It’s a bad-news, good-news kind of month, isn’t it? A few examples:

Bad news: It’s so dreary, dark, and cold. Bah humbug!

Good news: It may be hard to notice, but the days are ever-so-slightly getting longer. Some things, like these February Gold narcissus (daffodils, which are one of my very favorite flowers), are even growing!

Bad news: If the Mayans and conspiracy theorists are right, this may be the last February ever.

Good news: At least we get an extra bonus Leap Day! With 29 whole days to rock it, we can make this the best February EVAR!

Bad news: I have a hard time coming up with things to write for my supposedly-weekly newsletter. Can I get an “amen”? Please? Anybody?

Good news: My friend Beth McKeon, who runs not one but three successful small businesses, is leading a roundtable workshop this weekend called But What Do I Write? I am totally looking forward to this. Come join us — it’ll be fun, and you might even be able to get your next newsletter done in time to watch the SuperAdvertisement –er, Bowl.

Bad news: The sheer volume of awesome stuff I’m doing this month means I will be completely unavailable for new client work, including Units of Wendy, Fairy Godmother packages, and WordPress installations, until April 2 (no fooling).

Good news: Here’s  just a taste of the aforementioned awesome stuff: This is the month Pamela Wilson and I will be releasing a new do-it-yourself guide to building and designing your own website, along with a free class, information-packed PDF reports, and bonus interviews (hint: We have a Skype date with Sonia Simone this week!) If you want to be the first to get the goodies, join my Invitation List! Just fill in your address here, click RSVP, and I’ll keep you in the loop, one step ahead of the crowd.

Oh, and a final piece of good news: If you’re already in my Peace of Mind Program, no worries! I’ve reserved time just for you during this short but busy month, and I’ll continue taking care of your WordPress backups and upgrades.

Hey, that tips the total for February into the Good News column… how about that?

February Gold daffodil image by Cillas on Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License

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In this post, I’ll show you how to get this plugin working again.

Fair warning: This fix involves directly editing the plugin’s source code. I’ve provided all the necessary code so you can just copy and paste. This has worked on all the sites I’ve tried it on, but it’s possible that it won’t work for you — you might have a different hosting setup or a plugin conflict that I haven’t run across.

But even if this fix doesn’t take, really, the worst that can happen is that your copy of the WPAudio plugin still won’t work. What I mean is, a copy-paste mistake isn’t going to break your entire site or erase your database or anything disastrous like that.

Why you might not want to fix this plugin at all

I chose to research the fix because I like to know how things work, I’ve got a hardcore DIY streak, and I’m stubborn — I like the way WPAudio looks and works and I just don’t want to switch, doggone it.

However, I fully realize that I might be in a tiny minority here and that you might decide that it’s just easier and simpler to switch to a different audio player on your WordPress site. And that is totally OK (I’m actually researching some WPAudio alternatives and will post about those later this week).

One big reason to switch to a different plugin is that WPAudio’s author is no longer supporting it or releasing new versions. WordPress will continue to change and improve, and it’s very possible that future versions of WordPress will break this plugin again. So this code fix is a bit like wrapping a frayed wire with electrical tape — a temporary measure that’s fine for now but not built to last.

Still here? On with the tinkering!

Step 1: Download these two text files. You’ll need to copy and paste their contents later in these instructions. Right-click (on a PC) or CTRL-click (on a Mac) the filename, and choose “Save Link As” or the closest equivalent.

1. wpaudio.js.txt
2. wpaudio.min_.js.txt

Step 2. Open the files in a text editor (Notepad, TextEdit, or the like). Because they have the .txt suffix, they may automatically open with the right application if you simply double-click them.

Step 3. In your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins –> Editor. 

Step 4. Choose “WPaudio” in the drop-down list at the top right corner of your Plugin Editor screen. When you first arrive at this screen, it will show the first plugin in alphabetical order (often Akismet). After you select WPaudio, click the “Select” button next to the drop-down menu and you will then see a list of that plugin’s source files.

