Managing Spam Maintenance with Akismet Auntie Spam Version 2
Akismet Auntie Spam is a maintenance script for WordPress administrators. One of the problems with the Akismet spam protection service is that sometimes it misidentifies a real comment as spam. WordPress has a spam recovery console that I like to call the spam inbox.
Have you ever stuck your hand as far back at you can into the crannies of your couch and pulled out what you found? That’s kind of what going into the default Akismet spam inbox is like. It’s a dark and evil place, filled with things that will make your eyes burn. You only wanted to find the quarter you lost, but before you know it your hand is stuck and something is touching you back.
Akismet Auntie Spam is a kind old lady who will come to your house and give it a thorough cleaning. She’s not afraid of the dark corners, particularly the spam inbox because she knows exactly how to handle the creepy crawlies hiding out of sight.
Akismet Auntie Spam is not a WordPress plugin. It is a script for the Firefox web browser that will work with any installation of WordPress or WordPress Multi-user — that means you can use it with WordPress.com, Edublogs.org, Blogsome.com and any site that is running WordPress with Akismet. Version 2 is a complete rewrite from scratch, and it is much less complicated now. There are no knobs and buttons for users to twiddle with — it works out of the box, the same way for everyone. Auntie Spam is here for one reason and that’s to save you time.
Akismet Auntie Spam is in no way affiliated with WordPress or Auttomatic — it’s a script I created to make it a hell of a lot easier to watch out for false spam.
How to Install
- You need the Firefox web browser - Download and install
- You need to install Greasemonkey - How-To
- You need to know how to install a Greasemonkey script - How-To
- Install Akismet Auntie Spam
Slight gotcha: if you are an old time user of Akismet Auntie Spam (from before August 2007) then you’ll want to uninstall your old version before installing the new version of the script. Find out how to uninstall a Greasemonkey script.
What Does Akismet Auntie Spam Do?
Much less time is spent navigating your spam inbox. You can see it all on one page, and it doesn’t take nearly as long to scroll through as it would without Akismet Auntie Spam installed.
- Fetches all of your spam comments and displays them on one page.
- Sorts spammers by the amount of spam they’ve sent.
- Shows only the first line of spam, so less time is spent scrolling.
- Completely hide obvious spam.
- Automatically checks for a new version of itself every two weeks.
- Install it once into your Firefox browser and it will work with *ALL* your WordPress blogs.
Show Me How It Works
Go to your spam inbox on your WordPress dashboard console.
Auntie Spam will immediately kick in and download all of the spam at once — no navigating between 10s to 100s of individual pages of spam.
You can do something else like check your RSS feeds while she grabs all of your spammy comments and organizes them.
Spam is sorted from newest to oldest and categorized from most spammy to least spammy. She groups spam by identifying the computer it came from, so surprisingly enough the more spam you have the easier it is to look through it all. She even summarizes it all by only showing the first line.
Auntie Spam hates those idiots who keep sending you spam again and again. They can be completely ignored.
As you read through all the comment summaries, you may come across one that looks like it isn’t spam. Click on the ‘# comments’ link and Auntie Spam will show you the full text of the comment and give you the option to mark it as not spam.
Once all the spam is loaded there no need to reload it all because you want to search for something specific — hit Ctrl+F and use Firefox’s built in page search.
When it comes to de-spamming marked comments, or deleting all comments, Auntie Spam gets out of the way and things work the same way they always have.
If Auntie Spam is doing something you don’t want here to, you can return to way things have always been with a single click on the Greasemonkey icon and reloading the page.
What Are You Waiting For?
If you’re running WordPress and you’ve ever had to go dumpster diving for a comment that was accidentally marked as spam then you need Akismet Auntie Spam.
Related Posts
WordPress.com Command Diagrams
I’ve created two useful diagrams for WordPress.com bloggers, and more importantly, for people who offer support in the WordPress.com help forums.
WordPress.com Blue Bar
WordPress.com Dashboard
Canadian Marketing, Media, and Digital Blogs Tournament
Internet Duct Tape is proud to be a part of the 1% Army Canadian Blogging Tournament. I’m part of division A: Online/Digital/Tech/Web 2.0. The other divisions are B: Media/Social Media/PR/Culture, C: Marketing/Communications/Research/Design, and D: Quebec. Yes, they’re that distinct! You can read more about it on the 1% Army Facebook Group.
Photo by sookie
I have to submit three posts written in 2007 that will be judged on:
- overall impact (20%)
- clarity of thought (20%)
- did it make me want to think/act differently (20%)
- did it want me to comment/participate (20%)
- originality (20%)
What Do You Think?
I’m going to rip a page from Ben, co-founder of Standout Jobs — a Montreal-based job search start-up, and ask my readers what they think my three best posts were under the criteria of overall impact, clarity of thought, call to action and originality. Name your three favorites in the comments section, or write about them on your blog and leave a trackback. I have to submit my three best by September 8th.
Something New
One of the posts has to be written since August 11th.
- Revolutionizing the Web with Firefox and Greasemonkey (with screenshots)
Firefox and Greasemonkey - How to Install a Firefox Extension (with screenshots)
Firefox and Greasemonkey - Universal identity and single sign on using openID? No thanks
Web 2.0 and Social Media
Something Old
The other two posts can be from later in the year.
- The Solution to Social Network Site Fatigue
Online Privacy and Reputation Management, Web 2.0 and Social Media - Community Starts with Communication: 5 Tips to Building Your Readership
Building a Community - Facebook Applications and Privacy - How to Configure Facebook Applications
Online Privacy and Reputation Management, Facebook - Electronic Civil Disobedience
Digital Culture, Digg - How to use Facebook without Losing Your Job over it
Online Privacy and Reputation Management, Facebook - Getting to Simple - Engineers Have No Idea How Normal Human Beings Interact With Their Environments
Increasing Productivity and Simplifying Your Life, Programming and Software Development - Why Posting Your Email Address in Plain Text is Never a Good Idea
Building a Community, Web 2.0 and Social Media
Thank you in advance for your participation.
Tip: Send Amazon or iTunes Gift Certificates Anonymously
Have you ever wanted to send a gift certificate to someone anonymously? One of the problem with electronic transactions is that quite often they tell the recipient exactly who you are. This isn’t a problem when it comes to gifts for your family or friends, but it can be more tricky if you are running an online contest for your blog.
photo by lilit
Why Anonymously?
There are several non-creepy reasons why you might want to send an anonymous gift certificate. Perhaps you are blogging pseudoanonymously? Or it could be that your PayPal / Amazon account is registered to an email address that you don’t want to share/publicize? There are many reasons why you might want to keep your Amazon or iTunes account information private but still send someone a gift certificate.
