The purpose of this post is twofold in terms of blogging.  First I wanted to introduce to you two plugins you might not have ever seen.  Secondly I wanted to talk about professionalism for designers.

Plugin One is an affiliate publishers best friend.  Adrotate is every bit as good as Max Blog Press’s Ninja Affiliate.  Not only will the last several versions of this plugin provide you with quick affiliate masking slash redirect through your own site, it keeps track of your banner impressions and click throughs.  Version 2.4 even has a feature to block banners when they reach a certain number of impressions or clicks. Unlike Ninja Affiliate version 2.3.1 of AdRotate works quite well in WorPress Mu.  There are things to be aware of though.  If you use the banner wizard you can not later make the link an auto redirect link, you will have to stop rotating the banner and make a new entry.  Secondly in version 2.4 he automatically sticks a link back to his site in your meta information links, there doesn’t seem to be a way to stop this short of editing the code that I can see which is in direct violation of wordpress.org rules for plugins.

The second plugin I wanted to mention this week is Stumble for WordPress.  This is basically your very own blog version of Stumbleupon.  You can edit the settings to decide what percentage of stumbles are for pages on your site and which are for network wide.  I use this on most of my blogs and find different ratios better suit my purposes on different blogs.  I recommend using the defaulkt setting as traffic will start coming in from other sites the more that goes out from your site.  This is a fine plugin that will really help you build exposure from other sites.  I highly recommend it.  I also recommend that you leave the optional link back to the plugin site intact.  People who provide a great product deserve some credit.

Now on to the second part of this post, professionalism.  i wok up this morning with a ping from a website I didn’t reconize, Making The Web.  This is the Stumble for Wordpress designer’s site.  I was quite pleased that my site, Brad’s Tiny World had served up more network stumbles by a large margin over the next nearest site.  Brendon didn’t go out of his way to get backlinks or praise from me, he simply made a post and said thanks, good work, here are the leaders.  He makes fine plugins and doesn’t try and take over your blog with links and garbage proclaiming how great he is.  This is professionalism and not what you get from Arnan who makes AdRotate.

Arnan has a long history of not only being unprofessional when you question the quality of his plugins and showing some incompetence as a designer. Truth be told he is quite an asshole who seems to think if you don’t love his plugins or say anything bad about them, it is some sort of attack on him personally.  By extension if you read some of his rambling not directly related to his plugins but on the same site you will find he he also takes any lack of enthusiasm for Apple products as personal disrespect towards him as well.  I would like to say the behavior is typical of all mac fanatics, but he suffers from some additional megalomania, he also seems like the type who would preorder a Mac Book Wheel or voted for Scott MacIntyre on American Idol had he been listed as an iScott.

BTW if you choose to use AdRotate make sure you use the call on website for theme insertion.  If you use the call in the readme file which has been told is wrong repeatedly nothing will show up.  Use <?php echo adrotate_banner(‘1′); ?> not <?php adrotate_banner(‘1′); ?> which is what the readme file still says several releases after it quit working.  Now that he has been called out let’s see how long it takes hime to fix it.

Localizing images on your wordpress blog often times is a tedious task, but something you need to do if you want to avoid hotlinking images in your blog.  I hate hotlinking to images for several reasons.  The first and foremost reason is it is bad form and impolite if you don’t have permission.  The second thing is you have no idea when, if or how that file might change.  This is less of a problem these days since disk space is cheap and people are often using image hosting services such as flickr.  In the old days though it was not uncommon for perverse webmasters to put up pornographic pictures using the same title that was being hotlinked too.  I remember seeing several business meetings go awry from this and learned quickly just how bad this practice can be.

Do I still hotlink even knowing the potential dangers?  The answer is yes and no.  I often times grab an image on the fly when I am posting, especially if I’m using Scribefire or Windows Live Writer and not working directly with the wordpress interface.  That said I never do it for very long, usually long enough to get back to my desk and work on my blog properl, never more than a day.

There is a way to easily fix your hotlinking problems with wordpress plugins once you sit down to do it.  To make the most of this process you will need an ftp program and for windows users I recommend FileZilla.  The two plugins you will want to have are Hot Linked Image Cacher and Velvet Blues Update URLs.

