AskApache And Google XML Updates

I finally got the chance to upgrade the AskApache Google 404 Ajax Search plugin along with the Google XML Sitemap plugin. I’m still trying to determine what is new in the Ajax plugin which I’m sure AskApache will probably stop by and let us know. As for the Google XML Sitemap plugin, here is a short list of changes that occurred.

Changed HTTP client for ping requests to Snoopy
Added “safemode” for SQL which doesn’t use unbuffered results
Added option to run the building process in background using wp-cron
Added links to test the ping if it failed

Make sure you head to AskApache Google 404 and Google XML Sitemaps to download the updated plugins and install them on your blog if you’re using them.

One special note for those who use the AskApache plugin. I noticed the directory that houses the plugin files had it’s name changed. When you upload this plugin, make sure to delete the old AskApache directory so they don’t conflict.

Blogs – A Lifestream Of Links

It wasn’t too long ago when my poll asking if blogging was dying concluded with an astounding NO. BookTwo.org recently published an article highlighting a change that is taking place within the blogosphere.

I’ve noticed a trend in longtime bloggers, which I’m certainly a part of. Blogging less, linking more, generally winding down the straight blog in favour of a more distributed presence via Twitter, Delicious, videoblog apps like Seesmic. Some of these may be fed through the blog, like Booktwo’s RSS links, but it’s all getting a bit bitty. “I think RSS is one of the main reasons for this (perceived) decline in blogging. We don’t visit each others’ sites, so it’s less obvious when the frequency declines. As more small social apps like Twitter, and larger ones like Facebook, increase their reach, we don’t need blogs as our home pages either.

“It’s good to have a place to put these things, thoughts, articles &c. But I think it’s time, and I think it’s happening, that the delivery mechanism was stripped down. RSS might be the answer: people are starting to have ‘lifefeeds’ more and more, which aggregate everything they’re doing.

Unfortunately, BookTwo is on to something. What’s also interesting to note, is that this article falls in line with Steve Spaldings take on where blogging is heading.

Microblogging will be the critical change in the way we write in Web 3.0. Imagine a world where your mobile phone, your email, and you television could all produce feedback that could easily be pushed to any or all blogging platforms. If you take a picture from your smart-phone, it would be automatically tagged, bagged and forwarded to your “lifestream”. If you rated a television show that you were watching, your review would be forwarded into the stream.

This is the type of seamless integration that will finally bring the concept of blogging to the masses. Posts will become shorter and more topical, the world of rehashing the meme will be replaced by one where life and news generation go hand in hand. Blogging won’t be a hobby reserved for internet enthusiasts, but a past time for the MySpace generation.

Of course, the allure of any individual blog would be much more limited. As the popularity of micro-blogging explodes, more and more basically “unreadable” blog will start to populate the blogosphere. It’s not hard to imagine a world where the vast majority of your posts amount to, “stuck in traffic, ugh…”

That last sentence in Steves take on blogging is the one that concerns me the most. The last thing I want the blogosphere to turn into is a series of links with little substance. I want to see bloggers continue to write their opinions, reporting on things in their own way, and continue to be the driving force behind new media. I want to continue to see quality content written by someone other than big media properties. Continue to blog and if you need to share links, create a link blog as I illustrated how to do in a previous article.

I don’t want to see everyone’s blog turn into a lifestream of links. Do you?

WordPress Themeing Cheat Sheet

WP Theme Cheat Sheet

WpCandy has released an awesome PDF which contains helpful information related to developing themes for WordPress. The cheat sheet includes the following:

Basic Template Files
PHP Snippets for the Header
PHP Snippets for the Templates
And Extra Stuff for WordPress

The resource has been translated into Spanish and Romanian in case English is not your native language. At any rate, click here to view the PDF within your browser. Alternatively, you can right-click and save the file to your desktop.

Considering Matt Mullenweg and company are considering a WP-Theme Marketplace where unique theme designers can be paid for their designs, it might be a good time to pump up that WP theme knowledge.

Highlight Blog Author Comments

For a long time, I’ve been looking for a plugin that would change the commenting area for the blog author so that regular commenter’s or visitors would be able to tell at a glance when the author of a post or blog replied to a comment. Thank goodness the search is over. Thanks to the recent mention on the WeblogToolsCollection blog, I have found Highlight Author Comments.

Highlight Author comments was exceptionally easy to install. Once you download the plugin, unzip the contents to your desktop or a folder of your choosing. Upload the highlight-author.php file into your plugins directory and activate the plugin.

