You might want to skip this post if you aren’t hosted on WordPress.com.
You may have heard talks about how “Related Posts” was going to become an integrated feature in the WordPress core. Last friday they released a feature called “Possibly Related”. They use Sphere.com’s technology to analyze what posts are related to the current post and add links to the bottom of it. Doesn’t sound bad, right? Wait for it…
For WordPress Multiuser (like WordPress.com) they’re including links to other “related” posts by other people.
Two of my blogging heroes and inspiration Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky have joined together on a new venture called StackOverflow: overflowing with awesomeness. They are also doing a weekly podcast, and you can download the first 45 minute podcast here (8 MB). In the discussion, Joel makes a great comment: Windows Vista gives you change without giving you any value. As a Windows XP user there is no compelling reason to upgrade because you’re going to have to relearn where everything is, but you don’t get any new and compelling features or applications to offset that.
This perfectly explained my resistance to the new WordPress 2.5 admin interface.
You know the story. You’ve been using LiveJournal since 1999. It’s your home. You’re familiar with it. You’re on the list of notable LiveJournal users. But times they be a changin’. You’re friends are all leaving LiveJournal for WordPress because it’s a better C-M-S (whatever that is). You’ve switched to WordPress, but everything looks strange and confusing.
Don’t worry, as usual engtech has your back.
Blogs have a way of keeping track of who is linking to them using trackbacks or pingbacks. It’s a good idea in theory because it helps you follow the discussion as it spreads to new areas, but in practice it is mostly filled with spam because getting a well-placed trackback on a popular website can be a good source of traffic.
Instead of using trackbacks, why not use referrers?
In Blogger GTD, Leo mentioned that it was a good idea to have one inbox for all your blogging related notifications. I hate cluttering in my inbox, but I do agree that it makes sense to have a single point of reference rather to spend 5 minutes checking some information in one place and then spend 5 minutes checking information in another place. As Skelliewag says, those 5 minutes add up over the course of a day and by the end of it you’ve wasted an hour.
Directing everything to my inbox would never work for me, but it is possible to have a single start page for all your blog maintenance activities using Netvibes.
By engtech
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Also posted in RSS Syndication, Technology, Technorati, Twitter, WordPress.com Tips
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Tagged blog stats, blogging, Facebook, gmail, igoogle, maintenance, netvibes, productivity, rss, stats, Technorati, trick, Twitter
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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.
I’ve created two useful diagrams for WordPress.com bloggers and more important for people who offer support in the WordPress.com help forums.
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.
This means war.
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 Sandbox sample blog and example CSS template provided by Scott Wallick and made a very easy to use downloadable archive.
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.
All wordpress.com bloggers can do the same thing for their blog by adding “?random” to the URL of their main site.
This is a guest post by Daria Black of Webernet Architect
When I first heard of WordPress widgets, I was appropriately disgruntled. ‘Widgets? We don’t need no stinking Widgets,’ I grumbled. I was resistant towards the notion of widgetizing my themes because it meant having to change my style of design from using divs to separate the content in my sidebar to placing everything in an unordered list.
But when I saw how they make the end user’s life a little bit easier and how they can make an already powerful content management system even better, I can’t praise the creators of the Widgets plugin enough. So to show you just how creative one can be with the plugin, I’m going to share with you a way to create a template where you can have different widgets on each of your template’s page views; the index, single post and Pages.
This is a guest post by Sulz of Bloggerdygook
Posting support questions in the Wordpress.com support forums is an easy way to get an answer. But is it the best way?
7 Essential Things You Should Know Before Posting in WordPress.Com Forums
A tag cloud is a list of all the tags/categories on your blog where the tags appear bigger if there are more posts in that group.
Tag Cloud Generator connects to your Wordpress.com account, downloads information about your tags/categories and generates HTML code you can cut-and-paste into a blog post or a blog page. It’s not as simple as running a plug-in, but it is the only solution available for Wordpress.com bloggers who want a tag cloud.
Splashcast lets you create embedded multimedia that you can stick on any webpage that support embedding flash videos. It offers direct integration with Flickr and Youtube. Other people can subscribe to your splashcast and you can host this single splashcast on multiple sites.
This is how to use it with Wordpress.com, and several things they could do to improve the service.
WordPress 2.0.7 was released yesterday. Click here for details of the fixed vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, that was not soon enough for several web masters who run SEO sites. A hacker going by the name of FuckingPirate has taken down three popular SEO sites so far and published a hit list with more.
I don’t know about you but my Akismet spam folder on my WordPress.com is filled to the brim (56 pages deep, which is ridiculous if you consider that anything older than 15 days is automatically deleted). It’s considered good form to take a peek to make sure that no one’s comments are being accidently deleted, [...]
This is installment #5 of the WordPress theme review. My goal is to provide a clear document of the themes for the WordPress.com community. I also want to report all theme bugs to improve the experience of WordPress.com community. Support this project by linking to http://engtech.wordpress.com/tools/wordpress/wordpress-theme-reviews/ on your WordPress.com blog.
The themes released in October 2006 [...]
Regular readers may already have realized that I’m a WordPress.com fan boy. Anyone who has come from Blogspot will tell you how good things are over here (not that there isn’t the occasional problem – I’m the reason the Delete Post button turns red when you hover over it). I don’t post about every new [...]
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