Use a Proxy
If you wanted to surf the web anonymously you would use a proxy that would act as a intermediate between your web browser and the web sites you are visiting. The same technique works for buying gift certificates. There is an online service called Prezzle that will let you send “wrapped” gift certificates to other people. If you use Prezzle to send someone a gift certificate, the recipient will see the sender as Prezzle instead of your real identity.
There is a small service fee for using Prezzle.
Hot Tip: Make sure the gift certificate matches the country of the person receiving it! Often companies like Amazon and iTunes won’t let them transfer the gift certificate to the store for their country.
Community Starts with Communication: 5 Tips to Building Your Readership
When I first started commenting over at okdork.com, Noah Kogan would personally reply to me by email. I thought this was a little strange, even after a year of blogging this was the first time it had happened to me. I thought it was just that he was bored and killing time. It’s only now that I understand the genius of his technique: by going out of his way to contact me he went from “nameless stranger on the interweb” to a person I had one to one conversation with.
I hadn’t thought about it, but there is a different between scrawling messages on a public site and having a one on one conversation. The flame wars that are routine on some sites rarely exist in personal email. People stop being disembodied words and ideas and you remember that there is a person behind all of that typing.
There is another fringe benefit to directly emailing commenters on your blog. I’m absolutely horrible at coming back to re-read posts on other people’s sites where I’ve commented. I know there are tools to help me manage it, but I’m too lazy. I post a comment and forget about it. Direct emails bridge the gap of apathy and form a connection.
Phoning It Home
There are many WordPress plugins that will automatically send an email to all first time commenters. While it is a great low maintenance technique for reaching out to your readers, any automatic communication can be considered spam — always a bad first impression. Automatic plugins like Subscribe to Comments or Comment Relish run the risk of having your email address get caught by spam filters. Hand-crafted responses are the way to go. You want to establish a rapport and a connection, not be another reason to hit the Report Spam button.
If you are on self-hosted WordPress then I recommend the Comment Email Responder plugin (from being on the receiving side of it, I haven’t personally used it). It lets the blog owner easily respond to comments by personal email as well as on the blog. I think that direct emails in respond to comments is one of the best techniques I’ve ever heard of for standing out from the crowd. Here are five tips to help you do it better.
Tip #1: Use a separate email address for blogging only
I highly recommend using web-based Gmail. It is accessible anywhere, and has great search functions and spam filtering. You can even use Google Apps for your domain so that you’re using the Gmail interface, but your address is @domainname instead of @gmail. The best reason to have a separate email address for blogging is because it ensures some level of privacy, and it keeps your regular account from being swamped/interrupted by blogging related messages. Don’t feel like checking up on the blog? Don’t check that email account.
- Web Worker Daily on Gmail productivity tips
Tip #2: Mention your blog in your signature
Your signature should have your blog url and a direct link to subscribing to your blog by RSS or by email. This can help in all correspondence. Try not to go over a three line signature though, or to use something tacky and garish. HTML and images are most likely filtered by the recipients email software, so stick to plain text.
Quick Hacks for Signatures
- Quick guide to email signature etiquette
- Always put your signature below the latest text you’ve typed instead of at the end in Firefox
- Sign emails with your latest blog post
Tip #3: Automatically add correspondents to your address book
If you’re using Gmail this will be done automatically, but it is possible in other mail programs as well. The goal is to build up an address book of your blog readers so that you can automatically friends them on social networking sites like Facebook and StumbleUpon. With any kind of networking, having a large address book filled with useful information can be your best asset.
WordPress Comment Ninja will do this for you.
Tip #4: Include their comment in the message
If they are a first time visitor they might not immediately know who you are without context. By quoting the comment in the message body you remind them of what is being said. There are tons of WordPress plugins for comments, like the ones I mentioned in the beginning of this article.
WordPress Comment Ninja will do this for you.
Tip #5: Have something to say
This is probably the most important tip. Don’t email your commenters unless you have something to say to them. No matter how much you want to email them that photo you just took of your cat being silly, put the keyboard down and just walk away.
This is something I struggle with daily.
Community Starts With Communication
I’ve realized that sometimes I can be pretty anti-social in what is essential a social medium. I think that emailing commenters can be a great way of encouraging discussion and building relationships with your readers, and it’s something I plan to start doing. What do you think?
Related Posts
- WordPress Comment Ninja
- Create a Private Area for Your Regular Readers
- Technorati Favoritism – Trading Favours
- Using Comment Spam to Measure Blog Rank – It’s better than Technorati!
Written as part of the Carnival of Circular Communication
Tim Ferriss’ Four Minute Blog Training - The 9 Rules You Need to Know
What can a man who routinely slams corporate office culture for building boredom and people who waste their workdays with internet addiction have to say about writing a blog? Darren Rowse at Problogger has the scoop and now you can too with this no money down, no holds barred, straight for the jugular look at blogging from a man who has reached the New York Times Bestseller list.
Tim on Strategy
1. Polarization is Key
No one is interested in the middle ground. To be remarkable threaten the “3Bs: behaviour, belief, or belongings.” “I want at least one person to call me a liar per post or I don’t feel I’m pushing the envelope enough.”
2. Go to the Source
The biggest source of traffic is links from popular blogs and writing guest posts for them. “Borrowing traffic is a lot faster than creating it, and the former often leads to the latter.”
3. Be Diverse
How does your niche subject relate to everything (and anything) else in the world? Explore.
Tim on Technique
4. Headlines are Everything
“If you have a great headline, you can get great pass-along. If you have a mediocre headline, even a world-class post will be ignored.” “The headline doesn’t even need to describe the article or post. It has just one purpose: to get them to read the next sentence.”
5. Formatting Matters
“Add at least one graphic to each post, bold/italicize more to make the posts easier to scan and digest, and I would also discuss more topics that nearly everyone feels they can comment on.”
6. Post Less Frequently
It allows discussion to happen. “People have a lot of crap information being forced upon them, so I only want to add [] when I have something worthy to say.”
Tim on Monetization
7. Use Tact to Make Money
People don’t care if you’re making money, they only care if it interferes with your message.
8. Ethics are Easy
Pick sponsors from other industries that you’d never write about.
The Most Important Tip
9. Create a Community
Build a community that you would want to belong to.
You can read the entire interview at ProBlogger. Tim is the author of The 4 Hour Work Week [Wikipedia] and writes is own blog. I haven’t read the book yet, but I do strongly agree with his advice on blogging.
Climbing Out of Category Hell
One of my first and longstanding complaints of WordPress is that it does not understand the fundamental difference between tagging and categorizing. Categorizing is like taking all of your socks and putting them into drawers based on colours. Tagging is like sewing a little label on your socks that says when you bought them, how to wash them, and “if lost please return to the dude with the fat cat.” Categories add organization and tags add semantic information. A category can be a tag, but if you use your tags as categories you’ll eventually have a right old mess.
