Tag Archives: WordPress

digg IT

Posted on by
Comment

A new plugin being tested here.

Although I have my doubts about digg, I’ve always been curious about whether my posts have ever been “dugg.” I’ve often seen buttons with digg counts on other WordPress Web sites. I figured it was time to try installing one on this site.

digg what?

digg, in case you don’t know, is a social bookmarking site that’s pretty popular among blog enthusiasts. You sign up for a free membership, then “digg” blog posts you like. If the post has never been dugg, you can be the first to digg it. Otherwise, you can just add your digg to the count of existing diggs. You can also add comments about the post.

Posts with lots of diggs — generally more than 100 — get lots of visits, mostly from people who monitor popular posts on the digg site. So, for a blogger, being dugg could be a good thing.

I say could be because if you’ve got a lot of diggs, your post could become so popular that hits exceed your bandwidth. That happened with podiobooks.com, which I learned about today. A note on its site says:

We’ve been Dugg and Lifehacked in the last 24 hours, and the site is experiencing a little oddness from time to time. We’re working on getting things stabilized.

That’s when you can get the site. You’re just as likely to get a Server Error 500 when you attempt to access. Oops. Hopefully, things will calm down for them enough for their server to handle incoming requests.

The Plugin

Getting the digg button on a post is a matter of installing a plugin and modifying the WordPress theme’s template code to add a new function.

I needed to find the plugin, so I used by friend Google to search for digg wordpress plugin.

I first found Digg This, which was at the top of the list. I wasted no time downloading and installing it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to work. And when I scrolled through the list of comments, I discovered that I wasn’t the only one.

I decided to keep looking.

I then found digg IT (which may have been called Digg This in a previous incarnation). I downloaded and installed it. It worked immediately, perfectly. If I’m still using it as you read this, you’ll see it at the top right of each post.

(I say if because I might not keep it. Although it works like a charm, seeing so many posts with 0 diggs is kind of depressing. I have a post that’s been read over 3,000 times and still has 0 diggs. [sigh] You can help cheer me up by occasionally digging my posts.)

The installation required a single line of code to be inserted in The Loop, right before the < ?php the_content(); ?> tag:

< ?php if(function_exists(digg_this)) { digg_this('', '', '', ''); } ?>

It’s a nice piece of code because it checks to make sure the function exists before actually calling it. So if the plugin fails or is not compatible with a future version of WordPress, your site visitors won’t see an error message. I like neat code like that.

Unfortunately, the documentation does have a tiny error. It tells you to insert the code in your index.php file. If the < ?php the_content(); ?> tag for your theme isn’t in that file, those instructions could confuse you. In my case, that tag is in my post.php file. So you do need to have a little knowledge about your theme’s template files to install it properly. Just open them all up until you find the < ?php the_content(); ?> tag and you can’t go wrong.

Anyway, if you’re posts are dugg or you want them dugg, you might want to give this plugin a try. You can’t beat it for ease of installation and use.

March 26 Update: I removed the digg count from my pages. The zeros were really getting to me. If the site ever starts getting diggs on a more regular basis, I’ll put it back. For now, the code is just commented out.

Being a Responsible Blogger

Posted on by
2

With regular readers comes responsibility.

This morning, I noted that the feed for this blog has exceeded 100 subscribers. The 100 mark is a milestone for any blogger, and it’s no different for me — even though I’ve been at it for some time now.

I’ve been blogging for over three years and my blog doesn’t exactly follow all of the “rules” of blogging. I’m talking about the “stick to one topic” rule and “blog multiple times a day” rule. People say rules are meant to be broken, but that’s not why I break these rules. I just blog the way I want to blog and don’t really pay attention to the rules.

My Original Blog as a Separate Entity

My blog started out as a separate entity from my personal Web site, a way to share whatever I was thinking about or doing with people who might be interested. It was a personal journal, slightly filtered for the public. It was a way for me to record my life so I’d have something to look back on in the distant future. I didn’t care if anyone read it and was often surprised when someone I knew commented about something I’d written in my blog.

