Archive for January, 2008

Don’t you hate it when you’re reading a blog, and you’re trying to find that post on Page 23, but the only way to get there is by clicking the “Next page” link over and over and over and over…

Don’t do that to your blog’s readers. Use WP-PageNavi.

WP-PageNavi allows you to replace the annoying “Next/Previous” links with a much better pagination solution. The Next and Previous options are still there, but some new numbered links are added. It’s similar to the bottom of Digg.com.

By the way, if you run into a (Wordpress) blog that doesn’t use WP-PageNavi, here’s a tip: Just change your current URL to http://www.theblog.com/page/23/. Problem solved.

According to Twitter.com, “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” However, it has the potential to be much more than just “I’m drinking coffee” messages. To be honest, most of us don’t want to know what you’re doing every minute of the day. The Twitter competitor Pownce describes their site much better: “Send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. Create a network of friends and share stuff.” Pownce is marketed as being a communications tool, sort of like public/private IM.

I think of the two services as a sort of IM service that you needn’t be logged-in to receive messages. They’re, to me, public IM. Pownce is leading in that aspect (marketing themselves as an IM-like service rather than a system to tell everyone what you’re doing), but unfortunately, everyone uses Twitter, and therefore sees the notice on the main page that says “What are you doing?” I’d like to see less of that usage.

I recently created a Twitter account, and it’s interesting, though it threatens to be a major time waster (and why must their API have a 70 request per hour limit?). I haven’t actively used IM in years, and I don’t have a cellphone, but Twitter so far has pulled me in. I just use it as an IM service/link-sharing system/Tumbleblog (and I have WSC’s feed auto-posted ).

What is Twitter? It’s IM 2.0.

I’m participating in the Daily Blog Tips tutorial contest. Since contestants are supposed to post a list of their favorite entries, I’m going to post mine here. I’ve rounded up the ones I like, which I think readers of Webmaster-Source may find useful.

Wondering what post I submitted? How to Feature Your Best Posts in Your Sidebar, which I wrote not long after seeing the contest. It was in my mental list of “Things That Would Make Good Tutorial Posts, If I Can Remember Them.” The contest got me to invest some time actually writing it (Thanks, Daniel!).

Here are my favorites from the list of entries (and I say again that you may find them useful): (more…)

Posting frequency is something you should think about whenever you start a blog. How much time do you have, and just as importantly, how many post ideas do you have?  What length will most of your posts be, and how easy will they be to write?  Consider these questions, and think about your posting frequency.

Decide how many days you should post in a week. Currently, I post daily here on Webmaster-Source, and there are some bloggers who take weekends off. Posts on Pro Blog Design tend to come out once a week, which plenty of blogs are doing now.

Posting less often gives you more time to work on posts, and it lets your posts collect more comments before they’re “not new anymore.” On the other hand, some people are online everyday and like to see new posts from their favorite blogs all the time.

Looking for a domain? It sure can get frustrating when you enter 375 different ideas into a WhoIs service, only to find that they’re all registered.

While Tabeze can’t help you come-up with more ideas, it can help you check their availability easier.

Tabeze is a domain availability checker that allows you to, with the press of a key, open as many search boxes as you want. Type a domain (including the TLD) into a box and press enter, and Tabeze does the rest. You can open more search boxes so you can check more domains at once, or you can do it so you can leave positive results onscreen for later reference. There are many ways to use this innovative feature.

My biggest complaint is that, unlike normal WhoIs services, it doesn’t show alternate TLDs that are available. If I search superwebmegasite.com on WhoIs.net, it will let me know if it’s available, and mention whether superwebmegasite.net and superwebmegasite.us are available. Tabeze doesn’t do that.

• Pagepeel Type Banner Application: Pageear
• 10 Simple Ways to Squeeze the Most Out of Entrecard for Your Greater Advantage - I’ve started playing around with EntreCard. I’ll write a review of the service at the end of the month (I hope to gain enough credits to advertise on ProBlogger soon). For those who don’t know, EntreCard is a system allowing free advertising based on a their EntreCredit “currency”.
• 101 Best CSS Techniques of All Time Part 2
• Free Fonts Of The Month: Newcastle, Anziano
• P2P defendant: RIAA identified an IP address, not a person
• 21 Factors to Consider Before a Redesign
• A draft of the HTML 5 standard has been posted on the W3C website.
• Matt Mullenweg is migrating to his new domain… “Ma.tt”. Dang, I’d have registered it if I’d known it was available…
• Wisdom and folly: IE8’s super standards mode cuts both ways
• 5 Easy Steps To Oodles Of Search Engine Traffic For Your WordPress Blog

Looking for a way to feature some of your better posts? Here’s a method I’ve been using for a few months (visible on the index and the screencap to the right).

The five most recent posts that I’ve marked as “Featured” will appear in the list, along with a “view all” option that takes the clicker to a custom date-based archive.

How does it work? It’s done with multiple loops and categories. (more…)

Well, it looks like OpenID may be catching on. (I’m still not sure if that’s a good thing, though.) Now, wouldn’t it be cool if you could use your website’s domain as your OpenID URL? It’s easy to do. I’ll use my ID as an example.

First, create an OpenID at any provider of your choice. (You can find a list of providers here.) The URL I ended up with is redwallhp.myopenid.com.

Next, decide what you want your customized URL to be. Do you want just your domain, like mydomain.com, or will you set-up a subdomain (or subdirectory)? I ended up picking my new personal blog at matt.ntugo.com.

Now you just need to add two lines of code to your header.

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server“>
<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://redwall.hp.myopenid.com/“>

Replace the italicized part of the first line with the URL of your provider’s OpenID server. A quick Google search will help you find the right URL (e.g. openid.claimid.com for ClaimID users). Replace the italicized bit of the second line with the OpenID URL your provider gave you.

And your done! You can now use your domain as your OpenID URL. This has the benefits of being easy to remember, and you can just change those lines of code if you decide you decide to switch from MyOpenID to ClaimID.

Well, it looks like OpenID is catching on. Two major companies (Google and Yahoo) are slowly launching support for the “single sign-in” standard. On a related note, I voiced some concerns last April about OpenID. They seem very relevant nowadays.

Yahoo is implementing OpenID alongside their existing Yahoo ID system, giving Yahoo users OpenIDs. According to openid.yahoo.com, you will be able to enter the URL “yahoo.com” into an OpenID box, bouncing you over to Yahoo where you can login with your Yahoo ID. Does this mean they’ve got their system set-up so you don’t get a unique OpenID URL (like id.yahoo.com/your_yahooid)? Another worrying note: Yahoo is providing OpenIDs, but are they going to allow people with non-Yahoo OpenIDs log-in to Yahoo sites (Flickr, for example)? Also, what’s to stop Yahoo from preventing your Yahoo-provided OpenID from logging you in to certain sites (i.e. competitors)?

Google’s Blogger.com will soon be an OpenID provider. Once this new feature makes it out of draft and into the main feature set, your blog’s URL will be your OpenID URL. If your blog is at you.blogspot.com, that’s your OpenID. It even works if you have your own domain name. Now, will they start allowing OpenID sign-ins with other Google services? Who knows, they might.

As you probably know by now, the popular RSS reader FeedDemon is now free. The maker, NewsGator, has decided to start making money solely off their enterprise customers. So they decided to make FeedDemon available to anyone who wants it (don’t worry, it’s still in active development).

I decided to take this as an opportunity to compare “normal” feed readers with my own MyNT RSS reader. How? I kept a record of the amount of time it took to read my RSS feeds for a total of one week (using MyNT). Next, I repeated the test with FeedDemon. Here is a chart of the results:

(more…)