything that I can taste and anything that goes fast or flies in the air. I like to read business books and comics in my spare time.
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