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.

Something is up at Technorati. For more than a month now I have been having problems with them properly indexing one of my blogs. Despite the fact that it was being updated either manually or automatically with daily digest posts, http://www.bradsotherblog.com was simply not getting its ping through to Technorati. This just isn’t me, either.

The first suggestion they made was to manually ping your blog at http://www.technorati.com/ping this works for all of my blogs except The Other Blog. After trying that and a ticket submitted with no answer I finally complained on the post board and the blog was quickly taken care of. They apparently want to take care of people who open their mouths in public a lot faster than they do those who wait patiently for returned emails. Well that one ping they did worked exactly once, the blog updated and jumped from an authority of 8 to 14 when all was said and done.

I checked back a week later and nothing since that day had been indexed. I sent another ticket and posted on the bulletin board the same day. Three days afterwards I received a reply to the first email and was told the blog had been indexed, what they didn’t say was it was done shortly after I made the problem known on the bulletin board. I have since had to make more than half a dozen posts in order to get the blog regularly indexed. Who ever is in charge of doing that does it pretty speedily and should be rewarded for it.

I have received several answers as to why this is happening from the board admin, and none of them are very likely. First I wasn’t given an answer. The second time I was told there was just a delay in indexing. The next time they blamed it on the number of anchor links some of my posts contain. They have blamed it on the number of tags. They have always fixed it an done an auto update but they refuse to address the key issue many bloggers are having. Neither the automatic ping services nor the manual ping at Technorati are working for many of us.

As I said this isn’t just my problem either. If you surf over to the Technorati discussion board you will find quite a few people who have gone a couple of days without being tracked to those who have gone weeks. One blogger reports his blog hadn’t been indexed for more than a year. I have no idea how often he posts, but Technorati simply can’t say his problem was a simple delay in indexing.

If you are a serious blogger with a Technorati account don’t just assume it has been working for you, go check it out. I know some of you are asking what the big deal is. First off if you are displaying the Technorati logo on your blog, you are advertising them in exchange for a service which includes indexing and providing search traffic. If they aren’t providing that, then they are operating on a fraudulent principal and should be paying you for the advertising. Secondly they are getting paid advertising because of the service they provide, I think the advertisers that pay them should be made aware that they aren’t getting everything they are paying for. I know I certainly would if I were paying big bucks to advertise on a site making claims of tracking a hundred million plus blogs, but only updating three quarters of their claim. The fact is they are a corporation and all corporations private or public need to be held accountable to proper standards.

I won’t debate whether they have the right or not to deny tracking of individual blogs, but the fact is they have an obligation to tell people that their blogs will not be tracked. They don’t even have to provide a reason, they just have to be honest about doing it. Of course none of us know if this is a softwarer glitch, which they have never admitted to, but they need to come out and say something one way or another. Failure to do or say something is the best way for them to lose their credibility. I can live with it being some sort of technical problem, we have all experienced those, but the fact is something needs to be done and done soon.

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

]]> http://bradtheblogboy.com/wordpress-2/plugins/must-have-wordpress-25-plugins/feed/ 45 http://bradtheblogboy.com/how-to/todays-blogging-tip/?source=rss http://bradtheblogboy.com/how-to/todays-blogging-tip/#comments Thu, 03 Apr 2008 04:17:05 +0000 Blogboy http://bradtheblogboy.com/?p=12 Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes

Today’s blogging tip is don’t over extend yourself.  If you don’t have time to commit to your blog(s) then you have probably over extended yourself with either the blogs or your other activities.  Either way trying to do both will make your life suck and no one gives a damn if you blog about your sucky life!  When you start out blogging you need to make some serious time commitments to your blog and not just writing the posts either.   Unless you have the extra cash to throw around at web developers then you really need to spend time learning site design, SEO, your blogging software, and all the latest information about the plugins that will make your blog great.  How do you do it?  You do it by reading a lot of really great blogs or better yet their feeds since you can do that quite a bit faster.  Where Should you start reading?  Here is my short list

• Pro Blogging
• Perfect Blogging
• Pajama Professional

That should hold you for a while.

WordPress 2.5 seems to be more particular than early releases to coding errors.  One possible result is the loss of sidebars and footers.  Elezend asked about this very problem on Lorelle on Wordpress, then again at Brad’s Tiny World.  Elezend’s footer which contains MyBlogLog and Blog Catalog displays just up and disappeared upon upgrading.  Personally I think upgrading on day one of any software upgrade is a bad idea, but that is from years of going WTF and looking at frozen computer screens.

This is going to be a multistep fix and some trial and error So lets get started.

1. The first thing I want to try to make sure this is not a general theme problem is to remove the MyBlogLog and Blog Catalog coding
2.