Step 5. In this list, click the link labeled “wpaudio-mp3-player/wpaudio.js” to display the contents of that file in the editing pane. It should begin with these lines:

/*
 * WPaudio v3.1 (http://wpaudio.com)
 * by Todd Iceton (todd@wpaudio.com)
 *
 * Converts an mp3 link to a simple player styled by HTML & CSS, powered by
HTML5 with SoundManager2 Flash fallback

Step 6. Copy the entire contents of the first text file you downloaded — the one called wpaudio.js.txt — and replace the entire contents of the wpaudio.js file onscreen with your copied text. You want to completely overwrite the file contents, so in the WordPress Editor screen you can either Select All and Paste, or Select All and Delete before Pasting.

Step 7. Click the blue “Update File” button at the bottom of your screen. You should see a success message appear at the top of your screen that reads “File updated successfully.”

Step 8. Repeat steps 5, 6, and 7 with the file named wpaudio.min.js. You’ve just replaced the entire contents of two of the plugin’s source files, and saved your changes. Your site is still there, right? No smoke coming out of your hard drive? Good! On to the final step:

Step 9. Go to Settings –> WPaudio, and click the blue “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the screen. It’s a good idea to check the settings to make sure they’re correct, but go ahead and click the blue button even if you don’t make any changes. This is similar to refreshing a web page to get the latest version — you want your copy of the plugin to read the new code you added.

Now go test one of your audio files on your site. Fingers crossed that it plays the way it is supposed to! And if not, stay tuned for my upcoming post on audio player alternatives (you can subscribe to get updates in your inbox or grab the RSS feed to get it in your reader). And feel free to leave a comment if you have a favorite WordPress audio plugin, too!

It’s important to note that I didn’t do this coding work on my own. All the code fixes came from helpful users on the WordPress.org support forum; I’m merely trying to let more people know about these fixes, and maybe make them a bit less scary to implement. Here are the original posts describing the code changes:

• WordPress.org support forum post with code fixes from forum user rahul286
• WordPress.org support forum post with code fixes from forum user waffl
• WordPress.org support forum post with code fixes from forum user Ursula (aka WP Gal)

Frayed cord image by blmurch on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License

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And then I tweeted and Facebooked to ask people to sign up for my upcoming WordPress Swimming Lessons group coaching class (deadline to sign up is Friday, January 20, and I’m not accepting any new client work in February, so this is definitely a case of Legitimate Urgency).

A Facebook friend gently chided me for making it harder for people to sign up for my class.

She’s right. I did make it harder. Not on purpose; not to force people away from my site. There was, after all, a “continue to site” link right on the splash page (though I can see how it was easy to miss), and the splash page only showed up once for each visitor (and I know full well that “just once” may have turned people away).

But I didn’t shut down my business or my website. I continued to work, plan, and hang out online at the same time that I was protesting. And I responded, in part, “I know it might not seem sensible, but… neither does SOPA/PIPA.”

And I’ll do it again on Monday, January 23. Because as Allison Boyer noted over on BlogWorld’s blog, SOPA and PIPA matter more today than they did yesterday. It’s not just about defeating one or two particularly badly written bills; it’s about crafting laws that uphold everyone’s rights (and I say that as a business owner as well as a citizen).

Is moderating blog comments online censorship?

Anyway, I got to thinking about the phrases that get thrown around about “stopping censorship.” And I wondered if anyone (other than my Internal Voices Committee, which always has something to complain about) could legitimately accuse me of censorship because I moderate my blog’s comments.

According to my pals at Merriam-Webster, the transitive verb “censor” means “to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable.”

By that definition, yes, I am engaging in censorship merely by moderating comments, even if I approve all of them, simply because I am examining them in order to make a decision! Interesting, eh?

Now, the definition of “censorship” contains this, among other definitions: “censorial control exercised repressively.” Here I could go down the rabbit hole of looking up the definitions of “repress” and “control” and so on, but I’ll simply say this: Even if I exercise my censorial control repressively here on this one website (which I don’t believe is true in the first place), the Internet is far bigger than me and my one-person business site. There are so many other venues for online expression that to claim that I could be acting repressively is honestly kind of funny.