The plugin options were located on my install by clicking on the OPTIONS link and then HIGHLIGHT COMMENTS. There is only one configurable option for this plugin and that is the CSS styling. This is where knowing CSS helps. All I wanted to do was change the background color of my comments. Here is a screenshot showing how I did it.

My Highlight Author Options

The plugin homepage actually contains a few examples of CSS code that you can edit, copy and paste into this box. One thing worth noting is that you don’t need to place a { or } at the beginning and end of your CSS. The plugin does this automatically.

I have this plugin installed and running. You’ll notice my comments now have a shade or two darker grey when compared to everyone else’s comments. I think it’s a good plugin for every blog to have. It’s nice to browse through a post that may have 100 comments and being able to pick which ones were from the article author at a glance. It also let’s visitors do a quick Who’s Who.

I suppose I can set my unreplied forum topic requesting this plugin to RESOLVED. Thanks goes out to Rob Marsh for creating this plugin. I and many others really appreciate it.

WordPress 2.3.1 Now In Fantastico

I just received word today that the latest version of Fantastico has been shipped out. The good news is, Fantastico now supports WordPress 2.3.1. Originally, WordPress 2.3 was the version everyone has been looking for and I wondered if Netenberg was going to hold off on the update because of 2.3.1. That doesn’t seem to be the case.

Now all you need is for your webhosting provider to upgrade their Cpanel/Fantastico scripts and then you should be able to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress.

List Of WordPress Plugins I Use

Wordpress Plugins Over the past few weeks, I have had a number of individuals ask me questions regarding the plugins I use on this site. I thought I would take the time today to tell you every plugin installed and in use on this blog. This article took 2 hours to write and I hope it answers most of your questions. If not, ask away within the commenting section of the article. At the end of this list, let us know which plugins you suggest to use. Enjoy!

Plugin//Version//Description

AddThis Sidebar Widget 1.2 – AddThis is an awesome plugin that gives users the ability to bookmark a specific page to one of any number of bookmarking services such as Digg, Delicious, Technorati, ect. Instead of having a ton of icons or badges for each service, I can use one image which makes it easy to implement and use. You can see this plugin in action by clicking on

Akismet 2.02 – I don’t think enough can be said about Akismet. Akismet was created by Automattic as an anti spam application. It’s one of the best around and without it, I would of had to manually delete 2,500 entries which have been detected as spam. If you are running WordPress, make sure this plugin is activated.

AskApache Google 404 2.2 – This plugin has turned my WordPress 404 Page into something useful. I wrote a detailed review of this plugin here ( Add Google Ajax To Your WP 404 Page ) and it has become the second most viewed article on this blog. Google 404 adds an Ajax powered search into your 404 page. When someone ends up on a 404 page, the terms that generated the error are automatically plugged into the search bar which generates a Google search amongst your own blog, the internet, images ect. To see it in action, visit https://jeffc.me/blabla

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator 3.1.2 – This is one of two sitemap generator plugins that I use. This plugin is highly customizable and gives me the options of how I would like to display my sitemap to the public. When you visit https://jeffc.me/my-sitemap/ the output comes from this plugin. Works seamlessly in combination with my Google XML Sitemap generator.

Digg This 1.0.2 – There are many WordPress plugins that center around Digg but this one is still one of my favorites. When anyone submits one of my blog posts to Digg.com, I am notified by email and a Digg button is automatically placed on the right side of the post. The plugin works by detecting a referral url from Digg. You can customize where the digg button shows up within your post as well as a few other options. To see the plugin in action, visit ( Migratr – Backup And Migrate Your Online Photos )

Dofollow 2.1 – I covered this plugin more in depth here ( You Comment I Follow ) Essentially, this plugin strips the “REL=NoFollow” attribute from a commenter’s URL. This is good for Google juice to be applied to those that comment on your blog. It’s also a good showing of appreciation to those that engage in the conversation through comments.

FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.3 – This plugin finds all the ways to subscribe to your blog and consolidates them into one feed using FeedBurner. This ensures accurate feed reader statistics. It’s one of the first plugins you should install when you begin a WordPress blog so that it’s as accurate as possible.

Get Recent Comments 2.0.2 – This displays the most recent comments/trackbacks on the sidebar. I have implemented this plugin near the top center of the page called MOST RECENT COMMENTs by adding the hook into it’s own div container. There are a number of different formatting options to display this plugin which make it highly customizable for your situation.