(photo by striatic)
WordPress doesn’t (yet) let you easily differentiate between tags and categories without using extra plugins, which means those of us who are cohabiting in a WordPress Multi-user ghetto like WordPress.com are stuck with the plain vanilla categories and the ugly mess that most tag clouds turn into. I have more categories than posts on my blog because I use “WordPress categories” for both tagging and categories. And I’ve finally realized that makes it near to impossible for me to properly organize my posts and for other people to read my site and find things of interest.
I’ve spent several days designing a blog that looks nice; it’s time for me follow through with the rest and climb out of the technical debt I’ve been incurring from my horrible overuse of categories and tags.
Lorelle on Tags
Lorelle is the number one source of all things WordPress. She has written a *lot* about categories verses tags, and even went into detail about her experience in recategorizing everything. I find it absolutely amazing that she managed to re-categorize her WordPress.com blog in only a couple of hours.
“Tags, however, are more like your blog’s index words. They are micro-categories. Do you use them when you visit a blog? I’m not and I’m wondering why.” — Lorelle
“I think of the two a little differently, which is why I offer both categories and tags on my main site: How can I best help a visitor navigate around my site.” — Lorelle
“categories equal tags, used by Technorati and other tagging directories as keywords to categorize your posts in their directories. If you want your posts to be found, this has to be considered.” — Lorelle
“With so much importance put on categories by WordPress, choosing your categories becomes a major decision. You can either use categories as tags and add a new category for every tag you need, creating a long list in your sidebar or elsewhere, or keep your category list short and add tags with another method.” — Lorelle
Categories in Action — How Do The Pros Do It?
When in doubt find an expert and copy them mercilessly. Here’s the categories for some of the top blogs about blogging and my thoughts on them.
ProBlogger: 31 Days to Building a Better Blog, Adsense, Advertising, Affiliate Programs, Blog Design, Blog Networks, Blog News, Blog Promotion, Blogging for Dollars, Blogging Tools and Services, Business Blogging, Case Studies, Chitika eMiniMalls, General, Miscellaneous Blog Tips, Other Income Streams, Podcasting, Pro Blogging News, ProBlogger Site News, Professional Blogger Interviews, Random Blog Tips, Reader Questions, Reader Tips, RSS, Search Engine Optimization, Writing Content, Yahoo Publishing Network
My thoughts: Could be improved with hierarchy and grouping similar categories together. Blogging for Dollars, Adsense, Affiliate Programs, Chitika, Other Income Streams, Yahoo Publishing Network should all be under the same umbrella.
CopyBlogger: Administrivia, AdWords, Affiliate Marketing, Blog Psychology, Blogging, Copywriting, Grammar, Headlines, Internet Marketing, Landing Pages, Link Building, Links, List Building, Metrics, Personal Branding, Persuasion, Podcasts, Popular, Promotion, RSS Marketing, Selling, SEO Copywriting, Social Media Marketing, Traffic, Tutorials, Video, What’s Your Story?, White Papers
My thoughts: I’d reduce a quarter of them from the list. Adding the “popular” category to track what people like is genius.
John Chow: AGLOCO, Cars, Fine Dining, Investing, Make Money Online, Ramblings, Review My Blog, ReviewMe Reviews, Technology, The Net, Videos, WordPress
My thoughts: There isn’t a lot of incentive to click on any of those titles.
Lorelle on WordPress: Blog Babble, Blog Challenge, Blogging Tips, Web Design, Web Wise, Weekly Digest, WordPress News, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips, WordPressdotcom, Writing
My thoughts: Only uses the letters B and W. :) Well thought out and descriptive.
DailyBlogTips: Blog Design, Blog Projects, Bloggers Face-Off, Blogging Basics, Blogosphere, Blogroll, Domain Names, Firefox, General, Monetize, Promotion, Reader Tips, SEO, Software, Strategy, Web Tools, WordPress, Writing Content
My thoughts: Firefox could be a subcategory of software. Not sure what Blogosphere, Blogroll or Strategy is about. Other than that it’s well done.
Successful Blogger: Analysis, Audience, B.A.D. Blogger, Basics, Blog Review, Bloggy Questions, Branding, Business Book, Business Life, Checklists, Comments, Community, Connecting Dots, Content, Customer Think, Design, Great Finds, Guest Writer, Idea Bank, Inside-Out Thinking, Interviews, Links, Liz Also Writes, Marketing, Motivation , One Way to CC It, Outside the Box, Perfect Virtual Manager, Productivity, SEO, SOB Business, Songs of Life, Strategy, Successful Blog, Survival Kit, Tech/Stats, Technorati, The Big Idea, Tips, Tools, Trends, Writing, ZZZ-FUN
My thoughts: Too many categories, maybe trim out some of the ones with less than double digits? She has a really impressive number of blog posts.
DoshDosh: Adsense Tips and Hacks, Advertising Networks, Affiliate Marketing Tips, Affiliate Programs, Blog & Website Promotion, Blogging Tips, Doshy Link Attack!, Get-Paid-To Websites, Internet Marketing, Link building and SEO, Make Money Blogging, Make Money with Social Media, Monetization Strategies, Money Making Tips, Niche Blogging Tutorials, Online Entrepreneurship, Popular Articles on Dosh Dosh, Revenue Sharing Websites, Useful Web Tools, Web Traffic Building Tips, WordPress Themes & Plugins’
My thoughts: Good use of long category names. I’m not sure how some of the categories are different.
What Do The Pros Recommend?
Daily Blogging Tips gives this advice on categories: be descriptive, limit the number to one screenful, try to put posts in only one category, and display the number of posts in categories.
One of the best things I’ve seen about categories is the recommendation to go through your search terms and base your categories off of how people are looking for things on your blog. Identifying the blog posts with the most comments helps as well. Lorelle also includes the helpful advice to turn trackbacks off before you start reorganizing your categories or you’re going to spam the crap out of yourself as you resave all of your posts (whoops, forgot about that).
(wes)
What Do I Recommend?
I’m a strong believer that the best way to learn something is to do it wrong. Repeatedly. My categories/tags are a mess, and this is what I’ve learned from it:
Content before categories: You can’t know how what your categories are until you know what you’re writing about. If you have a new blog don’t worry about them until later.
Categories are specific: Categories should tie together related content around a specific subject. The first time I reorganized my categories I tried to break everything down to “articles, opinions, blogging, links” but that doesn’t mean anything to anyone but me.
Use long category names: Make sure the category adequately describes what it contains and has a title people WANT to click on.
Use category descriptions: WordPress lets you put in some meta information about specific topics. Use it. You can even put links in these descriptions.
Niche is king: It is much easier to organize categories on a niche blog. Niche blogs can have very specific categories because they are all related to the same main subject. If you write about a multitude of subjects, then you need to have general categories with more specific categories underneath them.
