In a blog post titles “6 Steps to Kill Your Community“, Matt listed “Allow Spam Through” as the second step and “Don’t Participate in Comments” as the fourth step to killing your community. We treat comments and reader participation very seriously at Weblog Tools Collection. We highlight commenters, try to identify the frequent comments who participate willingly and heuristically remove nofollow tags from the links of commenters who participate in the community. I have personally chosen and thanked frequent commenter by providing them deeper access and rights to the various portals, elevating and applauding their presence within the community and have chosen most of my co-authors based on their participation and passion within the communities that I purvey. In short, I agree with Matt in that relevant comments and passionate participation are the lifeblood of any community.
But our little blog gets a lot of attention from spammers. We are listed […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog
Preface
The act of adopting an abandoned plugin reminds me of adopting an orphaned child. On the one hand, the new parents are taking on someone who they didn’t help raise thus far, which forces them to “learn” the ways of the new child to communicate well with them. On the other hand, the new parent is left with the fear that there will come a day that the old parent will come to claim their rights on the child.
The analogy I brought can go some way in building an intuition about the problem of orphaned plugins, but if we want to go beyond just intuition we need to take a more in-depth look at the subject. I hope such a look will inspire a discussion that will benefit us all.
The chase for a faster plugin installation
My prime example for an orphan plugin for this post will be the “Improved Plugin […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog
How to Write with a Knife: I have been a big fan of CopyBlogger for some time and I try to read their articles as often as I can, though not as often as I would like to. The above article, followed by another one in the series called “Do Long Blog Posts Scare Away Readers?“, have some really good advice for bloggers. I have implicitly tried to follow some of them because my past training and weakness for the English language, but having them spelled out succinctly is really helpful (I already caught myself making one of the mistakes mentioned in the article, can you tell which one?).
In addition to the above suggestions, I would like to add a few of my own. Please feel free to add others in the comments.
Make your titles short, sweet and eye catching. Long titles lose their punch.
Proof read. As Michelle says so […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog, blogger
I have been following the WordPress Theme GPL discussion very closely for as long as I have been involved with WordPress and I am glad that Matt, with the help of the Software Freedom Law Center, has cleared the air. There has been a lot of valuable discussion surrounding this blog post and the issue, here is a small list of what I have read.
Lloyd’s analysis on GPL and themes
Daniel’s view from the other side of the fence (be sure to read through the comments, there is a lot of wisdom there)
WPTavern’s forum post on the blog dev blog post and the forum post(s) leading up to it
Brian Gardner wants the community to move on
Other miscellaneous posts on the issue
I am a huge proponent of the GPL and consider it to be one of the primary pillars of WordPress, both as a piece of software, and as a community. This […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
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The Federal Trade Commission is planning to crack down on bloggers who review or promote products while earning freebies or payments, the Associated Press reported Sunday. “New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the agency can go after bloggers–as well as the companies that compensate them–for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of interest,” the article explained. via Report: FTC to go after blogger freebies | Politics and Law - CNET News.
While I am not a big fan of government scrutiny and general “big brother” mentality, I do believe that this will add to the believability and authenticity of the blogging medium. We at Weblog Tools Collection try very hard to keep commercial interests completely out of the content that we generate and only rely on what we consider to be ethical ads to make ends meet. We also follow a […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog, blogger, blogging, news
I trust Google. I use GMail as my primary email address and store stuff in my mailbox that is of crucial importance to my existence as a citizen of this modern world. Over the past couple of months, Google’s Orkut has dealt a deadly blow to that trust that is making me rethink my allegiance towards anything Google.
I am the owner of a midly popular community on Orkut with about 25k users. Since I was given the privilege of being a beta tester on Orkut, I had created a community called Calcutta many years ago and that community has since, taken on a life of its own. It is run by moderators who report to me and I log in every so often to perform maintenance and help the moderators out. My existence is not only a mystery to the members of the community, it is also the source of […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog, google
Happy Halloween to everyone! At this All Hallows Eve, I would like to talk about Scary WordPress Moments. Since I have been working with WordPress for some time, I have had quite a few scary moments with WordPress. One stands out in recent memory.
WordPress Pumpkin by Eric Martin Displayed with permission
Let me start by saying that I am a huge proponent of backing up my blog. I put together the original WP-DB-Backup which has been enhanced and fixed through the years and is a fantastic plugin. I use it religiously combined with a couple of tricks I picked up from readers along the way. I have the plugin backup my databases everyday and email them to a “backup” gmail account. I also have filters setup in the gmail account to delete daily backups as they come in, thus managing space (gmail keeps deleted emails for 30 days). So I have […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog
I was preparing the following post as a speech for an event, but since I already used the above quote in a comment and the event did not pan out, I would like to post it for my readers. This version is smaller and is modified to suit the medium but I have tried to keep the message as close to the original thought as possible. I hope it helps at least one WordPresser help another WordPresser.
I started on my Masters degree in Computer Science after having worked in the industry for over four years. I decided that my education in Physics was not enough because it did not give me the ability to make enough of a difference to the people that I worked for. I could solve their problems and try my very best to make them smile when I left their establishment (I worked as a computer […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog
Two Column Themes
K2
K2 is a popular WordPress theme which is not fully compatible with WordPress 2.5. The theme now has options to dynamically reduce the number of columns to fit screen size and also support for Hooks and PHP. The theme also has Avatar support and Image gallery […] Continue Reading…
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Original post by Mark Ghosh
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This post is not written by me but is reproduced, with permission, from a post in the Weblog Tools Collection News Forums. It was written by Weathervane. Since Frank has downloaded 530 plus plugins, and most of his thoughts are well expressed and documented, this post might trigger some good conversation. Please chime in.
As a new WordPress blogger, I wanted to customize my installation, so I began a review of the available plugins. My first installation of WordPress was version 2.3.1. Because this version was a significant change, there was a list of v2.3.1-compatible plugins, of which I downloaded and tried most of them.
Since then, I’ve downloaded 530± plugins (this was what’s left after deleting extensions of commercial services), and tried/tested most of them. Five-hundred± is an incredible number and rivals, I think, Photoshop actions or plugins—and there are lots of those. The WordPress plugins community is impressively prolific.
Whenever I’ve […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog, blogger, news