Google XML Sitemaps 3.0 – This is purely a Google only sitemap plugin. What I like most about this plugin is that it creates sitemap.org compatible sitemaps which are supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN and Yahoo. This plugin combined with my other sitemap plugin covers my blog at all angles.

JS Toggle Boxes 1.4 – Js Toggle Boxes provides a means to add a plus symbol or a minus symbol to a div element that contains an unordered list. Using a combination of Javascript, CSS and cookies, readers of this site can now show or hide at least 6 different content blocks.

Live 0.4.1 – Wrote about here ( WordPress Real Time Browsing Stats ) Live gives WordPress admins the chance to see who is browsing what in real-time. The plugin provides information such as IP address, whether the user is on a page, comment, or a hit from an RSS aggregator, and referral URL. This is probably one of the most used plugins I have installed to monitor what’s going on. I’ve been anxiously awaiting a new version which promises additional functionality.

Live Comment Preview 1.7 – I came across this plugin while reading a blog post on how to make your WordPress blog Web 2.0ish. Powered by Ajax, this plugin gives readers a chance to preview their comment in real-time before it’s published. You can use the provided preview function to add a PREVIEW area anywhere on your site. It’s nice to know what your comment will look like before it’s published.

Most Viewed Widget 1.0 – This is an addon for another plugin called WP-Postviews which I’ll get to later. This widget will take the posts with the most number of views and display them as a widget or wherever you place the hook. You can modify the plugin code to determine how many articles are shown in the widget.

MyAvatars 0.2b – I covered MyAvatars here ( MyBlogLog And Gravatar Support ) in light of the recent Gravatar acquisition. MyAvatars displays avatars from both MyBlogLog and Gravatar. The best of both worlds it would seem.

MyBlogLog Widget 2.0 – In order to use a MyBlogLog widget, you first have to visit MyBlogLog.com and create one. Once you get the code for the widget, paste it into a TEXT based widget. This is essentially how you add any 3rd party widget to your site.

Optimal Title 3.0 – One of the first plugins I’ve ever installed, Optimal Title mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ’separator’ to after the title rather than before. This is what enables me to have links within the title bar of your browser that look like this

Notice how the name of the post comes before the actual title of my page. I read this was supposed to help with SEO but I’m not sure if it has or not.

Related Posts 2.04 – This plugin returns a list of related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. The relation happens automatically and so far, it has worked out pretty well. This plugin becomes more accurate as you publish more posts. Not a good plugin to use if you have under 30-50 posts.

SezWho WP1.2 – SezWho is a comment rating/reputation based service. Users rate on comments for a given post which can in turn, leverage ratings of a commenter on other blogs. Replace the concepts of Gravatar with comment rating and user reputation and you should get the idea behind the service.

Share This 1.4 – Another awesome plugin that consolidates what would be a number of different images or badges into one easy to access control panel. ShareThis gives your users the oppurtunity to share a post with others through social bookmarking or by email. This is one of my favorite plugins as it provides so much functionality in such a tidy, neat package.

Subscribe To Comments 2.1.1 – This plugin adds a check box to a comment form which gives users the chance to subscribe to a particular page and it’s comments. After you subscribe to a post, each time a user comments on that blog entry, an email will be sent to your account letting you know someone has carried on the conversation. In my opinion, this is a function that should be supported out of the box.

What Would Seth Godin Do 1.3 – This plugin gives me the chance to configure a default welcome message to brand new visitors of the site. It uses cookies so that after a configured amount of times, the welcome message disappears. The welcome message contains the text “Welcome to my blog, if you enjoyed reading this, perhaps you would like to subscribe for more RSSLINK” Not sure if this has contributed to my RSS subscriber count but I haven’t had any complaints.

wp-cache 2.1.2 – The oh so infamous Wp-Cache. You almost have to use this plugin if your using WordPress. Wp-Cache is a very fast caching module that is actually modules within modules. This plugin has been known to withstand the Digg effect as well as the Slashdot effect. How’s that for noteworthy. I have quite a few issues with WP-Cache that I can’t seem to figure out but I’ll post about those some other day.

WP-PageNavi 2.20 – If you scroll to the bottom of this blog’s home page, you should see the numbers 1, 2, 3, ect in little squares. That is actually the PageNavi plugin in action. This plugin is just an advanced version of pagination which gives users more control over the navigation of the blog.