Less is more: The more options you give a reader the less likely they are to interact with any of them. Too many categories/tags means I’m not inclined to click on any of them. Don’t have a lot of categories and don’t assign posts to too many categories so that readers feel like they’re always seeing the same posts in different categories.
Think maintenance: Time spent managing categories and tagging is time spent not writing posts or *gasp* doing something else. Too many categories makes it hard to pick a category for a new post.
Plan it: write down your planned list of categories before you start reorganizing and do a walk through your archive to see if they match.
Categorize your flagship content: Blogs always end up with a lot of “meh” or “look at this” type of posts. What you want to do with your categories is focus on the articles that add value to the reader. If you have posts that should be swept under the rug, then don’t bother categorizing them, or put them under something like Misc, Asides or Links.
Rule of 10: If a category isn’t going to have at least 10 posts, then it shouldn’t be a category of its own.
Use excerpts: Your category/archive pages should show excerpts instead of the full content. The excerpts should be long enough to entice the reader.
Screw tagging: This took me forever to realize, but tagging isn’t usually worth the time and effort. Tagging only works well when more than one person is tagging content. If it’s just one person doing it then it turns into a mess every time… a big cloud of nothing. Tags are useless for helping people find things if each tag only has one post. Tagging with WordPress makes categories unmanageable and unorganized. A well directed Google Custom Search engine can replace the need for tags.
The solution I came up with tags is to have some direct sub-categories under my main categories.
How Did I Do It?
These are the steps I took to drastically reduce the number of categories I had on my blog.
- Delete all categories willy-nilly
- I had to write a script to do this because the WordPress delete category interface is too slow (I’ll release it next week)
- Turn off the visual text editor on my User Profile
- Use the WordPress Category Resizer to make the category editor in the edit post window bigger.
- Fix manual navigation links to category pages and CSS effects
- Regenerate my Tag Clouds
- TODO: Run a link checker against my blog and fix all broken links
- TODO: Regenerate CSS for category icons
There’s a reason why I only do this every nine months or so.
What Does It Look Like?
- Becoming a Better Blogger (14)
- Book Reviews (18)
- Geeking Out (14)
- Humor (19)
- Internet Duct Tape News (15)
- Lifehacks (15)
- Miscellaneous (12)
- Programming and Software Development (57)
- Software (4)
- Web 2.0 and Social Media (23)
Still too many categories, but much better than before. Obviously I didn’t follow a lot of my own advice. There are still some categories that could get nuked, but I’m using them as tags.
The users will be presented with the following categories in the sidebar as a text widget.
- Becoming a Better Blogger
- Book Reviews
- Geeking Out
- Humor
- Internet Duct Tape News
- Lifehacks
- Programming and Software Development
- Software
- Web 2.0 and Social Media
All of the subcategories are used as tags.
Presenting: Black and Blue and Read All Over
I’ve been tweaking my blog theme furiously in preparation for the Sandbox CSS Design contest. Again I have to say that I have the utmost respect for web designers. Making a good blog design that looks nice is hard work. But I feel that I’ve gotten a lot better since I touched CSS for the first time, and the recent incarnation of IDT has many improvements over the existing style.
- Top header bar uses a much better technique for the buttons
- Global style reset so it should look the same between all browsers
- Support for asides (not that I use them often)
- Support for pretty-printing
- Georgia headings and Verdana text (thanks to these tips)
- Styling on the navigation links between posts
- Still readable in 640 width and 800 width
- General reduction in hacks
So please step out of your web browser and let me know about any pages that are looking wonky. Please cut-and-paste the link to whatever page looks wrong and mention the web browser you are using.
In general site news I’ve gone back to having a front welcome page, instead of having the latest post on the front page. I feel it gives people a better introduction to the site. I desperately need to weed my categories, but that’s a job for another week.
FeedBurner Tip: Create a private area for your RSS subscribers only
When it comes to blogging the most important people are the ones who take the time to read your RSS feed. They’re your long term readers who are in it for the long haul, much more so than the people who stop by your blog because they found it through a search engine or a social bookmarking site. They’re the ones who promote your articles, and the ones who’ll let you know when you’re falling off your blog game.
It’s important to build a rapport with them, and one of the ways to do that is by giving them special offers that aren’t available to regular readers of the website. This could be an electronic book, information on how to submit reader links, or beta invitations to other websites like Pownce and Joost.
But how do you send these links to your RSS readers without displaying them on your blog?
FeedBurner to the rescue
If you aren’t using Google’s FeedBurner service for your blog then you should be. (It has built-in integration with Blogger, and the rumour mill says that it will be added to WordPress.com at some point.) FeedBurner has these things called FeedFlares that show up at the end of your RSS feed. They can do things like dynamically list the number of comments on that post, or how many times it has been dugg or saved to del.icio.us.
It’s really simple to build your own FeedFlare that links to anything you want. Dosh Dosh has a detailed guide explaining how to do it. I wrote a list a while back explaining why I think FeedBurner is so great.
How to create a Custom FeedBurner FeedFlare
- Login to FeedBurner
- Click on My Feeds
- Click on the feed you want to edit
- Click on the Optimize tab
- Click on FeedFlare from the sidebar
- Under “Personal FeedFlare” cut-and-paste your generic feedflare link and click add to FeedFlare
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/variableflareunits/GenericFeedFlare.jspx? text=Some+text&link=http://www.somelink.com
I’ve created a Password-Protected Post on my blog for my RSS readers at http://internetducttape.com/easter-eggs/reader-appreciation/
So I would use the following custom FeedFlare:
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/variableflareunits/GenericFeedFlare.jspx? text=Thank+you+for+reading+IDT+(click+and+enter+password+-----) &link=http://internetducttape.com/easter-eggs/reader-appreciation/
That will give you something like this:
Thanks to Dosh Dosh for showing me how to do this. I had a previous hack in place where I had a del.icio.us account and I would use the FeedBurner splice with del.icio.us to share things with my RSS readers only. Using a FeedFlare is much more elegant.
My Favorite Posts from DailyBlogTip’s Project3
As part of Project3, Daniel from Daily Blog Tips has asked us to read and rate each other’s entries. I went through the big list of 115 entries and here is my (much shortened) list of favorites. They are mostly about blog advice or health tips. You can read my entry for Project 3 here: 3 Surefire Ways to Advertise Your Blog on a Shoe String
This list was put together using my delicious2blog tool that I will be making freely available by September 1st. If you would like to receive an announcement when the program is available then please subscribe to a new blog I’ve created purely for announcements of new software/tools/themes I’ve created at IDT Labs. Not only does it post a list of links from del.icio.us based on specific tags, but it also sorts them by the number of times they’ve been saved on del.icio.us, dugg or linked by other blogs.