The first step  is upload the plugins and install both plugins.  You will either need to use your ftp program or file management system on your server to create a directory upload in the Hot link Image Cache plugin folder and set the file permissions to 777.  Your first time running the HLIC plugin you will want to run it with the all setting to cache every static image you are hotlinking too.  After this time you can run for individual posts by simply using the post ID number.  The downside to this plugin is it puts everything in its own upload directory rather than the standard uploads directory.  On the plus side of this plugin it leaves any link you had associated with the image intact so you don’t have to worry about affiliate links getting broken.  This was my original intent in using the plugin, a program I run on another site requires me to host all the images and one post had ninety seven separate images linking to the advertiser page.

The second step is move the image files to your uploads directory.  The safest way to do this is download the contents of you HLIC plugin upload folder, then upload the contents to your uploads folder.  The big reason for this is when you go to export and import the data from another site the automatic uploading of images only recognizes the /wp-content/uploads/ folder when importing imagesm using a 755 permission set it is also a more secure directory.  You could simply use your FTP program to move the directory contents but should something go wrong with the url changes you could find yourself having problems.  When the folder contents are uploaded it is time to run the Update Urls command.  Start by inserting http://myblog.com/wp-content/plugins/hot-linked-image-cacher/upload/  then changing it to http://myblog.com/wp-content/uploads/.  It is a simple efficient process and I have never had a failure when changing this, but never think it can’t happen to you.  The downside of this plugin is it doesn’t alter the data in your meta data fields, which can be problematic if you have changed domain names and link through the meta data fields to such niceties as thumbnail images for every post.  The plus side is it makes updating any and every url in your blog extremely easy.

My last word on hotlinking is if you are worried about your original images then you should be using some for of hotlinking protection.  There are a couple of wordpress plugins, but most effectily are your server side options.

In my quest to provide an every better experience for all my readers I have added a new feature in the way of the WP Link Directory. This handy plugin allows site owners to make use of the constant flow of internet traffic. Whether you are actively promoting your wordpress based site or not, this plugin also comes with some handy searchable identifiers. Like CommentLuv, NoFollow Free and KeywordLuv blogs using the WP Link Directory can seach out blogs using it by searching for “Powered by WP Link Directory“. If you don’t want potential spammers finding you that way their is the option of removing the text link. There is also the option of requiring a reciprocal link for sites of a designated page rank to increase your own backlinks and a nofollow option. Post Origin: Local News and Newspapers Click this link to get your own syndication code. Update:  Be advised Wordpress 2.7 beta 2 has problems displaying this plugin.  It works but the display is kind of screwy and it hangs up on the scripting a bit.

There are a growing list of things that I already hate about WordPress 2.7.  Most of them are minor issues that can either be ignored or simply written off as quirks I don’t really need to worry about for my style of blogging.  The major issue is still the layout.

Wordpress 2.7 Write Screen. Click to open full size in new frame or window.

This is not some minor petty concern. This is flat out bad design.  Any blogger worthy of the name is using some plugins and other tools on the administration side of the blog.  This is as it should be, since customization has always been a prime feature of WordPress.  I sincerely hope someone soon comes up with an administration plugin to fix the layout flaws.

Here is the major problem with WordPress 2.7.  As you will notice in the full screen image all of the internal links for WordPress 2.7 have moved to the left hand side of the screen.  in western languages we read from left to right meaning the most important or most often used information should always be put at the top left of our viewing area.  Links to the dashboard and everything else on the administration side of things clutters your field of view while posting.  There is a good chance I will be using ScribeFire even more than I have previously, because of this layout flaw.

Getting to post through scribefire doesn’t make the problems all better with a soft kiss from the open source faeries.  Writing a proper post in requires more than you typing in a few lines of text putting in a picture and calling it good.  There are all sorts of things you need your write window for, that scribefire can’t do.  Second problem with having the internal linking on the far left of the screen is the scroll bars for most of us are on the far right of the screen.  This means mousing clear across the screen to get to the links and then mousing back to scroll down the new screen.  This is not only inefficient, it is ergonomically unsound.  it wouldn’t surprise me if this layout doesn’t cause some serious problems for people who already have hand and wrist problems.

While the layout of administration links sucks, I am not totally displeased with other things about Wordpress 2.7.  The write page is back to making good use of available space.  My categories by default are just to the right of the post box.  On top of that the components are modular and can be moved around the page.  This is great design, and a great feature for those of us who use certain things far more than others.

