In other news, back home in the San Francisco Bay area, the authorities busted the guy who probably profited from the catalytic converter that was stolen off of my vehicle last fall.

It turns out it wasn’t a big deal at all because the theme had just been turned off, so re-enabling my custom theme reset all back to normal. One has to wonder how this happened, however… things that go away by themselves come back by themselves.

Maybe it’s time I changed my WordPress admin password, hmmm?

One of the big hassles with Amazon Associates is how affiliate links are created. I’ve been a member for years (about $100 in commissions in the last couple of years, if you’re curious), and despite repeated entries on my task list to install and play with WordPress plugins for Amazon, I never got around to it until a couple of weeks ago.

Now that I have, I wish I’d done it literally years ago. If you’ve ever created an Amazon affiliate link and you use WordPress, go download the WP-Amazon plugin now. I can’t believe I ever created an affiliate link without it.

Seems like a pretty cool service. My guess is that they’re slapping some advertising on at the beginning of each podcast, which they monetize. Seems like a pretty good deal for smaller content producers (like me), while they probably would be willing to do a revenue split with larger players.

Still, I’m not convinced that this is really worth the effort — while it looks pretty easy to sign up and establish (there’s even a WordPress plugin available), how many readers would actually be interested?

Please comment: Would you signup for a podcast of Really Smart Guy if it were available?

As luck would have it, on the very same day, my friend Eric Giguere published an article on his AdSense blog about publishing Full Feed RSS on WordPress 2.0+. He actually dug into the code and hacked it to display the entire feed within the RSS description tags, which some readers apparently [incorrectly] display as the entire content. Up until yesterday, I’d never caught a mistake on Eric’s blog, so I just followed his instructions without pondering the problem. Unfortunately, after trying Eric’s instructions, FeedBurner claimed that my RSS Feed was no longer valid. So I reverted back to the original code. Sorry, Eric.

I don’t know about other RSS readers, because I personally user Google Reader as well (and didn’t take the time to test with other readers), but here’s what I did to fix the issue for Google Reader:

• Verified that my installation of WordPress was configured to publish the full feed (in the WordPress administration tool, go to Options > Reading).
• Logged into my FeedBurner account, accessed the feed for Really Smart Guy, clicked on the “Optimize” tab, and turned on “SmartFeed”.
• Pinged FeedBurner to update my feed [almost] immediately.
• Unsubscribed to my own RSS Feed in Google Reader, closed all browswer windows, then resubscribed. I’m not sure that the browser shut-down was actually necessary, but I wanted to be certain.

Voila! It should be noted that I’m using the FeedBurner Feed Replacement plugin. I can’t see any reason not to use FeedBurner — their tools allow for all the feed customization I’d ever want (and then some), I get the cool Subscriber Count widget (although I still scratch my head daily as to why it fluctuates so much), and I don’t have to worry about handling email subscribers. Plus, seeing as how Google owns FeedBurner now, I imagine there will be ample opportunity to monetize RSS moving forward.

By the way, it did take 12 hours or so for my secondary google account (for testing) to update, so even if you ping FeedBurner, your existing subscribers won’t see the change for a day or so.

Turn off nofollow in your comments. “nofollow” refers to a property defined in html link tags that prevents search engines from spidering (or following) a given link. Most blogging platforms automatically add the nofollow property to all link tags because of comment spam. As long as comment spam can be caught using other tools, however, there’s no reason to do this. In fact, giving your commentators (or is it commentors? dammit!) a little linkback love is a good thing. This encourages readers to comment, which should foster discussion, and ultimately improve the quality of your readership, your writing, and your life.

(Well, the last one is up to you, but hopefully you actually like this blogging thing in the first place. ;-))

There are a plethora of plugins that accomplish this relatively simple task for various blogging platforms. I’m personally using Semiologic’s dofollow here on Really Smart Guy.

Of course, this isn’t a new idea. I’ve been meaning to do this for months. Better late than never, right? I’ve also added a nifty new ifollow badge to my sidebar, courtesy of Randa Clay Design.

Oh, and you absolutely must have an anti-comment spam plugin like akismet or spam karma (which I’m using and love) installed with this. But you knew that already, right?

For more mostly objective information on the nofollow tag, see the wikipedia entry.

So I’ve had a FuelMyBlog badge up for about 6 weeks (it’s on the sidebar to the right if you’re reading this through fuery.com). Here’s a snapshot of my statistics thus far.