My Favorites
- How I built 10,000 links in 3 weeks
(blogstorm.co.uk, 13 saves, 33 inbound links, 3 diggs)- From the article: ” Building a website is so easy these days that you really need to have remarkable content and linkbait if you are to succeed.”
- How To Sell Your Blog in 3 Easy Steps | Performancing.com
(performancing.com, 6 saves, 23 inbound links, 12 diggs)- From the article: ” Selling a blog may seem a daunting task, but it doesn’t need to be so difficult or stressing. Perhaps what you need is the right system to assist you in selling your blog.”
- 3 + 3 + 3 Places Where You Can Get Free Icons For All Seasons And Reasons
(lytebyte.com, 5 saves, 23 inbound links, 8 diggs)- Lots of sources for free icons when doing theme design.
- 3 Surefire Ways to Advertise Your Blog on a Shoe String « //engtech - internet duct tape
(internetducttape.com, 4 saves, 23 inbound links)- This was my post from the project 3 group writing project.
- 3 Reasons Why You Should Use Storytelling
(dailyblogtips.com, 4 saves, 23 inbound links)- From the article: ” t makes a big difference if you are reading about something that the author thinks it might be true compared to something that he actually experienced in the first place.”
- 3+1 Things Blogger’s Should Never Ever Do.
(clazh.com, 3 saves, 26 inbound links, 1 diggs)- Done steal other people’s content. Don’t be rude. Don’t steal ideas. Don’t post without checking your facts.
- Top 3+1 Sites about Blog Contests — Freakitude
(freakitude.com, 2 saves, 18 inbound links)- Wish I’d known about this for my older contests. It doesn’t seem like any of the sites have a huge following yet, but they can be a great way to get some free stuff by blogging.
- Blogging in Three Numbers | www.mapelli.info
(mapelli.info, 2 saves, 16 inbound links)- From the article: ” You have to build audience, to write valuable content, to get some links. You have to grow your authority, to create a network of bloggers from your niche, to find sponsors. Zero is the start of your journey.”
- 3 Ways to Track Your Comments
(pureblogging.com, 2 saves, 23 inbound links, 3 diggs)- Three tools for tracking the comments you leave on other blogs.
- Add Impact To Your Photos With –The Rule Of Three– | Epic Edits Weblog
(blog.epicedits.com, 2 saves, 18 inbound links)- This is one I learnt in photography school..
- 3 Reasons why I suck as a blogger — Binary Moon — The home of Ben Gillbanks
(binarymoon.co.uk, 19 inbound links)- I feel the same way as what he writes. My blog traffic peaked in feb/07 and now I’m redefining what my blog means to me.
- L’Amour De Blog: 3 reasons why blogging is like being in love | Romantic Ideas: Romance Tracker
(romancetracker.com, 26 inbound links)- From the article: ” If this post sounds all too familiar, your relationship with your blog may have already gone far beyond the platonic . . . and entered into the mysterious, intoxicating world of l’amour de blog.”
- Three reasons to try a marathon… | allaboutrunning.net
(allaboutrunning.net, 21 inbound links)- From the article: ” In daily life we can afford to indulge our mind’s complaining or moaning - it might get us down, but we generally manage to avoid grinding to a halt.”
- Top 3 Mistakes of Rookie Web Designers | Quartz Mountain Communications
(quartzmtn.com, 17 inbound links)- From the article: ” We aren’t talking about the real amateur problems, like cheesy animated GIFs, loud backgrounds, and horrible font choices. Here we’re looking at mistakes that you might see from professionals who get paid good money for their work.”
- 3 Reasons Why I Love the Bar Exam « Legal Andrew
(legalandrew.com, 20 inbound links)- From the article: ” Oh, Bar Exam, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways…”
- SeanPAune.com — Blog Archive — 3 Ways To Get Me To Not Visit Your Blog Again
(seanpaune.com, 18 inbound links)- From the article: ” Consider these helpful hints to keep your most precious commodity, your loyal readers, coming back.”
- 3 things you can do to have a great sick day | Aiming for Independence
(richgilchrest.com, 18 inbound links)- From the article: ” When Ferris Beuller called in sick, he didn’t just wake up one morning and say to himself, –Ferris, this would be a good day to not go to school. So what are we going to do today?– He planned ahead.”
- 3 Reasons Running is Good for You - Just Keep The Change
(justkeepthechange.com, 20 inbound links)- From the article: ” there are also a lot of reasons why running is good for you, and here are 3 of them.”
- Get Healthy In Three Minutes : 60 IN 3
(60in3.com, 21 inbound links, 1 diggs)- From the article: ” There seems to be a belief that being healthy if something you can only do if you have large chunks of spare time.”
- 3 reasons why comment relish is not good for your blog — Siteguide
(siteguide.us, 21 inbound links, 1 diggs)- From the article: ” automated messages do not elicit any appreciation from users. When I get an automated mail from any place I’ve been to, I simply know that my contribution was not acknowledged by a person but by a computer.”
- 2Dolphins - July Blogtipping
(2dolphins.com, 17 inbound links)- Had to pick this one because he’s blogtipping Webomatica and Hamelife.
- diabetic47: 3 Things I Have Done To Save My Own Life
(diabetic47.blogspot.com, 17 inbound links, 1 diggs)- From the article: ” For about 4 years I “played” with the idea I was diabetic and it almost ruined my life.”
- 3 Easy Steps to Becoming More Effective
(lssacademy.com, 17 inbound links)- Achieve flow by not stopping
Legend
- saves - number of people who bookmarked on http://del.icio.us
- inbound links - number of blogs who linked to it (max 100)
- diggs - number of people who dugg on http://digg.com
WordPress Tip: Create a Digest Post in 3 Seconds
It’s a good habit to post a summary of your recent posts once or twice a month, but like all blog maintenance it can be a pain in the butt if you don’t make it as easy as possible. Here’s a hack that’ll let you create a summary of all of your posts over X number of days using a handy-dandy Yahoo Pipe.
How to Create a Digest Post
- Click on this link to go to the Yahoo Pipe
- Change “Truncate feeds older than 7 days ago” to the number of days back you want to go
- Change “Enter RSS URL” to the feed address to match your blog
- I would use http://internetducttape.com/feed or my FeedBurner address
- Click on the Run Pipe button
- Cut and paste the output from the pipe into a new blog post using the WordPress rich text editor
Ta-da! Now you’ve made a digest post. You can edit the text and summaries as necessary, or adjust the date and re-run the pipe if the amount of time is not correct.
Advanced users can make a clone of that pipe and change it to have your feed url and the date range you want by default.
Sample Digest Post
This was cut and pasted from the pipe output with no modifications.