Further, I believe that every website owner has the same right — to delete content that doesn’t meet their standards. Whatever those standards might be. And I think this view is consistent with wanting to stop the government from stepping in and making those content-removal decisions without the benefit of due process.

I stand by my decision to moderate, and I’ll state for the record that yep, I will absolutely delete anything I consider objectionable. This is my blog, my website, and my online home. No one gets to enter without my permission. I am the sole and final judge of what counts as objectionable here.

That said, I can count on one hand (with a few fingers left over) the number of times I’ve manually deleted comments. Evidence shows that 99.6% of my real, human commenters are just fine, simply because they are real and human. And my moderation process reflects that — if a given user’s first-ever comment is approved, my site will automatically approve and post additional comments by that user.

(Manually deleting comments doesn’t include spam or robots, which are automagically filtered quite well by a combination of two plugins (Akismet and WP-Hashcash) and a comment blacklist that screens for certain non-Roman characters.)

What about you? Do you have a comment policy? Why or why not? How is it working out for you? Want to see how fast I approve comments?

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Instead of two columns of settings, you now have one column of extra-wide settings:

…with a big space about halfway down the page:

Clearly some kind of column-resetting weirdness has happened with the WordPress 3.3 upgrade.

Fortunately, it’s easy to get your normal two-column display back, in four quick clicks.

Click 1: Screen Options

At the top right of your Prose Design Settings screen, there’s a little gray pull-down menu entitled “Screen Options.”

Click it.

Click 2: Select number of columns

At the bottom of the menu that opens up, look under Screen Layout and click “2″ next to Number of Columns.

Unless you have a good reason for hiding one or more of your Prose Design Settings, just leave all the checkboxes checked.

Click 3: Close Screen Options

When you have selected the two-column layout, go ahead and close the Screen Options menu by clicking on the words “Screen Options” again.

Nothing changes on your screen, but that’s because you need the fourth click!

Click 4: Save Settings

At the top of your Prose Design Settings page, click the Save Settings button (it’s supposed to be WordPress blue, but in some browsers it shows up as barely legible white-on-gray).

Be sure to click the Save Settings button at the top of the page. There’s another one at the bottom of the page, but the bottom button is buggy (say that five times fast!), especially in certain browsers.

Presto! Two columns restored!

There you have it, your regular two-column Prose Design Settings have been restored!

Yes, that Prose link up there is an affiliate link. I’m now using the Prose theme here on WendyCholbi.com and for the majority of my WordPress installations, and I highly recommend it. You’ll be hearing more about Prose from me in the coming months.

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Even though the sun is currently shining into my window, it feels pretty dark. In all kinds of ways.

I’m behind on everything.

I’m drowning in email.

I’m cold (currently typing in fingerless gloves).

I’m sleepy at all the wrong times. Which also means I’m also awake at all the wrong times.

“Closing out the year” seems like an impossible task. So does starting a new year.

But…

According to TimeandDate.com, at my latitude, tomorrow’s daylight will last three seconds longer than today’s.

Three more seconds of sunlight may not seem like much. Even day after day after day.

The long warm twilights of July seem impossibly far away.

But they’ll get here. Three seconds at a time.

And I’ll get there too.

Three seconds at a time.

How about you?

Candle image by Bangin on Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License

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I’m sitting in a fairly comfy chair, I’ve plugged in my laptop, and there’s actually a decent wireless connection. I’ve worked in worse places, so I’m pretty happy at the moment.

Normally I’d be reading a book at a time like this, but the internet connection at my house isn’t working, so I’m grabbing all the online time I can.

See, we had a super-apocalyptic version of one of our normal fall Santa Ana windstorms on Wednesday night, and at 4:30am the power went out for thousands of people in our area. After a 15-hour outage, power blinked back on at about 7:30pm on Thursday. Hallelujah! We could cook! Bathe in hot water! Watch television!

I secretly was hoping we’d have to have a completely candlelit evening, though. I love candles.

Except that the router wasn’t picking up an internet connection. So after trying the various reset-restart-reboot operations, and spending 45 minutes on the phone with Verizon tech support, I learned that we’d need a new router. Which Verizon was happy to ship to us at no charge.

So I’m without internet until Monday.