WP-Polls 2.21 – What good is a blog or website without a poll? This plugin is pretty much the defacto standard for polls within WordPress based sites. The poll is powered by Ajax, can be customized to match your template, supports multiple selections for answers, and the ability to use more than one poll at a time. There is also a Poll Archive page that be added to your site if you so choose.

WP-Polls Widget 2.21 – This widget works along side WP-Polls and displays the actual polls as a widget within your WordPress Template.

WP-PostViews 1.20 – This plugin provides a way for you to see how many views a particular blog post has. You can configure this plugin to show guest views, registered member views or both. I use this plugin just to provide me with “at a glance” statistics for posts. It’s a good feeling to be reassured that people are reading what I write.

WP-Print 2.20 – WP-Print adds the ability for users to print specific articles. The plugin contains options to allow users to print comments, posts, pages, or a combination of everything. I’ve added this functionality to my blog just in case someone feels to the need to print out a tutorial or something.

WP-Stats 2.20 – Displays your WordPress blog statistics. This plugin ranges from general blog statistics to plugin statistics. The plugin statistics are actually stats from a number of other plugins created by Lester Chan that you may have installed on your blog.

WP-UserOnline 2.20 – This plugin gives you and your user’s a chance to see who is currently browsing your blog. The plugin shows which registered members, guests and search engine bots are on your site and which URL they are currently browsing. It also provides a referral url to see where that user came from.

WP AJAX Edit Comments 1.1.1.4 – Reviewed here ( Digg Like Comment Editor For WordPress ) is a plugin written by Ronald Huereca of the Readers Appreciation Project. This plugin gives administrators and regular users the ability to edit their own comments within a given time frame. The plugin pretty much works in the same way that the Digg commenting system works. As I have always said, every blog should provide some sort of way for a user to edit their comments. This plugin is a nice solution to that problem.

WP_EasyReply 1.0 – It becomes tiring typing out something like @whoever each time you want to reply to someones comment. This plugin does that task for you, albeit with a little bit of help. Out of the box, EasyReply provides a link which automatically puts each user account name that has commented since your last reply into the comment box. With a little bit of hacking, I was able to get this plugin to perform the mundane task of typing out @username which is a time saver and a blessing for my fingers. To read how I hacked this plugin for my own purpose, please read ( WordPress Comment Reply Plugin )

Conclusion:

Wow. Can’t believe I’m finally finished with this article, 2 hours later. At any rate, I hope this article answers everyone’s questions as to which plugins I’m using. Installing and configuring the plugin is one thing, how you implement the plugin into your template is a different ballgame. I’ve used a bit of creativity on my blog but it shouldn’t be too hard to discover which content blocks are using which plugin.

Please share your experiences and or implementations of the plugins above if you use them. If not, please tell us which plugins you use and why.

Digg Spy WP Plugin – WassUp

If your a statistics junky, I’m sure you’ll love this plugin called WassUp. WassUp is like WordPress Live which I wrote about here ( WordPress Real Time Browsing Stats ) except WassUp kicks it up about 5 notches. WassUp tracks your visitors in real-time as well as providing a wealth of information about those particular visitors. Information such as:

ip / hostname
referer
spider
search engines used (includes Google Images)
keywords
SERP (search engine result page)
operating system / language / browser
pages viewed (chronologically and per user session)
complete user agent
name of user logged in
name of comment’s author
top ten charts with aggregate data (top queries, requests, os, browsers)

WordPress Wassup Image Because of the amount of information available for archiving, database size can be an issue. This plugin solves those issues by giving you different options as to when to delete older records. WassUp is not intended to replace statistical information programs such as AWStats or Google Analytics but it does provide an informative view into what individuals are doing on your site. This is great for SEO purposes or just general knowledge of how visitors are using your site.

To download and learn more about this plugin, visit the official Wassup Plugin Page.

Comment Rating Within WordPress

James Mowery of TechInDemand.com got in touch with me a few weeks ago and wondered which plugin sites like Engadget and Autoblogs were using that allowed for comment rating. I digged into the source code for those websites and couldn’t figure it out. Today, I have finally discovered which plugin those guys are using and figured I would share it here.

Its called, Comment Karma. Comment Karma is a plugin you can use to allow your visitors to rate each others comments. Like Digg, you can click a thumbs up or thumbs down icon which will give that comment either a positive or negative number.

This plugin was created in 2006 so I’m not sure how it will work with WordPress 2.3 but it’s worth a shot. One thing worth noting is that, the rating cache is set to 120 seconds.