Back in those days, my blog wasn’t something I worked hard at; the entries just came out of me, like one-sided conversations with friends. Perhaps it has something to do with my solitary work habits — many people gather around the “water cooler” at work to trade stories about their weekends or opinions about world affairs. There’s no water cooler in my office and no co-workers to chat with. My blog may have been my outlet for all these pent-up stories.

Blog + Site = ?

A little over a year ago, I combined my blog with my personal Web site. I did it to make my life a little easier. I’d already decided to use WordPress as my Web site building tool. Why not just make my personal blog part of the site?

My Web site has been around in one form or another since 1994. I built it to experiment with Web publishing and soon expanded it to provide a sort of online résumé and support for my books. Support for my books often meant additional tips and longer articles about some of the software I’ve written about. This is fresh content of interest to people who use that software, even if they don’t buy or read my corresponding books. Since writing this content is relatively easy for me, I have no problem offering it free to anyone who wants it (as long as they don’t steal it and pass it off as their own; see my © page).

One of the great things about blogging software is that it automatically displays the newest content on the Home page and archives older content by category and date. In the old days, I’d have to manually create new pages for every article I wanted to put on my Web site and then add links to them. It was time consuming, to say the least. Sometimes too time consuming to share even the quickest little tip with visitors. So I didn’t publish very many articles. But the time-consuming, hand-coding aspect of my site is gone, and it takes just minutes to put any content online, whether it’s a link to an interesting podcast I just listened to about iPod microphones or a multi-part series of articles explaining how to use WordPress as a content management system.

What’s odd about the merging of the two sites is that my personal blog entries now commingle on the Home page with my book support entries. So these 100+ subscribers are seeing (and possibly reading) all kinds of stuff coming out of my head. (Now that’s a scary thought!)

My Responsibility

As my blog/site audience grows, my responsibility to provide good content for readers also grows.

The way I see it, when only a half-dozen people read my blog regularly, it was okay to bore them with stories about my horse eating corn cob stuff out of the bottom of my bird’s cage or rants about the quality of “news” coverage. Now, with over 100 regular readers, I need to think more about what would interest my audience and concentrate on producing the articles they want to read. (You can help me by voting on this poll.)

And that’s when blogging becomes work. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does take more effort on my part.

And it may push me far from the original purpose of my blog: a journal of my life. That’s something to think about, too.

The Other Blogs

I just want to take a moment here to comment on some of the other blogs I’ve seen out there. The vast majority of them are a complete waste of bandwidth. Some exist to echo the sentiments of others and show very little original thought. Others are complete blather, written in a style that makes me mourn for the failure of our educational system. Like chat room comments. Ugh. I don’t see why people waste their time writing this crap and really can’t see why people waste their time reading it.

But there is a small percentage of blogs that provide good, informative, or at least interesting content, written in a way that’s easy to read and understand. Those are the blogs that serious bloggers should be reading and learning from. Those are the blogs we should try to emulate, not by simply copying or linking to content, but by adding our own original material to the blogoshere.

That’s my goal and my responsibility as a blogger. If you’re a blogger, is it yours, too?

Web Site vs. Blog

Posted on by
10

What’s the Difference?

Today I got a phone call from our local newspaper’s “business advocate” — the guy who writes stories about business. He was researching an article about blogging and figured that I was the most active blogger — if not the only blogger — in town, so I might be able to to provide some information about it. He wasn’t aware that I’d co-authored a book about WordPress blogging software (WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide) in 2006 and he probably wasn’t aware that I wrote Putting Your Small Business on the Web back in 2000. He probably also doesn’t know that I’ve written four books about Web authoring software (various versions of PageMill, now defunct) and that I’ve been building and managing Web sites since 1994 (although I’m not crazy enough to do it for a living).

We stumbled a bit in our conversation. He referred to my Web site, wickenburg-az.com, as a blog. (The site has been around since 1999, predating the blogging phenomena by at least 3 to 4 years.) I responded that it wasn’t a blog, that it was a Web site built with blogging software. And then he asked me what the difference was.

