One of the things I want to start doing here on FansiteBlogger.com is to share the awesome plugins that I find useful on the various fansites that I run. In doing so I believe it will help you as a fansite owner or community manager to improve your fansites.

Today I’d like to point you towards a fantastic little plugin called Linkwithin.

Linkwithin is a free “blog widget that appears under each post, linking to related stories from your blog archive.” It essentially replaces other plugins like the ‘Similar Posts’ or ‘Related Posts’ plugins (both effective  in their own right), to give you a more visual aesthetic with which to display your older posts.

As explained on the Linkwithin website:

We retrieve and index all stories from your blog archive, not just recent stories, making them accessible to new or casual readers of your blog who would not otherwise encounter them [..] “the widget links to stories that are relevant and interesting to readers of a particular post, keeping them engaged with your blog, and increasing your traffic.”

I have Linkwithin installed on 3 of my fansites and have seen evidence suggesting that it does help with reader engagement and page views. I haven’t had Linkwithin implemented on my blogs for long enough to give an accurate assessment on whether it’s more effective than some of the other ‘related post’ plugins (I do plan following up on this at some point in the future). But I really like the minimalistic design (blends in with most themes without looking ugly) and the fact that it automatically finds and crops thumbnails of the corresponding posts. As a reader of other blogs, I also find the Linkwithin widget a helpful tool in finding older posts that I might be interested in.

Linkwithin is simple to install. If you want to try it out on your (self-hosted WordPress) fansite:

1. Go to Linkwithin site and fill in your blog details and preferences (time: 10 seconds).
2. Download the plugin from the next page and save it on your computer (time: 3 seconds).
3. Go to the Upload Plugins page from your WordPress admin section. (time: 2 seconds).
4. Upload the Linkwithin plugin that you downloaded a moment ago (time: 3-6 seconds).
5. Activate the Linkwithin widget (time 2 seconds).
6. Optional: Go into the Linkwithin options and select whether you want the widget to display under posts on the homepage or single post pages (time: 2 seconds).

Average time to get plugin rocking: 22-25 seconds.

Linkwithin also works with Blogger, TypePad and other blogging platforms.

Let us know about your experiences with Linkwithin – have you noticed increased reader engagement? Do you like the visual thumbnails it provides readers? Or are you not seeing satisfactory results since you installed it?

For a live example of what the Linkwithin widget looks like in action, check it out below this post.

In preparation for our upcoming Intense Debate vs. Disqus comment system comparison, I thought it would be good to take a poll to see which comment system you currently use on your own fansites.

Use the poll after the cut to lodge your vote and check back later in the week for our fansite-orientated Intense Debate vs Disqus comment system comparison.

I’ve been considering a premium video sharing solution for my video files. Currently I use Youtube to host my videos but I’m looking for greater control, particularly in terms of video statistics.

I’ve considered Vimeo and JWPlayer from Longtail Video (amongst others), but in the end I’ve decided to give VideoPress from WordPress a try. VideoPress, in their own words, allow you to “easily upload and share videos on your WordPress blog or any other site, even in full HD”. It’s not cheap – it costs $59.97 per year (per blog), but the interface is good and I feel more comfortable using a WordPress product on my WordPress blogs. I’m not after any frills, just a clean, accomplished video player that will allow me to embed and share videos on my blogs.

I’ll post a review of my thoughts on VideoPress once I’ve had some time to become familiar with the player and its features.

I’ve been interested in using Disqus comment system on my blogs for a while now. I’ve tried it out on a few different occasions (twice on FlashForwardblog, where it’s currently installed), but I’ve never been completely satisfied – especially since the native WordPress comments does a good enough job. But is good enough, good enough?

I’m always striving for something better, tools and resources to make my various blogs more interactive, but in a way that doesn’t compromise ease of use and effectiveness.

One of the things I like about the Disqus comment system is that is offers a more ‘social’ element to comments – it makes it easier for people to comment via their social logins, such as Facebook, Twitter and the like. There’s also a great comments widget and a there’s the nifty “like” feature (where other people can show that they like a particular comment with the click of a button), not to mention the ability to offer commenter’s a profile, should they choose.

However, one of the main drawbacks I’ve found when trialing Disqus is the speed. There is always a noticeable delay before the comment count shows up correctly, and for the comments/page to load. This lag is really, really off-putting and doesn’t reflect a very professional set up (it also makes posts with comments look like they are comment-less, until Disqus loads, which can be at least a few seconds after the page content). However, according to a recent announcement from the people at Disqus, it looks like they are making moves to address the speed issue. I really hope an improvement can be made in this area, because I’d like to move all of my current and future blog comment systems over to Disqus.

I’ll see if the changes are positive and report back on my progress. Maybe I’ll post a review at some point.

LocateTV has launched its first online affiliate network, unveiling its “Next On” widget for television viewers. To enhance their TV show, movie and celebrity content, personal and fan websites can easily cut and paste the widget from the LocateTV web site. LocateTV’s dynamically changing code will automatically update to show when the TV show or person is next on the air.