(I did try to arrange to pick up a new router from a local Verizon store, but that turned into a scavenger hunt game of chase-down-the-right-phone-number and then take-a-number-and-wait-in-line-in-the-store-where-they’re showing-Secretariat-on-TV (I haven’t seen the movie yet! Spoiler alert: HE WON THE TRIPLE CROWN!! Then I got to see what I think was the first 10 minutes of the Karate Kid remake, featuring Jackie Chan eating noodles with chopsticks) and then leave-before-my-number-got-called-because-I-can’t-miss-my-brake-appointment…)

This is an interesting situation.

I had to reschedule a client call, and of course all my client work is being delayed, because working on live websites requires being connected to the internet.

There is non-online work I can be doing, of course — planning, writing, filing, organizing, etc. But the actual work, the part where I run backups and install plugins and publish blog posts and tweak sales pages? Can’t be done without an internet connection.

So it is fascinating to notice that part of my reaction is logical and sensible because the majority of what I do requires being online. And that another part is the jittery, twitchy, impending delirium tremens of internet withdrawal.

Of course I never considered myself addicted until I couldn’t get my fix.

And then it was a surprisingly short time until I caught myself thinking ridiculous nonsensical things like I can’t learn anything! and then doing weird things like booting up my laptop in the brake shop. Kinda like your alcoholic uncle rifling through the fridge and downing a jar of maraschino cherries with a chaser of vanilla extract.

This “unplugging” thing people talk of? I don’t really do it. I work at home and my computer is always on, always connected.

That advice to batch email checking and only do it once or twice a day? Never thought it applied to me.

I never thought I suffered from Internet hangovers because I’m never offline long enough to get the shakes.

So this weekend will be an interesting experiment.

Remaining conscious and noticing what’s going on will be key.

I don’t know how I’ll feel about it — I’ll have to experience it first. Right now I’m OK, but of course I’m still online, and that’s about to change.

Have you ever tried an experiment with batching email, limiting internet access, or intentionally unplugging? How did it go for you? What did you notice? I’d love to hear about it in the comments (but I may not reply until Monday!!).

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In every one of these three cases, it turned out that they weren’t able to use the built-in WordPress menus, because their themes were outdated. And with WordPress 3.3 due to be released in the next few weeks, theme compatibility is on my mind.

If you’re apprehensive about updating to WordPress 3.3, get a Website Tune-Up and I’ll handle the upgrade for you, as well as making sure you’re completely backed up.

Navigation is important. If your visitors can’t find things on your site, they will go away.

To meet this need, every website should have these two things on (almost) every page:*

1. Clear navigation menu(s). The navigation links should have short, obvious names. On my site, for instance, the purple navigation bar that appears just below my header has six links: Home, About, Contact, Store, Free Goodies, and Subscribe. My Store link also has a drop-down menu listing the individual pages describing my products and services.
2. A “search this site” form. This can go in the header, in the navigation bar, or in a sidebar, but please put it in a consistent location across your site. And test it once in awhile to make sure it works.

*I say “almost” because there are always exceptions. On a sales page, for instance, you may not want to include a search form because you want the single call-to-action on that page to be clicking the buy button.

Is your theme compatible with WordPress Menus?

These three clients, with different websites, were all telling me that they couldn’t reorder their menu items or add items to their menus. And at first I was baffled, because the WordPress menus are really easy to work with — you just drag and drop to reorder, and adding a page is a one-click operation.

But in each case, the problem quickly became clear when I logged into their WordPress dashboard to find that their theme was not compatible with the built-in WordPress menus.

If you’re not sure if your theme is compatible with the drag-and-drop WordPress menus, visit Appearance –> Menus in your WordPress dashboard. If you see a message telling you that “The current theme does not natively support menus…” then you need a new theme. Period.

If you see this incompatibility warning, you seriously need a new theme.

Yikes! What if you need a new theme?

The WordPress menus have been drag-and-drop for at least a year now. So any theme that is not compatible with WordPress menus is outdated.

Good theme developers update their themes when WordPress introduces cool new functions like drag-and-drop menus, so it’s possible that you can simply update your theme to the latest version. If you bought a premium theme, updates like this are part of what you paid for. Ask the theme creator how to update your theme.