I had to think about it. What is the difference between a Web site and a blog?

They’re very much alike.

Let’s take a look at the similarities.

  • Web sites and blogs are both published on the Web and can be read with any Web browser. This gives them the same basic look and feel and similar user experiences. Web sites built with blogging software can look and feel just like a blog, even if that’s not what they are intended to be.
  • They depend on good, useful content. Web site visitors and blog readers come to read content. If the content is good and meets their needs, they’ll be back for more. If the content sucks, they won’t.

But they are different.

Of course, I needed to explain how they were different — not how they were the same. The response I came up with centered around the purpose of visitors coming to to the site, but there are more differences.

  • Web site visitors come to a site to look for specific information. That information does not need to be new. It just needs to be what the visitor is looking for. For example, I visit the HP Web site when I need a new driver for one of my printers. I know it’ll be there and I don’t care if it’s been there for five years. People visit wickenburg-az.com to get basic information about Wickenburg: what it’s like, what to do there, etc. But blog readers visit or subscribe to blogs to get fresh information or insight on topics that are important to them. I read ProBlogger, for example, because it has timely articles that can help me understand how to be a better blogger. People visit aneclecticmind.com to read articles like this one about blogging, or other articles about flying, or even other articles about what it’s like to live in a place like Wickenburg — all from my point of view.
  • Blogs tend to be more opinion-based than Web sites. Sure, HP is going to tell you on their Web site that their printers are the best, but what would you expect? On my blog, I’ll tell you what I think about my HP printer and compare it to other printers I might own or have experience with. I’ll also tell you what I think of Apple Geniuses or local restaurants or life revolving around the Internet. (Although some locals might find this hard to believe, I keep most of my negative opinions of Wickenburg out of wickenburg-az.com. Most.) The opinion aspect makes blogs more personal than a Web site.
  • Blogs rely on fresh content. It’s commonly accepted that a blogger should post at least 3 to 5 new entries a week. Web sites, on the other hand, are more static and don’t require as much updating. Their visitors don’t expect it, either.

Does it matter?

Who knows? But it’s made me think about blogging a bit more than usual lately. And I’m sure it will lead to a few more articles here about what makes a blog a blog in the near future.

Long Lost Cousin Found

Posted on by
Comment

A true story involving an odd last name, the Daytona 500, Google, and one of my Web sites.

The other day, I got an e-mail message from a guy named Steven P. Obviously, his name was not just P. It began with a P and was somewhat unusual. Pretend, for simplicity and to keep this guy’s identity private, that it was just plain P.

Here’s what he wrote.

My name is Steven P. I was getting tickets for the Daytona 500 and was surprised to find another P in the Ticket registery. All I got was Mike P from Pheonix. I googled his name and got a website with your writings. I also got a guest book for Benny Parson’s that Mike had left a message at. I was just wondering if you know Mike? I have lived in Tampa Florida all my life. I have family in Bradenton. All of them have passed, just cousins left. I was just trying to find out if we are family. If you know him and could tell him about this message I would be thankful. My EMail is scp@yahoo.com [not his real address].
Thanks, Steven

I don’t know who or what Benny Parson’s is, but I did track down a comment written by Mike P on my wickenburg-az.com Web site.

I don’t know Mike P. He’s not listed in the Wickenburg phone book. And I wrote back to Steven P to tell him that. But, at the same time, I told Steven P that I’d send Mike P a copy of his message. Since WordPress requires commenters to enter an e-mail address, I had one for Mike P. (Oddly enough, it was also a yahoo.com address.) So I forwarded Steven P’s message to Mike P with an apology for bothering him just in case they weren’t related.

A few days later, I got the following message from Steven P:

Thank you so much for forwarding my Email to Mike P. He Emailed me back and we are family. His Dad is my cousin who lives in Florida. We don’t see each other and I never knew he had kids. Thanks again. Steven

Now doesn’t that make you feel all warm and cuddly inside?

Full Text vs. Summary Feeds

Posted on by
3

What the hoopla is all about.