In the end you will either love this design, or you will hate it.  Either way though if you are serious about your blogging then WordPress is still your best option and WordPress 2.7 will be the platform they keep the security fixes up to date on, so you will use it.

For those who have been eagerly anticipating the release of Wordpress 2.7, it is getting closer and closer. For those of you dreading a new release, let me say I am with you. I finally got around to installing the latest build of Wordpress 2.7 and let’s just say this is not going to make a lot of people happy.

First off is the dashboard setup.

If you didn’t care for the way the screwed things up going from 2.3 to 2.5 let me say, you are going to hate these changes even more.  I am unsure what kind of mentality actually is going on here.  It is like they have brought in design consultants from the auto industry and Microsoft who said ’screw with the way it looks and the general layout of everything, if we confuse the user with something shiny and new we can blame any problems on operator errors’.  Thankfully Wordpress doesn’t charge for tech support or we would all be fucked.

They get an F for the new radical design.  Design shifts need to be gradual during the same version release.  This is the kind of thing you implement between version 2 and 3 or 2,3, and 4.  I will save the rest of the grade when they finally release it.  Unless you are a masochist I really suggest you avoid downloading it today.

In the early days of web design one of the few interactive things you could do with your readers was set up a guest book. At first this was next to impossible because almost anyone and everyone who had a website was operating on free sites like Geocities, Angelfire, or Tripod. There was no cgo access unless you paid for it, so there was no interaction beyond the simple mail form. Eventually most of them had heard the call for interaction and offered up ready made guest books. By that time it was really too late to do anything about it, blogging had been invented and was taking quick hold on sites like LiveJournal and Blogger. The world of interactivity was upon the average website owner, and we went from simple users to publishers.

The advent of blogging with threaded post and comments we respond to or at the very least should be responding to left behind the old guest book format. Users could now interact with authors directly over on subject specific ideas. Simply put the guest book was stiff, bereft of use, pushing up digital daisies, had run down the curtained screen saver, had emptied the recycle bin with ccleaner, overwritten multiple times with randomized ones and zeroes, and joined auto-starting background midi files as things Skippy should never put on a site. The guest book was and ex-webpage! That was until I figured out a use for it.

I know you are thinking this guy is ought of his bloody mind. Well I might be, but never the less I know how to make the guest book useful once again. Every blogger gets comment like ‘this is nice’ and ‘I like the post’. For those of us kind bloggers using a dofollow system this is annoying crap. However with a nofollow guest book and a move comments plugin we can preserve those comments, because some of them actually mean what they say and could give a damn about the backlink, and keep our blogs from being fodder for spammers.  The second plugin you will want if you wish to keep dofollow status is a conditional plugin that allows for conditional nofollow noindex posts and pages.

Once you have your plugin installed you can start by creating the guest book. If you are a nofollow blog the process is pretty simple, just create called guest book add a few lines of text and stick the post link in your menu. Alternately if your theme allows for comments on pages you can make it a page and it should automatically go into your navigation structure. Assuming you are a kind dofollow blogger honoring your readers comments, you are going to need to do a few things differently for the guest book to work like it should and not screw up the rest of your blog.

After activating the plugins the next thing you will want to do is make a copy of your single.php and rename it guestbook_template.php. This is the file we will edit.  Top the top of this file you will want to add the following code:

<?php
/*
Template Name: guestbook
*/
?>

Once this page is uploaded create a new page using the guestbook page template.  Say a few words of kind warning about the kind of comments that should go in posts and the kind that belong here.  Set the page to nofollow and noindex and you are ready to go.  Move your comments at will and enjoy your new found guest book.

Post 8 of 100 of Brad’s Tiny World Scribefire Challenge.

Sorry about the mess everyone.  I am making some changes around here this weekend and will looking at a few different theme designs to decide what I like and don't.   If the theme changes on you mid read sorry for any disruption.

The current theme is the Freemium Theme by Ptah Dunbar.  Feel free to tell us what you think of it.

