For those looking, WordPress.com support on IRC is on the Freenode servers at #wordpress.com while WordPress.org support is on the Freenode servers at #wordpress. #wordpress.com is primarily WordPress.com developers/employees and staff of Automattic while #wordpress is the open source community.
Category: WordPress
Features, tidbits and my learnings of WordPress
Video Comments Now Allowed
Thanks to the power of Seesmic, you can now comment on any Reality Me post by simply using your webcam. Below the regular comment box, you will find a link "add a video comment"
If you have a Seesmic account, you can log in and post a video. I have also opened comments up for anonymous comments which means you don’t have to have a Seesmic account. Try it out! You will be prompted to allow the plug to use your webcam and nothing gets installed on your computer. I have heard that there may be a problem with the video commenting and WordPress 2.5.1 but I am sure that will be addressed rapidly.
Update: If you add Seesmic video comments to your blog, be sure to immediately add yourself to the wiki. It takes only seconds. I could have been within the first 100 but ended up being like 187 because I waited to look at the wiki.
Import from iWeb to WordPress
I helped Chris the Carpenter and Kari the Herbalist set up YurtTrash and The Lifted Lorax Show recently. They were using iWeb and importing to WordPress did not look promising. Fortunately, they decided against importing so I ceased seeking out a solution or writing one myself. Melinda has asked about the solution for importing from iWeb to WordPress. Luckily, Dan of MaciVerse wrote an excellent guide on March 8, 2008 How To: Import your iWeb Blog to WordPress. Since MaciVerse is down right now, I am reproducing his entire post (minus pictures) for prosperity:
Update: Looks like MaciVerse is back up. I just caught caught it during Maciverse’s face lift.
Performance Issues?
If there is one thing that Reality Me shouldn’t have is performance issues. I was told that today it saw 500 errors. Not as in the quantity five hundred but as in the server was having a problem. Reality Me is on a shared host which means that the one computer servers out web pages for many different people. In other words, the same box might have a very popular website unrelated to any of my websites and the server could have performance issues because of stuff they are doing. Of course, it could be me. I could be demanding too much of the machine with an inefficient WordPress plugin.
In short, I need to do troubleshooting which could take a lot of effort. If you notice problems with Reality Me or Domestic Psychology, please email me or Twitter me and let me know about the issue or error message. I am also going to try out the WP-Cache plugin so I would be interested in hearing about any odd behaviors (or improvements) it created. Thank you!
WordPress 2.5 post by email broken
Yesterday when Comcast was down for scheduled maintenance I tried to blog it by sending an email from my phone to Reality Me via a secret email that WordPress checks once an hour. I actually sent two posts via email and neither were ever seen on the blog. I just found both the posts with a "pending review" status. This seems to be a new behavior in WordPress 2.5 and not a feature that I like. There does not appear to be a setting that allows me to change this behavior. Perhaps it is my turn to write a plugin.
I think having the ability to post by email when I cannot otherwise reach the blog is a powerful feature. Having the post hidden from publication by slapping it into a pending review status makes posting by email a bit useless, at least for my purposes.
WordPress Convert
Kari the Herbalist, of The Lifted Lorax Show fame, has moved from iweb to using WordPress! Head over to YurtTrash and check our her story and a very well designed blog.
As a reminder, my standard offer is that if you get yourself some inexpensive hosting, and want to setup a WordPress site, I will happily help you. If your site is personal, you can also find volunteers to help you install from install4free.
Thinking about hosting your own blog?
I am a huge advocate of getting your blog away from 3rd party solutions like blogger.com. If you have blogspot in your blog’s address then you need to consider getting some hosting and using a solution like WordPress.org (note: wordpress.com is a 3rd party solution just like blogger.com and while I advocate every wordpress user having an account at wordpress.com for statistics and askimet key, you really need to use the open source software found at http://wordpress.org) WordPress is not the only content management system out there which is great for blogging. You have a ton of choices! If you have trouble setting up a WordPress blog, just contact me and I will help.
One negative in hosting your own blog is that you have to pay a host for server space. That is akin to renting a building to run your business. In the Internet business, like so many businesses, you get what you pay for. Free hosting will likely have problems but it is available. I have personally found 1&1 hosting to be very reliable with great customer service despite its low cost. I highly recommend 1&1!
The postive of paying for hosting is that you get full control over your content. If Blogger’s robots determined that your blog suddenly appeared like a spam blog, they could take you offline instantly and lock you out of your account. You could find yourself unable to access your posts and drafts. If Blogger suddenly went out of business or just quit, you’d be out of luck. Does this happen? Ask anyone that hosted their photos at Yahoo. Yahoo bought Flickr and did away with their photo hosting. Anyone that failed to move their photos by the deadline lost their pictures. All links to those pictures are now 404 pages. We personally came within minutes of failing to get our pictures moved. By paying for hosting, you get backups of your data, control of your site, and the ability to handle exceptions (like 404s) in a way that can benefit your audience rather than drive them away. Plus with your own domain name, you can virally market your blog by using the address in your emails. You can’t send an email from blogmaster@someblogname.blogspot.com but you can send an email from blogmaster@myowndomain.com and everyone who gets that email has the chance to say, "I wonder what myowndomain.com is?" Each email sent becomes a subtle advertisement for your site.