“Our widget gives fans the information they need to never miss their favorite TV show, movie or star,” says LocateTV’s Brian Margolis. “We feel we have a unique product that every site with an interest in TV programming and celebrities will want to have. And the widget is as easy to use as embedding a YouTube video.”

For more information on LocateTV’s affiliate widget program, please contact Brian Margolis at bmargolis@nds.com.

About LocateTV
LocateTV (www.locatetv.com) is a web-based programming guide providing TV, online and DVD viewing information. The customizable interface provides accurate listings by cable or satellite provider (currently available for the U.S., U.K. and Republic of Ireland), the ability to create a personal viewing schedule and email reminder alerts. The site also offers a dynamically updating widget that can be embedded on blogs, fansites and websites. LocateTV is operated by NDS Group Ltd.

Personal View

The LocateTV Widget is an interesting tool for TV show, DVD and celebrity fansites. Let’s say that you run a fansite for the TV show “LOST”, the widget can It an be inserted into your blog or website (i.e. your sidebar). The widget is dynamically updated to show when the TV show is next on in specific regions of the USA, UK and Rep. of Ireland, and are personalized to the person viewing the page. There are some customization options, such as background color and widget size.

I’ll be keeping an eye on LocateTV for updates and improvements to their service. As I said, it’s offers interesting functionality to relevant fansites, although it would be great if there was some form of revenue sharing incentive on their DVD purchasing options.

Staff members are an important part of any fan community. They help spark discussion, enforce the rules and come up with ideas. They are an extension of a fansite’s ethos and as community leaders they are vital to the long-term survival of any serious fansite.

But even community managers, moderators, contributors and other team members need a sense of direction and, at times, motivation to feel ‘in the loop’.

During my years managing fansites, blogs and forums, I’ve seen staff members struggle in community leadership positions. There are various reasons for this, including; feeling out of their depth, only wanting the role for community status, being unprepared for the workload, and a lack of clear direction – to name a few. I’ll discuss some of these points in future articles, but for now I want to look at a few techniques I’ve developed to keep staff members in the loop and feeling motivated.

• Be Inclusive. It’s quite simple, but in my experience, a culture of openness is one of the most important things for the successful management of a fansite. Communicate with team members – ask team members for their input, hold regular meetings (via a private staff area, chat system, email or any number of social tools), share ideas and create a sense of collaboration. People are more likely to become invested in something when they feel a part of it. In my experience, I find it helpful to ask my staff members for their point of view, and often they come up with great ideas that I hadn’t thought of.

• Staff privileges. Everyone loves extra features and freebies. As a way of ‘thanking’ my members of staff I give them extra community enhancements, such as, larger personal message space, bigger album storage and various custom features and any ‘freebies’ that I receive from media companies. It’s just a small way of showing appreciation for their hard work.

• Remove Inactive Staff. This is a tough one, but sometimes it has to be done. It doesn’t help anyone when a member of staff doesn’t contribute, fulfil their staff duties or communicate their reasons for being inactive. Sometimes there is a valid reason, but running a community website takes a lot of time and energy and you can’t afford to have people who are happy to assume a leadership position, but not be involved in the hard work that goes with it.

The above points are definitely only the tip of the iceberg. I hope to follow up with more insights and personal experience on managing a staff team in future articles, but if you have any views or opinions feel free to share them in the comments below.

Photo Credit: anhtuan.

In a move which suggests established online communities are becoming more important in the marketing strategies of large entertainment companies, MSN have added 9 fansites from wiki start-up Wetpaint into its entertainment.

Although the financial terms are undisclosed, the agreement will probably allow Wetpaint and their partners to sell more ads through the increased audience that MSN will bring, whilst MSN now has a cheap way to bolster their online entertainment portal, with content on their new wiki sites being provided freely by fans.

This looks like a good move for both Wetpaint and MSN. Wetpaint have really taken the wiki concept forward by targeting fandom niche’s, and MSN have made a smart step in bringing established fansites into their network, potentially creating greater engagement for their visitors. The bottom line is that MSN aren’t just adding “bricks and mortar”, but the online communities that come with the wiki sites, as well as web presence (google ranking, authority), branding (domain name, reputation) and Wetpaint’s technical expertise in growing communities.

I’m always looking for ways to add more interactivity to my blogs – useful methods of engaging readers and making content more relevant. While there are tons of products that promise to enhance content, very few deliver. Most just add clutter and detract from the focus of a blog or fansite. However I recently stumbled across an interesting product called Apture which might have to potential to be different.

What is Apture?

In their own words, Apture promises to enhance blog posts with interactive videos, images, Wikipedia, maps and more from 50+ sources without making readers leave the page.

Apture, which is available in the form of a plugin, uses pop-up windows to display external content chosen by the blogger. For example, if you run a music blog and you’re writing a post on your favorite musician or an upcoming gig, you might want to add Wikipedia links or YouTube videos to add depth to the post and further engage your readers. Normally you’d add a Wikipedia link which opens in an external window or tab, and you’d link to the YouTube video, resulting in the reader leaving your site if they want to investigate your recommended link (of course, you might embed the youtube video instead). Apture lets you present  your ‘extra content’ via a small pop-up window, or bubble, that overlays the page when the reader clicks or points their cursor over the link.