If your theme doesn’t have a menu-compatible latest version, you seriously need to get a new theme. Seriously. You are missing out on features that will make your WordPress-wrangling easy, quick, and fun. And older code (yes, older than a year is pretty old in Internet time) is more vulnerable to corruption by Internet Bad Guys.

With a Website Tune-Up, I’ll update your theme to the latest version, if one is available (and I’ll also update you to WordPress 3.3 when it comes out).

If you need to switch themes entirely because your old theme is outdated, consider my new Fairy Godmother package, which includes two one-hour consultations with me plus my time to fix, tweak, and test your site.

Got a question about WordPress menus, themes, or wine? Leave a comment!

Wine menu image adapted from Civertan on Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License

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Jump links, also known as anchor links, are links that take you to a specific part of a page, instead of the default top location.

I personally prefer the term jump links because it captures the idea that these links let readers “jump” to various parts of a page (and also because technically all links use the HTML anchor tag…so every link is an anchor link).

So…what if you want to link to something other than the top of the page?

Good news: Yes you can!

News that might be not-quite-so-good: You have to do a little bit of manual fiddling to get it to work, including (gasp) adding a tiny piece of HTML code to your page.

Why use jump links in the first place?

Links should be useful. And sometimes that means linking within the content of a page.

F’rinstance, here are some situations that might call for jump links:

• A long post or page with a table of contents at the top. Each item in the table of contents links to a subhead lower down on the page.
• The handy “return to top” link at the bottom of a page.
• At the top of a sales page, you can include a link saying “Want to go straight to the price?”
• Footnotes.^[1]

Let’s say, for example, that you have a long page, and you want to let readers jump straight to Part 1, Part 2, or Part 3 of the page from a table of contents at the top. Here’s what you need to do:

Step 1. Figure out where the jump will start and end

At the top of your page, you’ll have some text that you want to turn into clickable links to sections of your page. Maybe a list, like this:

Part 1: Thesis

Part 2: Antithesis

Part 3: Synthesis

And then lower down in the body of your page, you’ll have subheads, using Header 3 style, that match those table-of-contents listings.

Let’s link up the table-of-contents entry “Part 1: Thesis” with its subhead. To do that, we’ll start with the subhead itself.

Step 2. Locate the end point of the jump in HTML view

The Visual and HTML tabs on the WordPress post box

At the top of your WordPress post box, there are two tabs, labeled Visual and HTML. Most of us do our writing entirely in Visual view, which is fine for most purposes. This is one of the few times you’ll need to take a peek into the HTML code of your page.

If you click the HTML tab, you’ll see that the text of your post is still there, interspersed with HTML tags. What you want to do is find the subhead where you’ll be pointing your jump link. If you’ve used the WordPress visual editor to give this subhead a Header 3 style, it will be wrapped in the appropriate HTML tags like this:

<h3>Part 1: Thesis</h3>

Step 3. Add an id attribute to your HTML

Now that you’ve located the HTML tags that enclose your subhead, you need to add one small piece of code to the first tag, so that this:

<h3>Part 1: Thesis</h3>

becomes this:

<h3 id="thesis">Part 1: Thesis</h3>

Pay attention to the spacing: Leave a space before the “id” but make sure there’s no space between the closing quotation mark and the greater-than symbol. And remember, you’re not deleting any characters, only adding.

You get to choose the text between the quotation marks — it will become part of your link URL, so use only letters and numbers, and no spaces inside the quotation marks.

You can add the id=”linkname” attribute to any HTML tag, not just <h3>. Subheads are easy to find and it makes sense to use them, but you’re not limited to them for jump link purposes.

Step 4. Switch back to Visual view and make sure it looks OK

Now click the Visual tab again and make sure the subhead — and everything after it — looks all right. “All right” in this case means “visually indistinguishable from before you added the id=”linkname” attribute.” In the Visual tab, your subhead should look unchanged.