Brad

Update:

10-8-2008: We should be bck online here later today.  If you run a site about blogging I encourage you to check out http://www.bloggingfornoobs.com/topsites/

One of the least used and most powerful features of wordpress is the page template. The page template to make a long story short integrates non standard coding into your blog seemlessly. It is probably used most often as an archive page in free themes, but most of those free templates forget to tell their users how to use the template and therefore it goes unused. They can be used for so many other things than just an archive page though.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger makes extensive use of page templates. If you look at the beautifully designed landing page you will find a lot of information all packed neatly into one space. If this were a standard freebie theme you wouldn’t be able to see much more than this. It is my esitmation that his home page is home.php rather than the standard index.php. (for more information see the the wordpress codex on) By making use of the home.php as a landing page in your theme you can then make a blog template that will display all of the posts in a nice chronological order. This is especially nice on multiple author blogs like ProBlogger. I know some of you are thinking isn’t this just an archive page? The answer is no. A good archive page should give you little more than a quick excerpt of the post. My preference for an archive page is nothing more a link to the posts.

Here are a few more places where I make use of page templates since I am having a hard time actually finding other good uses of them at the moment. This page makes use of the Pandora Internet Radio Widgets on a single page rather than a sidebar present throughout my blog. The contact form on the Free Online Music Articles site makes use of the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form by Mike Cherim & Mike Jolley. Most of the other pages on this blog utilize my standard article directory information with the automatic pulls from the blog’s information. It saves needing to write these over and over again for different sites utilizing that or similar template. Plop the info into a template and it puts in all of the correct information. Another popular or should be popular page template is the sitemap. If you look at it there is a sextion for my pages, not all of which are listed on the landing page header. You get a list of my categories with how many posts are in each category. Then there is a listing of the ten latest posts in each category. If there were mutlpile authors to this blog you would find a listing of the ten latest posts from each author as well. Notice, this page template has absoluetely nothing to do with your google xml sitemap.

In the end if you are capable of doing simple theme editing you can create a wealth of useful pages not possible in your standard blog layout. If you aren’t so handy with the coding, try looking for themes that provide you with more template oportunities. Not only wiil they create a better reading experience many of the them will improve your SEO.

I was going through my Woopra stats not so long back when i noticed something very exciting and very unexpected.  My political blog, Brad’s Tiny World, was receiving a lot of traffic from CNN and within a few days of watching that incoming traffic I started noticing them coming from The Wall Street Journal.  When tracking down this traffic I found it had come in the form of a sweet little plugin I had accidentally left on when I was testing what did and didn’t work with the new theme tools and WordPress  2.6.  I had long known Sphere Related Content plugin existed, in fact the version I had in the plugin directory was a few versions out of date, but I never really expected much from it and as such never used it.  What a mistake that was.

While the traffic generated was small, it was all relevant traffic and directed at specific stories.   To get those links I was citing and linking to stories on the major sites.  This was usually an excerpt with a backlink.  it was a small common courtesy, but well worth it.  That new traffic which fades after a story is no longer popular, does bring you people willing to give relevant comments and more important, it increased my social bookmark submissions.  I can’t promise you will gain anything from this plugin, but I also know it doesn’t take up very much room either.  Add it and comment on sites using it and see what happens for yourself.  You too might just find links from unexpected places.

Homepage
Download: Sphere Related Content

There were several old combinations that worked well together but since WordPress 2.3 came out many of them stopped working properly or stopped working altogether. Fear not there are replacements out there. Unlike many of the regurgitated idiot lists currently out there, everything I list will work in WordPress 2.5 the only version of the blog software you should be running.

Ultimate Tag Warrior hasn’t been supported by the author since WordPress 2.3 came out. Many of its features and those of Bunny’s Technorati Tags, Jerome’s Keywords, and other tagging programs are easily replaced in better plugins. The All in One SEO Pack can even be replaced now.

The new power plugin combination consists of Headspace2 and Simple Tags. Between these two plugins you can hand every task that you used to require half a dozen plugins and tweaks.

Simple Tags takes over most of what was done by most of the old tagging plugins did. While it alone doesn’t do everything UTW did that can be handled by Headspace2. There are two more tagging plugins you may wish to consider as options. Gormful’s Technorati Tags will give you another formatting option. Tag This will allow users to add/suggest tags at will or with the parameters you set.

Headspace2 while a more complicated option than the much love All In One SEO Pack, is simply a more powerful tool and one you would do well to learn. Mani at the Daily SEO Blog has a very good tutorial on Headspace2. He also confirms my suspicion if you are using Google XML Sitemaps you can’t use both Headspace2 and AIOSP without causing plugin clash. This video will give you a nice look at Headspace2.