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Book Review: Overclocked by Cory Doctorow (and Fair Use Day)
Last night I finished reading Cory Doctorow’s new collection of short stories, Overclocked, and I was very surprised at how much I enjoyed it.
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Be My Friend (on social network sites)
Unless you’ve had your head in the sand (or *gasp* you aren’t obsessed with Internet culture), then you’ve noticed that we’re seeing more and more web service startups over the past few years. Last year I flamed the Bubble 2.0 soundly in “Web Too.Many.” Earlier this year I tried to get…
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Free Pownce Invites [del.icio.us]
I have some Pownce invites to give away. Click on the link.
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Best of Feeds - 24 links - design, tips, facebook, blogging, games
Tags: blogging, design, facebook, games, programming, tips, transformers, webdesign, writing
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3 Surefire Ways to Advertise Your Blog on a Shoe String
People always talk about how to sell ads on your blog, but it seems that no one talks about how to buy ads for your blog. (photo by riccardo) Time is money. Trite, but true. One of the handiest “life hacks” is to figure out how much money your time is worth (after taxes) and use that to [...]
Advanced Users
It doesn’t look great when you cut-and-paste the code from the Yahoo Pipe to a WordPress blog post. You can fix that by using my Yahoo Pipe Cleaner script with Greasemonkey.
- Best of Feeds - 26 links - video, blogging, web2.0, google, css
- Tags: blogging, css, design, google, programming, socialsoftware, tips, video, web2.0, webdesign, wordpress
- Facebook Tip: Broadcast your Facebook status as RSS
- RSS is one of the most useful tools out there for moving information around on the web. Recently the concept of “micro-blogging” status updates has become very popular with applications like Facebook, Twitter and Pownce. The only problem is that it is a pain to update many sites at the…
- How Do People Use Google Reader with Internet Explorer?
- Any computer geek worth his salt has been through the drill: you go to visit a family member for dinner and eventually they mention some arcane problem they’ve been having with software you long ago expunged from all of your computers. Common culprits are the Unholy Triad: Microsoft Outlook,…
- Best of Feeds - 34 links - blogging, greasemonkey, facebook, programming, wordpress
- Tags: blogging, code, comments, facebook, firefox, greasemonkey, humor, management, programming, socialsoftware, tools, wordpress
- The Solution to Social Network Site Fatigue
- Social network site fatigue is when you’re sick and tired of trying to find your friends when everyone jumps ship to the Next Big Thing. The biggest problem with the web 2.0 revolution of “social network apps” is that there is no universal identifier. In real life, governments use…
See the full list of free software I have created.
You can get frequent updates about all of my new software, tools or blog themes by subscribing to IDT Labs by RSS or by email. Or you could just subscribe to my main blog, Internet Duct Tape.
More Pipes
Here’s a list of more Yahoo Pipes I’ve created.
3 Surefire Ways to Advertise Your Blog on a Shoe String
People always talk about how to sell ads on your blog, but it seems that no one talks about how to buy ads for your blog.
(photo by riccardo)
Time is money.
Trite, but true. One of the handiest “life hacks” is to figure out how much money your time is worth (after taxes) and use that to as a basis for deciding if a time saving service is worth it’s cost (assuming you have disposable income). The classic example is to hire help for around the home or to go out for dinner. Compare the spent time doing it yourself to the money you’d spend paying someone to do it for you and find an acceptable ratio.
One of the greatest lies told in the blogosphere is “write better content to get more readers and more traffic.” Great content without promotion will always fail to reach wide audience. Some form of promotion is always necessarily, usually by getting links from a more popular site, or by having a reader base that promotes your content for you.
This is how I know that I’m not a writer: the best writing comes because you have something to say, not because you’re trying to achieve some level of popularity. I know I have thought “why write if no one is reading?” Obviously, I have some deep-seated issues involving being unpopular in elementary school and trying to find validation on the Internet instead of finding my own happiness inside me; consider this my cry for help.
(photo by peregrino)
Writing content takes time and so does marketing. I would estimate I spend more time promoting my site, networking and building relationships with other bloggers than I do writing content. My combined focusing on writing and promotion is the only reason why anyone has every read my site — not because my content attracts readers like bees to honey.
Writing and promoting leads to lost hours, but time is money. Is it possible to replace time spent on marketing with money spent on advertising?
My time is worth around $20/hour to me. Blogging is my hobby, not a money making venture. This would be purely to reduce time I already spend — not an attempt to “grow my business.” Can a small monetary investment replace my own time building links?
In an hour I can probably drive around a guaranteed minimum of 100-300 hits to a blog post by prepping it for search engines, submitting it to social networks, contacting other bloggers and plugging it in forums and blog comments.
The sums of money are small because 1) I’m not doing this as a business investment and because 2) it is harder to compare time to money with larger sums of money. I also feel that small sums are more realistic to what a blogger can afford. This is my first time trying to buy advertising so the results may be laughable — please give better advice in the comments.
Three Good Ways to Buy Blog Ads (and Two Bad Ways)
BAD: Strange Schemes - RentMyChest - $50/life
Everyone has heard of the Million Dollar Homepage due to the massive main stream media coverage it garnered. Lots (and lots) of similar ideas sprung up. Chris Pirillo came up with the oh-so-strange RentMyChest.com. Buy a linked word on his chest for $50 for life. Result: the traffic is low — less than three hits a day. Ratio has been less than 10 hits/dollar so far.
AVERAGE: Social Networks - StumbleUpon Advertising Campaign - $10/once
Any blogger who has had a post stumbled has seen the how they turn the referrer url into an ad for StumbleUpon (genius). They are the most straightforward with a direct cost per vistor of $0.05 a hit. $10 got me 200 hits, although my stats software only said 130 (my fault for having too long of a landing page). There were only three positive stumbles, which didn’t lead to any increased SU traffic once the campaign was over. Ratio is 13 hits/dollar. (It should have been 20 hits/dollar but I want to keep the metrics even with the rest.)
GOOD: Blog Advertising - Adbrite - $12/month
I chose to buy an ad on the popular blogger Violent Acres’ site because the cost was so low. I chose the “I support Violent Acres” text which made me the second most popular ad on the site with around 7-9 hits a day. When the author wrote a post directly about her advertisers that lead to an increase of around 100-180 hits for two days. Ratio was about 40 hits/dollar.
GOOD: Social Networks - StumbleUpon Sponsorship - $20/year
It is harder to measure the results of this. By becoming a sponsored StumbleUpon community member an account gets featured more often. But being a solid well-networked member of the StumbleUpon community seems to be a much bigger factor than whether or not you are a sponsor. I’ve seen StumbleUpon block users from submitting articles from certain blogs, but when contacted SU never responded.