If you’re using WP-Cache or similar the icons will not show up gray, nor will the numbers be updated if you reload the page until the page expires. However if a user votes again it will throw them an error. I’ve worked around this by setting the cache for 120 seconds. That way the server doesn’t get hammered with SQL queries, but you still see the comments being moderated in almost real time.

There is a similar service in SezWho, but by using this plugin, you can keep the comment ratings local to your WordPress install which may improve loading times for your site. I may install this plugin in place of SezWho just for that reason alone. If you’re interested in using this plugin, check out the official Comment Karma plugin page for directions on how to install it into your blog.

20 Weird Blogging Terms

Here is a list of 20 blogging terms with their supposed definitions. I’ve never seen most of these terms used which is why they qualify as weird to me. Let me know if you recognize any of these terms and be sure to add on to the list in the commenting area.

Weborexic – Referring to tiny (width-wise) layouts. Coined by Rhiannon Phillips.

instalanche – Sudden and possibly overwhelming increase in traffic to a site after being linked to by the Instapundit

K-log – aka “knowledge log”, a type of blog usually used by knowledge workers and posted on a company intranet for sharing company knowledge.

Gulog – A portmanteau of “gulag” and “blog”. Used when a blog is so dismal and depressing, it’s as if it were written in a Soviet labour camp.

Glog – A first-person recording of an activity, in which the person doing the recording is a participant in the activity. Probably a portmanteau of “gonzo” and “blog”.

Blooger – A blogger who exhibits adolescent tendencies and lacks basic social graces or good manners. A portmanteau of “blog” and “booger.”

Blistless or B-listless – When a blogger becomes listless or apathetic about posting. It is also indicative of what will happen to the blogger’s mailing list.

Bleg – A blog entry consisting of a request to the readers, such as for information or contributions. A portmanteau of “blog” and “beg”. Also called “Lazyweb.”

Biblioblogosphere – A humorous reference to the world of librarian blogging

Fisking – To rebut a blog entry in a line-by-line fashion.

Phlog – Type of blog utilising the Gopher protocol instead of HTTP

Scribosphere – Term to encompass blogs written by professional and aspiring screenwriters. A portmanteau of “scribe” and “blogosphere”.

Svithe – A spiritually themed post on a blog not normally focused on spiritual matters.

Vorage – A marriage between the words forage and video defined as “The act of foraging for video on the internet and sharing it with others.” Bloggers or vloggers who share streaming or downloaded video content on the web often engage in voraging, scouring search engines and obscure websites to present a curated collection of videos that usually fall within a set theme or editorial perspective.

Blogorrhea – A portmanteau of “blog” and “logorrhea”, meaning excessive and/or incoherent talkativeness in a weblog.

MyBlogLog And Gravatar Support

In a previous post I mentioned that I would highlight a plugin that enables avatars from both MyBlogLog and Gravatar to be displayed at the same time. That plugin is called MyAvatars MyAvatars displays avatar images from MyBlogLog and Gravatar yet, Gravatar support is not enabled by default. Among the obvious, MyAvatar sports the following features:

Added nofollow for avatars (from 0.2b)
“No image bug” solved (from 0.2b)
Title attribute for avatars in english (from 0.2b)
“Big images” bug fixed (from 0.2a)
Improved XHTML validation (but we still use onload=””) (from 0.2)
Gravatar support (not active by default) (from 0.2)
Trackbacks/Pingback support (Works good, but it’s not perfect) (from 0.2)
Support for blogs with more than 1 author, works very well (from 0.2)
Separated CSS Style (from 0.2)
Email address is now safe!!! (from 0.2)
Customizable title for the avatars (from 0.2)
Gets MyBlogLog avatars of your commenters
Links directly to their MyBlogLog profiles
Easy installation & template integration
Added email support for retrieving profiles (from 0.1a)
If not MyBlogLog member will prompt the registration page (from 0.1a)

I believe everyone’s comments.php file is different but here is a screenshot depicting where I have placed the MyAvatar function.

I’m not sure what impact the recent acquisition of Gravatar will hold for this plugin but so far, everything still appears to be working normally. One of the cool aspects of this plugin is that, if WordPress integrates Gravatar support within the WP core, you can turn Gravatar support off so it only displays MyBlogLog avatars. This will allow you to keep the functionality of displaying avatars from both services.

Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff

The Musings Of Jeff Chandler

Blogging