Archive for February, 2008

Have you ever told someone you’re a blogger? Have you told them that you make some money, however much it may be, blogging, only to have them look at you funny.

Plenty of people have stories about peoples’ ignorance of what blogging is. People still seem to think of them as online journals, and everything but the virtual equivalent to newspapers and magazines. If I tell someone I’m a blogger, or that I run a blog, people don’t seem to get it (they don’t seem to get why I would like dealing with HTML or PHP either…). They don’t seem get that you can actually make any money at all blogging. I jokingly say that I make $5 a month, and they think that’s great.

The solution? There are two things you can do.

1. Combat blog-ignorance. Try to explain what a blog really is. Maybe you should carry some TopicCards with you?
2. If you don’t feel like explaining, tell them you’re a “Web Publisher” or something of the sort. Make-up an impressive-sounding title that’s vague enough it won’t confuse people.

National Geographic is one of the best-adapted magazines (to the blogosphere). They have plenty of web content to supplement what they put in their magazine, and the print magazine itself reminds me of a blog.

Their articles are very blog-like, in writing style, and in the way they grab your attention. The articles open with a couple introductory paragraphs that immediately grab your interest, and convince you to keep reading, much like the way bloggers do. There are also a lot of pictures, that, again, help to grab your attention, and to break-up the blocks of text. Surely you’ve seen blog posts that kick-off with a big attention-grabbing image? Yes, there definitely are a few similarities between blog posts and NG’s articles.  Luckily, though, the articles are not full of bulleted lists and “bolded” text! (more…)

Adii, the self proclaimed “WordPress Rockstar,” has redesigned his blog.

(more…)

Internet Explorer version 5 was released on March 18, 1999. It has almost been nine years since its initial release, and two more versions have followed.

We all know that IE5 is a buggy piece of software with fairly awful standards support, though it was significantly better than its predecessor IE4. It’s no secret that I’m no fan of Microsoft’s browsers, but I do have to grudgingly admit that they’ve come a long way.

I was comparing stats on a couple of my web sites recently, and I wondered: Do we need to continue supporting Internet Explorer 5? There have been two major versions released since, and nine years is a long time in computer years. To put it in perspective, look at this timeline: (more…)

My GoCodes Redirection Plugin has been added to the directory at Wordpress.org, and I’ve been shamelessly promoting it wherever I can.

But what can the plugin be used for? Why would you want to to use a URL shortener?

Here are some examples: (more…)

Homepage Excerpts is a WordPress plugin that allows you to add some extra flexibility to the display of posts on your main page. Usually you would have to have all posts displayed in their entirety, have all posts truncated, or Use the Optional Excerpt or More Tag. With the Homepage Excerpts plugin, however, you can say “I want the first post to be displayed fully, but the rest should be shortened.”

The plugin allows you to choose the number of posts to be displayed fully, and whether it should use the Except field or just truncate to a certain number of characters.

Personally, I prefer to manually use the More Tag on my posts, but I’m sure plenty of bloggers will find this useful. To see it in action, visit logo designer David Airey’s website.

• Style Your Subscriber Number
• 10 best CSS hacks
• The Most Useful StumbleUpon Feature You May Not Have Known - I wish I had known about this sooner…
• Niche Social Bookmarking - Don’t give-up on Digg…but don’t focus on it. Niche social bookmarking sites can send plenty of traffic of a higher quality than Digg’s. Niche site users are more likely to stick around and subscribe than Digg users.
• CNN Producer Fired for Personal Blog
• Are You Ready for WordPress 2.5? - Make sure to update your theme, and if you’re a plugin author, there are a few things you should be aware of.
• Conversations with an Underground Text Link Seller - Someone has kept pestering ProBlogger Darren Rowse about selling text links on ProBlogger.net. Despite Darren’s saying “no” several times, the guy just kept raising his offer. Eventually, Darren thought-up a great (and funny) solution that put an end to the whole thing.
• My GoCodes plugin is now in the WordPress plugins directory.
• 125×125 Button-Ready WordPress Themes Gallery
• 45 More Excellent Blog Designs - More Smashing Inspiration, my favorite part of Smashing Magazine.
• What’s the best way to stop spammers from harvesting your email from your blog? Use an image of your email address, designed to look like plain text.
• Sell Side Advertising: A New Model? - This is a great concept. Currently, advertisers hold all the cards in the online ad model. If someone were to start an ad network using this concept, it would totally turn the tables.
• 37+ Great Ajax, CSS Tab-Based Interfaces
• Powerful CSS-Techniques For Effective Coding

My favorite software for creating forums is Simple Machines Forum, or SMF for short. It’s a free PHP forum script that I believe surpasses phpBB in quality and feature set (though I haven’t tried the latest phpBB version yet).

One problem, however, is spam. Virtually all forums are plagued by spam posts and user registrations, creating hours of tedious work for the administrators.

I just found an SMF mod that implements Akismet for the SMF system: SMF-Akismet.

If only I’d found it a year ago, when I really needed it!

I will take this opportunity to point you in the direction of the Akismet Development page. If you head over there, you can find libraries for PHP and other languages, as well as plugins for other CMS and forum scripts (like phpBB or Joomla). Akismet can be used nearly anywhere that comment spam is a problem.

I’ve been testing-out an ad network on a couple of my other websites. It’s called TNX.net. It’s a text ads network, but with a twist.

You buy “TNX Credits” which can be used to advertise on other sites (and can be redeemed for U.S. Dollars via PayPal). It costs $10 to buy 6800+ credits, and the sites you advertise on can redeem them at $0.74 per thousand credits. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but they add-up pretty quick. The cost of an ad is determined by the TNX system, so it’s pretty fair to both advertisers and publishers (since it’s in TNX’s best interests to please both parties). The whole credit thing reminds me of EntreCard a bit (so I think of TNX as a cross between EntreCard and Text-Link-Ads). (more…)

Are you new to this whole blogging thing? Are you trying to start your first blog?

I try to cover a wide array of web-related topics here on WSC, and balance things between the basic and the advanced (leaning a little towards advanced often). However, beginning bloggers really need all the help they can get. I figured it was time to round-up some posts for the newbies. (more…)