It’s a hot topic among bloggers. Full feeds or Summary feeds? I’ve exchanged some words with a reader here about it, but I’ve always been sitting on the fence.

RSS Feed Basics

For those of you who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, let me take a moment to cover the basics.

This blog (and its individual categories or topics) is available in two formats: HTML viewable in a Web browser and RSS viewable in a feed reader (or aggregator). The HTML format includes nicely designed pages (if I do say so myself), access to polls and comments, and full site navigation features. The RSS format includes just the most recent posts in whatever format a subscriber’s feed reader displays them in.

The benefit of the RSS format is that content is automatically delivered to subscribers as it is published. There’s no need to visit the site to see what’s new. The feed reader will automatically gather all new content for reading at the subscriber’s leisure. You can learn more about RSS on Feedburner’s Feed 101 page.

Full-Text vs. Summary Feeds

Bloggers normally have the option of creating feeds as full text feeds or as summary feeds. (To set this option in WordPress, go to Dashboard > Options > Reading. We provide full instructions in our WordPress book.) A full text feed publishes the entire content of each post to the feed, making it unnecessary for the subscriber to come to the source Web site. A summary feed publishes just the beginning of each post to the feed, making it necessary for the subscriber to come to the Web site for the remaining content of each post he wants to read. (In WordPress, this is only the first 55 words.)

It’s pretty well established that full text feeds attract more subscribers than summary feeds, so if getting more subscribers is a blogger’s goal, full text is definitely the way to go. But full text feeds have several drawbacks that have kept me from jumping on board:

  • Full text feeds eliminate the need for subscribers to visit the site at all. All your hard work on blog design is completely wasted on feed subscribers.
  • Because full text feed subscribers are less likely to visit your site, they’re also less likely to comment on entries. This reduces the interactive aspect of your site. I think this is a serious problem, since RSS subscribers are more likely to have something constructive to say about technical topics, which is what I often write about here.
  • Because full text feed subscribers are less likely to visit your site, they’re also less likely to click ads there, thus potentially reducing your revenue stream. (Of course, it’s a valid argument that RSS subscribers are more tech savvy and less likely to click ads in the first place.)
  • The appearance of feeds in a subscriber’s feed reader is dependent on settings within that reader. As a result, entry formatting can be lost, resulting in ineffective appearance to the reader. For example, headings may show up as boxes in the margins rather than as headings.
  • Full text feeds are more likely to be scraped by splogs. That means your content may be used by “bloggers” to build content on their advertising-heavy sites, as well as link farms and other unsavory Web traffic-generating or revenue-generating schemes.
  • If you write very long entries or include many posts in your feeds, you could reach feed length limitations with FeedBurner (if you use it).

For summary feeds, the only drawback is that they’re less likely to get subscribers since a lot of folks don’t think it’s worth subscribing to a feed if the entire content does not appear in their feed reader.

Sitting on the Fence

With all of this in mind, I’ve been using summary feeds since I switched to WordPress about a year ago. I haven’t been very interested in building the number of subscribers. This drew a lot of flack from a subscriber, especially when I couldn’t make up my mind and switched back and forth between the two kinds of feeds over the period of a number of weeks. I assume that she dropped her subscription when I stuck with summary feeds.

Now I’m more interested in building my subscriber base. So I’ve switched back to full text feeds. It’s been about a week, and my feed has already been scraped once, with a pingback that I assume was supposed to help the scraper’s Google placing. (I deleted that pingback comment as soon as I found it.) One subscriber (Miraz) has already joyfully commented on the switch. Others haven’t commented. I don’t expect them to, since there’s no way to comment from within the feed reader software (see drawback list above).

Anyway, I’m encouraging subscribers now and it’s a full text feed, so I invite you to subscribe. But please do stop by once in a while to share your comments with other site visitors.

March 6, 2011 Update: After a long run with full-text feeds, I finally switched back to summary feeds. I just got tired of seeing my copyrighted work automatically re-blogged on sites created by feed scrapers.