Archive for November, 2007

• Do your readers need a not-so-subtle nudge towards Firefox? Try the Get Firefox Plugin for Wordpress.
• Fawnt.com: “Fawnt is a font resource for designers, developers, and anyone that appreciates the web’s highest quality fonts”
• Review of PayPal Redesign.
• WP Cache 2 was a useful plugin that cached your blog to help you survive the Digg effect. The problem is, development stopped back in 2005 and there are some glaring bugs. Donncha O Caoimh has just released a viable replacement, WP Super Cache. It’s not perfect, but it looks like a great plugin.
• Wordpress Post Slug: Use It Efficiently.
• Freelance Wordpress Rockstar
• Naming your blog isn’t easy. Luckily, The Blog Herald has some advice.
• 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design.
• There’s been plenty of buzz about sideblogs lately. Pro Blog Design has a great tutorial on setting one up.
• I’m a big fan of the ShareThis plugin by Alex King. It makes it easy for people to Digg/Stumble/Reddit/etc your posts, but it keeps your template uncluttered. ShareThis 2.0 is out now, but I think I like the original better. The new one loads the social bookmarking links from ShareThis.com, which is a lot slower than having them hard-coded into the plugin.

Need a break from your design work? Tired of writing? Have some fun for a change! With these resources you can play for as little or as much time as you want.

1. Desktop Tower Defence - Build a maze of towers to keep the “Creeps” from crossing the board. Use the various types of towers to zap them before they can reach the other side.
2. Tactics Arena - Wouldn’t chess be more fun if the pieces had special abilities and health?
3. LineRider - Draw a path and send a stick figure on a sled down it. With practice you can draw jumps and loops to make it a bit more interesting. Oddly addictive.
4. StumbleUpon - Okay, this isn’t exactly a game. While SU is great for promoting your blog, doesn’t your time vanish when you start clicking that “Stumble” button?
5. FunCopter - Try to fly a virtual helicopter using only your left mouse button. How long until you crash?
6. Bloxorz - Move the block across the board into the slot. Sound easy? It’s not.

This month’s Wordpress theme is Grid Focus.

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Everyone’s been talking about WP Super Cache, the new Wordpress plugin based off the old WP-Cache 2. By storing static copies of your posts for a predetermined amount of time (then refreshing them after they expire), it reduces server load by a huge margin, which hopefully keeps your site from going down if you get “Dugg.”

It’s a great idea, but I’m not about to install it yet. As it says on the website, “dynamic content such as that within the sidebar, will only refresh when the cached pages are refreshed.” That, of course will cause major problems with some plugins. It’s hard to explain why those plugins won’t work, but I can give you some examples. (more…)

A sideblog, or asides as they’re sometimes called, is a great addition to a blog. It allows you to post short mini-posts into a spot in your sidebar.

Have you just hit the Digg.com main page? Give your readers a heads up. Did you just think of an idea your users may want to here? Sideblog it! Sideblogs are great for sharing links as well as posting updates. If you need more convincing, read Why You Should Use A Sideblog.

Let Michael Martin convince you to use a sideblog. This post is about setting one up. (more…)

Wordpress can hold comments for approval before they appear on your blog. While this keeps spammers at bay, you want to use this feature as little as possible. Comments should generally appear on the blog immediately. Why?

• Wordpress normally does not notify the commenter that his or her comment is being held for moderation. Instead the page just refreshes…. A usability nightmare.
• It disrupts the flow of the conversation. Comments will repeat themselves, questions will go unanswered, and windows of opportunity for jokes will be missed.

Do everyone a favor and turn comment approval off. To keep the spam out, here are some tips: (more…)

I’ve previously talked about sideblogs, or asides as they’re often called. The most common way to setup a sideblog in Wordpress generally involves creating a second Loop to display posts from a certain category (a plugin is often used to do this). There’s a downside to that approach though.