Now, based on the Business and Technology FuelMyBlog category, one should show up on the top ten with only 120 votes or so. The #10 spot as of today has 119 votes to date and only 2 votes today. Seems like pretty low hanging fruit. In fact, the top blog of all time, according to the FMB Master List, has only 818 votes. Seems achievable, right? Except that I’ve noticed a few things about FuelMyBlog:

• The daily votes are based on a 24 hour period beginning and ending at midnight GMT. Pretty straightforward.
• The front page updates are not real-time. If I log on at 12:05 AM midnight and give myself a single vote, I have found that the ten folks in the top ten spots on the front page (which apparently displays “today’s top blogs”) doesn’t update. This is true even if the other folks in the top spot also only have a single vote. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve logged on, seen ten blogs with only 1 or 2 votes, found myself and discovered I already had a vote, and added my personal vote, bringing the daily tally (in theory) to 2. Still no dice. Maybe it’s a cron task and I’m just checking at unlucky intervals — my observations are not scientific in nature (or, at least, outside of my own naturally analytic leanings), so this report should be taken with a grain of salt. A small grain. ;-)
• I detect next to no incoming traffic from FuelMyBlog in my web server logs. Google Analytics seems to agree. We’re talking a quarter of 1% of all my traffic. Since my traffic isn’t all that eye-opening in the first place, that’s pretty abysmal in my opinion.

Are any of you using FuelMyBlog? What has been your experience? Is it worthy of further investigation/promotion?

At any rate, the current 2.0 release of Sociable has a bug in the StumbleUpon submission code. I have fixed it. My guess is that this is the result of StumbleUpon changing the parameter format of their submission script (StumbleUpon appears to be written entirely in PHP).
According to StumbleUpon’s Blog Submission Guidelines, the proper stumbleupon submission format is

http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url= http://www.yoursite.com/article.php&title=The+Article+Title

Sociable 2.0 uses this format:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/http://www.yoursite.com/article.php

I have fixed this in wp-plugins/sociable/sociable.php. Beginning on line 305:


'StumbleUpon' => Array(
'favicon' => 'stumbleupon.png',
'url' => 'http://www.stumbleupon.com /url/PERMALINK',
),

…should be changed to read:

'StumbleUpon' => Array(
'favicon' => 'stumbleupon.png',
'url' => 'http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit? url=PERMALINK&title=TITLE',
),

Or, for the non propeller-heads, just download the entire package (zip’d) with the change applied here.

If this is helpful to you, please link back to Smart Guy. :-)

Happy blogging! ]]> http://fuery.com/2007/04/09/7-quick-blog-promotion-tips-getting-your-hard-work-or-silly-rants-noticed/feed/ http://fuery.com/2007/04/06/wordpress-plugin-wishlist/ http://fuery.com/2007/04/06/wordpress-plugin-wishlist/#comments Fri, 06 Apr 2007 15:56:36 +0000 Johnny Fuery http://fuery.com/2007/04/06/wordpress-plugin-wishlist/ Rotating After-Post Content
I want a plugin that places some random content at the end of every post. I want to control the content, of course, but I want an unlimited selection to draw from. This content consists of any content the client browser can interpret, so HTML, JavaScript, Flash, etc. The purpose? I want to dynamically post a “Sponsored Link” or “Partner Link”. I also, naturally, want the ability to put an adsense bar or similar JS widget in the same spot. As a bonus, I’d like to be able to choose whether I put it before or after my tags generated through Ultimate Tag Warrior. Doug Karr’s PostPost plugin is close, but it’s a static link. Better than nothing, but I want to spread my linkback love around. And highlight more varied products and services.

Feedback
Lorelle actually has already helped with this one. Looks like I have a lead or two on this one already.

I want a feedback plugin. A simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down deal would be sufficient, but in my perfect world, I’d be able to define the scale (binary 0/1 choice, 1-5, or 1-10) and have an Am-I-Hot style picker. Ajax-ified, naturally. That way I can decide what kind of content I should be writing and focus more on you readers.

Update: I’ve successfully installed the WP-PostRating Plugin, which I found through Lorelle’s helpful post. I’m very pleased with how this plugin works and it matches what I had in mind almost exactly. Now click those stars and give me feedback, will ya? :-)

I’ll probably write both of these (or adjust the existing “almosts”) if I can’t find ‘em. Anyone have any leads/interest/feedback?