Step 5. Add a link at the origin point

Now that you’ve prepared the end point of your jump link, you can use the built-in WordPress link dialog box to add your link in the usual way: Highlight the text you want to turn into a clickable link (in this case, the table-of-contents entry corresponding to the subhead) and click the link icon in your editing toolbar.

Now, instead of putting a full URL here, simply type the number sign (#) followed by the word you placed between the quotation marks in your id=”linkname” attribute, like this:

Optionally fill in a title, then click the blue “Add Link” button to save the link. Your table-of-contents entry should now show up as a blue, underlined link.

Step 6: Test the link

Once you’ve added the link, I suggest previewing the page to make sure your jump link works as intended. In the Preview tab, click the link and see if you jump down (or up) the page to your desired end point.

If it works, you are good to go.

If it doesn’t (if you click the link and nothing happens, for instance, or if you are taken to your home page instead of the same-page end point you expected), first double-check your HTML change.

It’s also possible that your theme or one of your plugins is rewriting your link URLs. The solution is to use the full URL of the page plus the “#linkname”, instead of just “#linkname” in the URL field, like this:

The tricky part here is that you are linking to the same page you’re currently editing, and if that page is unpublished, it won’t show up in the list of “existing content,” so you’ll have to manually type the complete and correct URL, make sure it ends with a forward slash, and append the “#linkname” text.

Now you can easily create tables of contents, footnotes, and intra-page jump links. Jump away!

1. ^ See how that little superscript “1″ took you right down here to the bottom of the post? Neat, huh? The thing to remember with footnotes is that you always want to provide your readers an easy way to jump back up to exactly where they came from, or you’ll lose them. That’s why the little “^” symbol at the beginning of this footnote is another jump link that goes right back up to the footnoted text. If it’s good enough for Wikipedia, it’s good enough for me!

Image adapted from dorron on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License

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As for patently unemployable me, I’m battening down the hatches and planning survival strategies for the weekend.

I’ve long felt that I treat weekends and weekdays “backwards” from the way the rest of the world does it. Partly because I’m an introvert and HSP, partly because I run my own business, partly because I have kids.

Here’s what “backwards weekends” look like for me: My work time (weekdays while the kids are in school and the Professor is at his day job) is my creative time, my moneymaking time, my online-socializing time, my marketing time, MY time. I get to throw myself fully into my best work and my online world(s) while I have the house to myself. And I love it and need it.

Sure, sometimes I hate it too (when I’m overcommitted, or overwhelmed, or spinning my mental wheels…). But I get to create and work to my own rhythms (and in whatever clothes or lack thereof I feel like).

Then the kids come home and I want to be fully present for them, so MY time officially ends (even if I am still trying to finish stuff on my computer while they’re in the next room). And on the weekends, EVERYONE IS HOME ALL DAY. By Sunday evening, I am really really ready for everyone to be gone and leave me alone to do MY work again.

So sometimes I feel like a curmudgeon and a bad mother (long weekends, for example. And ohmygod it’s almost Christmas vacation and I’m frankly dreading it). But sometimes I don’t. And mostly it’s OK.

And then sometimes there are weeks like this one.

Monday night both kids were throwing up all night. Which meant the Professor and I were up too, soothing children and putting extra loads of laundry in.

Tuesday they stayed home from school and I spent the day monitoring input and output of a non-HTML variety, finishing up the extra laundry, and scrubbing the toilets. Brief escapes to Twitter and a generous post-shower slather of Aardvark Essentials Second Wind potion kept me sane.

Wednesday they went back to school, which was a relief because I was prepping for a Really Important Meeting and collecting beta-tester feedback for my next product (if your ears just pricked up, you may want to sign up for my Invitation List). But halfway through the day, the school called to tell me my son had broken out in hives, so I rushed to pick him up, get him home and into a baking-soda bath and dosed with Benadryl. I still don’t know what caused it (he’s never been allergic to anything as far as I can tell).

Thursday, shortly after they went to school, it became painfully clear that I was getting sick, so I dosed myself up with acetominophen and bismuth, took a nap, and was completely useless for the entire rest of the day, feebly sipping my Sprite and gingerly chewing my crackers.