1&1 has a great deal right now! Since Uncle Danny is testing the limits of my webspace and monthly transfer volume, I thought I should review the limits on my account. When I did, I discovered that 1&1 is offering their Business shared hosting at only $5.82 per month! (normally $9.99) This is for the first year only with a 1 year commitment. It’s worth it! Their standard packages are still month-to-month (no contracts; no commitments) if I am not mistaken. They are $3.99, $4.99, $9.99, and $19.99 for shared hosting with increasing benefit respective to price.
Full disclosure: The 1&1 links in this post are associated with an affiliate id. If you purchase hosting from them by using one of those links I do get a payment but the affiliate link does not influence my decision to recommend 1&1. I genuinely like their service! This is also not pay-to-post. I just did this of my own inspiration.
Anyone want to do a group project?
I’ve never done an open source project before. Here’s my proposal. We write a WordPress plugin that helps create a blacklist of known content thieving IPs. When an IP from the blacklist requests the RSS feed or direct link from the WordPress blog, we deliver an anti-theft of content notice instead of the actual content. The plugin will have the ability to deliver a custom message allowing people the personal choice of making the payload as obscene or marketable as they like. I have some thoughts on implementation since the splog delivering the content might have a different IP than the scavenger. For instance, the plug could alter the comment interface to include a check to mark a comment or trackback as potential content theft. The plugin would then have to examine the server logs to try to draw a correlation between when the real content was posted, the IPs that requested the RSS or post, and the time the stolen content was posted. With large samplings to a single database I think we could be very effective at blocking the thieves. Now, what’s the abuse potential here?
After getting this working on WordPress, I think we could extend it to other platforms.
Update: Looks like Owen Winkler (Antileech) has already written this! Kudos! Lorelle gives an overview and also recommends Digital Fingerprint Detecting Content Theft WordPress Plugin.
WordPress Plugin Updates
FYI for the WordPress peeps: TimeZone has been updated to 2.2 and Subscribe to Comments is now 2.1
Pretty, Ugly, Layout
To the non feed readers, I threw up a new theme. Looks nice in FF. I haven’t checked in IE anything but James has reported that it looks terrible in IE 7. I’ll have to fix it later.
In other news, WordPress 2.0.6 was just released and claims to be the last batch of security fixes before WordPress 2.1.
Update: Regulus2.0 seems to hold fairly well in FF1.5, FF2.x, IE 6, and IE5.5. So far the only big difference I have seen is that the two columns on the right degrade to a single column in the IEs. IE7 still unchecked.
Plug me in – Enhancing WordPress
For anyone interested, these are the plugins I currently use. I’m experimenting with one not listed but it has to prove itself before it gets any credits.
- Spam Karma 2 (absolutely incredible, occasionally some trackback spam gets through but this just makes it all manageable)
- Audio Player (slick way to include audio on the site)
- Live (for the stat addicted, it shows the ip of someone on your blog while they are there, whether or not they are on the site or rss, if they are leaveing a comment etc) (Note: stat addiction can be cured. Don’t judge the success of your blog on "stats")
- Flickr Photo Gallery (adds a tab on the upload box that allows you to easily paste several size pictures from your Flickr account)
- Subscribe to comments (gives your readers the ability to request an email when someone replies to a particular comment thread)
- Time Zone (automates daylight savings time adjustments so that the times on your posts are always correct) (wonder if it will break in 2007)
Oops! That’s not private
Note! If you are going to use the private status on a WordPress blog and you hit "publish" it will NOT be private. That’s dumb. My apologies to Suresh.
21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic
SEOmoz Blog has a must read article for bloggers interested in traffic. Let me add that traffic is also something that will come with consistency and time. A lack of comments does not indicate a lack of readership. Many "counters" are inaccurate and do not accommodate readership through news readers (RSS, Atom, etc).
Testing Flickr Photo Album
I am testing tan tan noodles’ Flickr Photo Album plugin. It should create a gallery at http://blog.siliconholler.com/gallery/ and make adding flickr photos to posts easier.
Subscribe to comments
Have you ever posted a comment somewhere and thought, "I need to come back and see the followup comments" only to never return or return too late in the discussion? Comment subscriptions help you stay abreast of dialogs that interest you.
I have added Tempus Fugit’s Subscribe to Comments plugin for WordPress to Reality Me. Now you can subscribe to comments for specific posts that interest you. Enjoy!