GREAT: Group Writing Project with Prize / Contest - $15/contest
Group writing projects are a great way to get links and interactive community participation. The downside is that their success is largely a factor of how well they are promoted - Probloggers like Darren Rowse can get over 300 links in a group writing project. I got 23 links, 1000 hits and more importantly new readers because of my first contest. I consider it a resounding success. Ratio was 67 hits/dollar.
My second contest did 49 links and 1450 hits, and my third contest did 19 links and 860 hits.
Is it worth spending money to promote your blog?
I’m still divided on it. The results aren’t going to be any better than what you can build naturally through promotion, but it can be a good way to give support to other bloggers/sites you enjoy. Contests seem to be a great way to engage your readers and help build a community around your blog — but there isn’t any time savings compared to how you would normally promote a post. Running a contest is worth it for building up your community but it isn’t a short-cut (and too much self-promotion can drive away readers). Spending the same time and energy on something else other than a contest would likely get similar results.
(photo by greefus)
Ways to Advertise Your Blog (That I Didn’t Try)
Directory Listing
More info on SEOMoz: ” I think that this is a ton of bull. I think that you can blow a load of dough and a lot of time chasing these links - which are mostly going to be low quality - and bring you very little real traffic.”
Blog Advertising - Text Link Ads
The ads are served as part of the web content so they pass ad-blocking software and are counted by search engines. It’s like buying your way on to the blogroll. Text Link Ads would charge $69 to $83 per month for a single link on my blog — so it’s out of my “on a shoestring” price range. One thing I’ve noticed from being on many blog rolls is that they don’t usually lead to many hits. More info at SEOMoz.
Blog Advertising - Direct
Some blog owners who sell ads will allow you to negotiate direct prices. This is a better deal for both parties because there is no middle man. DailyBlogTips writes about direct sale from the seller’s point of view.
Blog Advertising - Networks
“Most blog networks allow users to purchase credits with money, and the price is really convenient. You should be able receive hundreds of visitors or to get thousands of banner impressions for less than 10 dollars. Some blog networks that sell credits include Blog Explosion, Blog Soldiers and Blog Advance.” More info at DailyBlogTips.
Blog Advertising - Sponsored Reviews
PayPerPost, ReviewMe and SponsoredReviews all let you find bloggers who are will to write about your site if you give them some cash. It could be a good way to target blogs that have the same niche, although there is no guarantee they’ll have anything nice to say about you. Blogging Tips talks about his experience buying reviews. Buying paid reviews can be a great way to promote a contest.
RSS Advertising - FeedBurner
FeedBurner has been selling ads in RSS feeds for a while, and that’s only going to increase now that they’ve been bought by Google. You are targeting people who read blogs and people who subscribe to RSS feeds. They have detailed demographics on the audiences. aVC talks about buying Feedburner ads, and how each subscriber makes him around $0.60/month on the ads he sells through FeedBurner.
Search Engines - Google AdWords
” Adwords is probably the most efficient method to generated raw traffic for your website. In order to get started you should create an account, add lots (by lots I mean hundreds if not thousands) of keywords that are related your site and set the maximum Pay-per-Click rate at $0.01. After that raise the rate by $0.01 every week or so until you start getting the desired amount of daily clicks.” More info at DailyBlogTips. You can also directly target a specific site using Google AdWords.
Social Networks - YouTube
This is like direct blog advertising, but instead you contact the creators of popular videos on YouTube and ask them to embed a watermark with your blog url for a small price. WebLogHits talks about their experience.
Social Networks - Facebook
Facebook lets you create flyers with 5000 impressions for $10. This sounds like a great ratio, except that so few of those impressions click on the ads.
Social Networks - Digg and User/Submitter
There are several underground sites that will “vote” for your site on social link sharing networks. This can lead to you getting banned from those networks, and isn’t like to be worth it in the long term. Digg seems to bring less hits and less links then it ever did before.
(photo by thoth92)
7 Tips for Buying Advertising for Your Blog
- Niche
- Buy ads from sites that would have a similar audience who would also appreciate your content.
- Deep Link
- Instead of linking to the front page of your blog, link to a particular page that gives the reader value. Try to convert them into a regular reader.
- Other Blogs
- By buying ads on other blogs not only do you support other bloggers but you are targeting an audience that already reads blogs.
- Choose Sites that Directly Mention Their Sponsors
- A link in the sidebar only gets a fraction of the hits compared to a blog that directly thanks the people who have sponsored them.
- Mention the Site You Are Advertising On
- Ads that mention the site they are advertising on cut through the blinders people have when reading websites.
- Avoid Pyramid Schemes and Pay Directories
- They don’t work. When was the last time you clicked on a link on a million dollar homepage or on from a blog directory?
- Ad-blocking
- If the ad would be blocked by ad blocking software then you might think twice about using it if you have an audience that uses ad-blocking software.
This was written as part of Daily Blog Tips “Project 3″ contest. Vote for it by linking to this article from your blog!
CSS Tip: Building 3D Buttons with CSS for the Sandbox Theme
Yes, it’s another post on CSS design with Sandbox. Feel free to skip.
One of the nice/painful things about designing for the Sandbox WordPress theme is that it forces you to use CSS to do the things you want to do. There’s no sneaking in there to tweak the underlying structure to get more convenient selectors, it’s CSS or nothing.
An often requested tip is how to do 3d buttons for the menu bar at the top of the page. It’s done using the common “sliding door” technique where one image is the front plus middle, and another image forms the end. I’ll be using the images and technique from the Dark Liquidcard 2.0 theme by Jori Avlis in this example, along with the Sandboxed example blog.
Image Is Everything
The starting point is to create two graphics for your 3d buttons. One image will have the left-and-middle portion and the other will have only the right portion. If you want the button to look different when it is highlighted (or when that page is selected), then put the highlighted version in the same image file right underneath it! That way the entire image is downloaded once and there isn’t a delay the first time a user hovers over the button.
In these images the button is 46 pixels high.
Getting Started
Here is what the menu looks like without any CSS:
We’ll start off by applying some basic styles: turn off the list style, remove any padding that might get in the way.
div#menu ul {
list-style: none;
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
width: 100%;
height: 46px;
}
Adding the 3d Buttons
Now we’ll add the 3d buttons as background images. We’ll start with the left-and-middle button first. It will attach to the list element (LI). You will have to adjust the padding so that the text is centered properly with respect to the image. Float left will change the orientation of the list. (Note: I changed the text color to white so that it would show up against the image)
div#menu ul li {
float: left;
background: url(http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n296/engtechwp/website/left.png)
no-repeat left top;
padding: 10px 0px 12px 10px;
}
Now add the right button. It will attach to the link anchor within the list element (LI A). Again, take care with the padding so that the text is centered properly.
div#menu ul li a {
background: url(http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n296/engtechwp/website/right.png)
no-repeat top right;
padding: 10px 25px 12px 10px;
}
Adding a Hover Effect
Now we want to show the hover effect. This is done by shifting the background image down 46 pixels. We’ll also disable the underline effect by turning off text-decoration.
div#menu li:hover {
background-position: 0% -46px;
}
div#menu li a:hover {
text-decoration: none;
}
div#menu li:hover a {
background-position: 100% -46px;
}
Download the CSS File
WordPress CSS Tip: Design for Sandbox Theme in a sandbox
In case you missed the last post, there is a CSS design contest using the Sandbox theme for WordPress. That post will explain what the heck it is all about.