The two standard plugins most people list and I will confirm is the default Akismet for spam control and Google XML Sitemap plugin for indexing. Both of these are pretty standard among power WordPress Bloggers because they work. There are other options like GT Site Crawler that may be better for indexing your site if it contains more than just a blog.

The next problem one faces with their blog is linking. In my opinion if you are using a good spam plugin like Akismet and practice good comment policy like requiring name and email and a previously approved comment then turning off the nofollow will gain you more than you lose in time. I have used the DoFollow plugin for some time but have just recently started looking at the more customizable NoFollow Free. Either way you go the plugin works well in WP 2.5, but don’t use them both.

Once you decide which nofollow plugin to use. You need to think about how the nofollow and duplicate content affects your SEO. To clue you into this plugin I give you the words of Andy Beard the plugins creator.

“This plugin is intended to be used in advanced linking structures such as those described in Wordpress SEO Masterclass For Competitive Niches

Rather than blocking duplicate content pages, they can be used to your advantage…. (NFTD) has a method of channeling “Google Juice” away from pages that are receiving the majority of links, to pages that you wish to rank well, and also to your homepage to enhance monetization.”

For the record I recommend Wordpress SEO Masterclass For Competitive Niches wholeheartedly.

WordPress comes with the Tiny MCE editor, but the Tiny MCE Advanced plugin will greatly expand the functionality to almost the point of being as good as MS Word for features. The good thing is depending on the kind of blog you run most of these features are useful and easily added or removed.

The next three are really optional plugins, but I have included them because of how useful they are. First as a writer and avid reader I like two spaces between sentences. This is what you get with the Extra Sentence Space plugin from Coffee to Code. The Disable wpautop, removes WordPress’s automatic paragraph formatting. This is useful for those who wish to have more control of elements from their style sheet. Excerpt Editor does a great job auto-generating your excerpt and can easily be customized. This is important for your front page SEO and channeling Google Juice to the right places.

Along with post style controlled from your style sheet I believe that most of your image and video styling should not be plugin control, but rather be a function of either WordPress’s native image/video functions or controlled from your CSS. There are a few image video plugins that I do find handy though. The only Image related plugins I use at the moment is Flexible upload and SEO Friendly Images. Flexible upload handles some of issues that were present in 2.5’s first release. SEO Friendly Images takes care of some of the extra bits like image description and alt info automatically.

Last but not least important are your social plugins. The first one to mention is the LiveJournal Cross Poster (LJXP) I am hosting the hacked version of this that is friendly to both 2.3 and 2.5 installs. If you still have friends there or want to simply post excerpts with links back into some of the promo communities this plugin will be your best friend. You can also download the excerpts from LJ and post them to any number of other blogs easily enough. I aggregate all 4 of my blogs LJXPs on WordPress.com. You can also snatch the HTML code from the LJ post and post it to a fair number of other blogging communities like Blogger and MySpace.

(There is a MySpace crossposter but I have never made it work and no one I have ever met has been able to either. If anyone gets it to work please let me know)

The next group of social tools includes Twitter Tools which is very good about posting your blog post updates to twitter, but it sucks for posting your tweets on your blog. For tweet posting I prefer MyTwitter which will allow you to hard code your tweeting and place it anywhere you want on your blog. You can also use the hard coding methods described on your Twitter account. The one thing you do need to know about twitter tools and the 2.5 widget layout. You have to uninstall the plugin or change themes to remove the widget.

The plugin I feel you almost certainly need to have if you are a serious blogger is a social bookmarking plugin. I prefer Share This for two reasons. One it has a small footprint and can be hard coded for exact placement. Secondly it has tracking available for your blog. If you want a bigger selection of Social Sites on hand, especially if you are using non US English sites I suggest using Sociable. You will have a bigger footprint and its gaudy but it gets the job done.

The last plugin in the category I want to mention is Auto Social. This handy little plugin will automatically submit your posts to Del.icio.us for you using all your own tagging information. It makes a powerful end of day digest post when you combine it with the Del.icio.us Thingy.

There are some site specific plugin for Digg, Sphinn, Reddit, and Technorati. I however think it is far better to hand code these links for better layout control.

In the end there are other tools and new ones will come along, but with this list you can quickly turn an ordinary blog into a power blog

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