If you use the Loop/Category approach, you end up with tons of short, two-sentence posts. That means each of your 347 sideblog entries has it’s own permalink page where 97% of the page is just the single.php template. Google doesn’t really like pages with little “original content,” so you could potentially have a problem on your hands. Even if you’re not that worried about what Google thinks of your blog, you still have 347 permalink pages, which could get in the way.

Here’s my solution:

1. Create a new Tumbleblog using Tumblr.com.
2. Use the SimplePie Wordpress Plugin to easily put the Tumbleblog feed’s contents in your blog sidebar.

Simple (pun unintended). Now you can post your sideblog entries to Tumblr, and they will appear on your blog. (more…)

Imar Krige of Blogsolid.com has won the podcast naming contest.

The name picked, however, was not Imar’s suggested “Webmaster-Cast” (though I also liked that name). Imar was chosen at random after I chose the name “BlogCast” for the upcoming podcast.

Imar was chosen at random from the people who submitted names. [the random winner was chosen with this code, if anyone cares: javascript:alert ( Math.floor ( Math.random ( ) * numberofcomments +1 ) ); ]

The first episode of BlogCast: The Podcast About Blogging and the Internet will be coming soon, though don’t pester me for a date as I still have a lot of work to do (recording mainly).

• Your Posting Schedule Could be Hurting You!
• 15 Things I’d Love to See Ad Networks and Affiliate Programs Do to Help Us Earn More Money Blogging.
• The interesting ad network WidgetBucks has been banned from Google results. John Chow explains why.
• 25 Code Snippets for Web Designers (Part7)
• “Custom Fields” are a powerful part of Wordpress. Here’s a brief introduction.
• Nusuni.com presents Three Unique Uses of WordPress Tags. The third one is especially cool, and I’m implementing something similar to it (take a look at the archives!).
• Are you using too many exclamation points? Are you missing commas? Then head over to Six Common Punctuation Errors that Bedevil Bloggers and start reading!
• 30 Ways to Increase Readability
• Was your PageRank lowered by Google? Grab one of these hilarious buttons.
• I’m still using Wordpress’s built-in WYSIWTH (What You See Is What The Heck) editor, but you may want to look into desktop blogging clients. With one of those, you can just open the application and write your post, instead of bothering with the Wordpress Admin. Blogging Bits has rounded-up “15+ Alternatives to Your Boring Blog Editor.”
• Are your friends not blogging yet, despite your constant pestering? Buy a copy of the new Wordpress For Dummies and let them all borrow it. I like For Dummies books, and I’m glad there’s now one about Wordpress.
• The Digg Efect: A Deconstruction
• Once again, Smashing Magazine “smashes you with the information”. This time, they’ve authored RSS: Best Design Practices and Icons. An interesting read.
• Create a Peeling Corner on Your Website (with JavaScript and Flash). Cool, but how practical is it?
• Royal Pingdom presents How Downtime Can Kill All Your SEO Efforts, an excellent post about how Google handles sites that go down.

Welcome to the third iteration of Webmaster-Source! Here’s what’s been going on lately…

• The design has been updated. There have been a few stylistic changes, and more room for peripheral content has been made by adding a second sidebar to the main page.
• Peripheral content. On the main page there is now a list of “featured posts” that points you toward the best of (in my opinion) Webmaster-Source. Also there’s now a “sideblog” available on the home page, where I will post brief “mini-posts” occasionally. Not everything can be stretched into a 250-1000 word post, so I’ll post short, and often valuable, items to the sideblog. I’ll include useful links, advice, ideas, etc. Don’t worry, BlogBuzz is sticking around, and will handle most of the links. The links that will go into the sideblog will be more timely ones that can’t wait for the next BlogBuzz edition. The sideblog entries will not appear in the main feed, but will soon be available in a separate feed.
• Podcast. The WSC podcast will be coming shortly (no exact date yet). Our naming contest ends tomorrow, so hurry up and get your name ideas in!

Tweaks will be made over the next few days, so don’t be too surprised if something looks odd (just wait a few minutes and refresh). Everything should be working correctly by Monday (email me if there is anything wrong after then).