I’m currently experimenting with Apture over at www.fringebloggers.com and will be testing it out here on www.fansiteblogger.com shortly. I have to say that I’m impressed so far. The main appeal for me is that it’s extremely quick to install and use. I also believe that it has the potential to give me greater control over the way I present my information, whilst giving readers more relevant content to explore. I can’t see myself using Apture links in every post, far from it. But the odd post here and there might well be suited to my needs.

There are  a few negatives that I can think of – pop-ups carry a certain amount of stigma and although Apture‘s pop-ups are controlled by the fansite owner/blogger and do not carry advertisements (yet), some readers might be instinctively put off by seeing a popup window emerge on top of a post. The fact that you have to sign up to Apture to make it work might also put a few bloggers off. (although that’s fairly common place practice with a lot of these tools – Lijit, Disqus, etc).

I’m going to continue experimenting with Apture for the next few weeks to see how useful it actually is and whether I find it relevant to my blogs in the long run. I’ll come back and do a more extensive review once I’ve add a good amount of time to test this baby out.

Apture WordPress Plugin can be downloaded from the Apture website.

If like me you somehow have two seperate Google Feedburner accounts, you’ll know that this can cause a problem when trying to monetize your feeds – if your main Feedburner account isn’t the same as your Google Adsense Account. Looking back, I’m not quite sure how that happened (presumably during the Feedburner migration to Google), but the important thing is that it DID happen and that it needs to be resolved so that I can increase the income of my sites and continue to cover server costs (etc) with greater effect.

Getting help on this issue has been pretty non-existent – I’ve posted threads in the Google help forum and searched various other places for information on how to merge my two separate Google accounts – but to no avail.

So today I decided to do something about it by investigating further, and all and lo and behold I found the answer! I’m not sure how long this option has been available for, but I was able to move my individual feeds over to my new (or should I say, “preferred”) Google Feedburner account using the “Transfer Feeds” option. Again, I don’t know how long this has been available for but today is the first time that I have noticed it. Anyway, without further ado, here’s how to transfer your feed in 5 simple steps:

1. Log into your old Google Feedburner account
2. Click on the feed that you want to move to your new Google Feedburner account
3. Click on the “Transfer Feed” option near the top of the page.
4. Enter the email address which is attached to your new (or destination) Google Feedburner account and click “Send Transfer Acceptance Request”. This will send an email notification to your Feedburner email address which will allow you to validate the transfer of your Feedburner feed.
5. Once you’ve validate the link, log into your new Google Feedburner account and you should see that your feed has been transferred over.

That’s it – simple – you can now use your feeds in conjunction with your main/preferred Google account! I hope this quick tutorial has proved useful to other bloggers or fansite owners out there!

I should add that you can only transfer to like accounts, so for example, moving feeds from one Feedburner publisher to another Feedburner publisher is fine.

Earlier today I was shocked to discover that all of the links on my Dollhouse fansite – WatchingDollhouse.com were broken. After doing a bit of digging I soon found out that my entire permalink structure had been reset to the default setting, resulting in none of my post links working. I quickly went about re-applying my custom “/%postname%/” structure (Settings>Permalinks>Custom Structure) whilst wondering what (or who) had been inside my admin panel.

Well, mystery solved – this just in from WordPress:

Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.

The tactics are new, but the strategy is not. Where this particular worm messes up is in the “clean up” phase: it doesn’t hide itself well and the blogger notices that all his links are broken, which causes him to dig deeper and notice the extent of the damage. Where worms of old would do childish things like defacing your site, the new ones are silent and invisible, so you only notice them when they screw up (as this one did) or your site gets removed from Google for having spam and malware on it.

I’m talking about this not to scare you, but to highlight that this is something that has happened before, and that will more than likely happen again.

A stitch in time saves nine. Upgrading is a known quantity of work, and one that the WordPress community has tried its darndest to make as easy as possible with one-click upgrades. Fixing a hacked blog, on the other hand, is quite hard. Upgrading is taking your vitamins; fixing a hack is open heart surgery. (This is true of cost, as well.)

2.8.4, the current version of WordPress, is immune to this worm. (So was the release before this one.) If you’ve been thinking about upgrading but haven’t gotten around to it yet, now would be a really good time. If you’ve already upgraded your blogs, maybe check out the blogs of your friends or that you read and see if they need any help. A stitch in time saves nine.

I was running 2.7.1.  I was a victim of the worm attack. Creepy to say the least, knowing that something has been silently sneaking around my admin panel. After re-applying my custom permalink settings and updating my .htaccess everything seemed to go back to normal, however I’m still running a thorough check just to be on the safe side! Now it’s time to upgrade my other blogs, including this one, that are running on 2.7.1.

Lesson learned! If you’re running on an old version of WordPress, I advise you to update now to avoid any malicious action and removal from google, and keep an eye out for official WordPress updates.