I’ll be the first to admit that I only know the tip of the iceberg when it comes to CSS design, but one ‘workhack’ that easily applies to any kind of programming activity is rapid development. The concept is simple: reduce the time between action and result to the shortest amount of time possible so you can get more done. My number one tip for doing a fast CSS design is to do it all on your own machine instead of doing it live on the Internet (or wordpress.com). It will save you lots of time and headaches.
I’ve taken the sample blog and example CSS template provided by Scott Wallick and made a very easy to use downloadable archive. It contains nothing but the HTML files, image files and CSS from the sample blog. It can get you redesigning Sandbox in less than a minute.
Getting Started
- Download the Sandboxed zip file
- If you want to work with the version of Sandbox on WordPress.com then grab this zip instead
- Unzip it
- Open index.html in your web browser
- Edit style.css
- Refresh your web browser
- Repeat #4 to #5
I find it easier to work on HTML files saved on my computer than creating a dummy blog on a fresh WordPress installation. If you feel the same way then downloading this archive is right for you.
Pick The Right Tools
There are several requirements for any tool that makes designing CSS easier:
- editing with syntax highlighting plus auto-completion
- showing you what CSS selectors are available on the page you are editing
- inspecting why a design looks the way it does
I heartily recommend the combination of the Firefox web browser with the Firebug extension. The learning curve for Firebug is a bit steep, but it will save you a lot of time in the long run because it is chock full of goodies as can be seen on this page.
Testing in Multiple Browsers
One of the hardest things I find in web design is getting something to look the same in multiple browsers. Having multiple browsers on hand to check out your changes locally is a must if cross-browser compatibility is important to you. Here are the top browsers to consider. Market share numbers are from w3counter (thanks Daniel).
- Internet Explorer 6 - 50% market share
- Click on that link to get the completely standalone version of IE6 that you can run side by side with IE7
- Internet Explorer 7 - 17% market share
- Firefox 2 - 15% market share (and 9% market share for FF 1.5)
- Safari 2 - 2% market share
- Finally available for Windows users
- Opera 9 - less than 1% market share
The market share should give you an idea of which browsers to spend the most time designing in. I find Firefox the easiest to work with. Jalaj gives a few other suggestions.
One highly recommended technique is “reseting” CSS properties at the beginning of the file to remove slight differences between browsers.
Some people like doing a Global white space reset by zeroing both margin and padding for all elements at the top of their stylesheets. Eric Meyer’s Global Reset, Christian Montoya’s initial CSS file, Mike Rundle’s initial CSS file, Ping Mag’s initial CSS file. [Roger Johansson]
More explanation of Christian Montoya’s initial CSS
Know What Size to Design For
It is important to test your design in different screen resolutions. Market share numbers are from w3counter. Something else to keep in mind is that those big old CRT monitors and those funky new LCD monitors display colours differently.
- 1024×768 50.43%
- 1280×1024 17.03%
- 800×600 8.89%
- 1280×800 8.38%
I recommend the Window Resizer extension for Firefox for rapidly switching resolutions. Firebug may be able to do it as well, I am by no means an expert.
Advanced Design Considerations
There’s a lot out there to learn about CSS design, here are some highly recommended links with more information. If you have any other suggestions, drop them in the comments.
- Typography is the most important part of CSS design — use Typetester to compare fonts
- GIF, JPG, PNG? What image format should I use?
- Choosing “web safe” colours or use the color lab on the web
- Browse through color swatches at Adobe Kuler
- What text size is best? 100% easy to read! (100E2R)
- Different ways to style links
- 70 CSS tips from the masters
Win Cash Prizes for your CSS Design for Sandbox
Web pages (ie: what you are looking at right now) are composed of many things. If you think of web pages as a house, HTML is the foundation and structure while CSS is the aluminum siding, brickwork and paint. HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language and CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. A passing knowledge of both of them is essential if you want to run your own website.
HTML Example
CSS Example
The whole idea behind HTML and CSS is that you use HTML to format your web page (or blog post) with things like headers, bold, lists and tables. Then you use CSS to style those elements so that they look the way you want them to. The whole idea behind it all is that you can build the structure with HTML once, and then change the look of it whenever you want to using CSS.
WordPress, Sandbox and CSS
If you want to change the way your WordPress blog looks there are two ways to do it. The first way is to change your theme. This changes the underlying HTML formating structure. The second way is to leave the theme alone and change your CSS. If you are running a blog hosted on WordPress.com, then the only way to customize your theme is to buy the CSS editing upgrade, choose a base theme, and then use CSS to redesign it. The preferred WordPress theme for CSS designing is Sandbox because it gives you so many things to play with.
Internet Duct Tape is hosted on WordPress.com using the Sandbox theme and a custom CSS design by yours truly. If I can find the time, I will be participating in the contest.
Win Prizes for Your Sandbox Theme
The creator of Sandbox is running a theme design competition with monetary prizes. The pot is getting pretty big right now, and the top six designs can win between $50 to $750 US. Even if you’ve never tried your hand at designing CSS before, this is the perfect time to give it a shot.
Scott has put together sample blog content for designing CSS for Sandbox and he also has a template file with all of the Sandbox CSS selectors.
Free Sandbox Designs
There are several free Sandbox designs available:
- Created or ported by Adam Freetly
- Created or ported by that girl again
- Kubrick ported by Scott
- K2 Lite ported by Almost Effortless
- K2 ported by Zeo
- Got a freely available Sandbox design? Leave a comment with a link!
People Are Talking About It
More coverage about the competition can be found at
weblogs tools collection: “I thought it was a good time for a new theme competition—or rather a “designs” competition. It has been around two years since the last successful WordPress theme competition (participants of the competitions in 2006 will roll their eyes and would include me).”
wank: “I’m hoping this’ll be as successful as last year’s Style Contest, and that Automattic will be as generous with their support as Six Apart were with theirs. (Matt has already thrown in $500 prize money, which is a good start, but a little linkage wouldn’t hurt.) “
Adam: “Scott’s organizing a wordpress design competition, purely in CSS. which means it’s open to:
* wordpress.com users
* anyone who can use CSS, since PHP and javascript won’t be judged”
Small Potato: “Conveniently for Scott’s Sandbox theme and W