And today, Friday, TGIF to the rest of the world, is a National Holiday. Both of my now-perfectly healthy kids are lounging around reading and playing computer games while I write this. I’m hoping I won’t get any sicker before I get weller, and oh joy, I just discovered the toilet in the hall bathroom is leaking.

So, yeah. This weekend is going to be one of the hard ones.

Would I rather be a corporate drone, though, looking forward to a work-free weekend? Don’t make me laugh too hard, please. If I had a “regular job,” I would have had to take at least two and a half days off this week, a week that only had four workdays to begin with. So I’d be just as behind, down three sick days, and hoping I’m not about to be downsized.

Nope, I’ll take the life I’ve chosen, backwards weekends and all. I’m allowed to be grumpy about it sometimes, because most of the time I love it to pieces.

What about you? If you’re running your own business (and that definitely includes part-time freelancing and other side-hustles), how do you treat your workdays and weekends?

Image by pvera on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License

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3. Lighting a candle

Specifically, this feature adds a simple checkbox to your blog comment form. If a commenter checks the box, the commenter is treated the same as someone who fills out your AWeber subscription form: They will receive a confirmation email message asking them to click a link to complete their subscription.

Want to see it in action? It’s on this very post! If you’re reading this in a feed reader or in your email, swing by the original blog post to see my shiny new checkbox.

It’s super-simple to activate on your own blog, and I’ll show you how in a minute.

First, let me be perfectly clear that the AWeber WordPress plugin does not automatically subscribe commenters to anything; they have to check the checkbox and complete AWeber’s double-opt-in confirmation process. You cannot set the checkbox to be checked by default (that would be a pretty clear violation of AWeber’s stated privacy policy, after all).

Commenters can subscribe with one click

I activated the new feature as soon as I heard about it, because I figure if someone is interested enough in my blog to leave a comment, and they’re not already subscribed to my Weekly Web Tips, I might as well give them a really easy way to subscribe without filling out another form or clicking through to another page.

Here’s how to activate this feature on your blog:

First, navigate to Settings –> AWeber Web Form in your WordPress dashboard. Assuming you’ve been able to connect your AWeber account to your installed plugin as described in my instructions for configuring the AWeber WordPress plugin, here’s what your plugin settings now look like:

You just need to do three quick things here:

1. Select a list from the dropdown (if you only have one list in AWeber, that will be pretty easy).
2. Edit the “Promotion text” to accurately reflect the list you’re asking your commenters to sign up to.
3. Don’t forget to click the blue “Save” button!

The two checkboxes here are checked by default. The “Allow subscriptions when visitors comment” is the important one here. Leave it checked to give commenters the option to subscribe.

A note about blog registrations

The second checkbox, “Allow subscriptions when visitors register to your blog,” is irrelevant for most of us, because you shouldn’t even be allowing registrations to your blog unless you have a good reason, such as a membership site. To check this setting on your site, visit Settings –> General in your WordPress dashboard, and verify that there is no check in the box labeled “Anyone can register.”

On the other hand, if you do have a membership site and you want to add your members to an email list at the same time they sign up, this is a super-simple way to do it. In this case, you’d want to UNcheck the first box, so that only new registrations to your blog, and not blog commenters, are added to the membership email list.

Remember that you can’t autosubscribe people, though, so you will almost certainly have members who register but don’t bother to check the box and thus don’t receive your emails. So you’ll want to have a backup method to ask those members to subscribe.

Anyway, here’s a shot of my saved settings for the AWeber WordPress plugin after I chose my list and edited my promotion text (the very same text you’ll see next to the checkbos on the comment form of this post…infinite meta loop alert!):

As you can see, it’s quick and easy to add a subscription checkbox to your comment form with the addition of this new feature to the AWeber WordPress plugin.

Limitations of the AWeber WordPress plugin “Subscribe by Commenting” feature

The plugin only allows you to connect one AWeber list with your comment form, so if you have more than one list, make sure you choose the one most relevant to your blog commenters sitewide to add to your comment form. You can switch lists and re-save after you’ve selected one in the drop-down menu, but remember that the new list will now apply to all your comment forms. There’s no way to let commenters on different posts subscribe to different lists.

There’s also no way to let commenters subscribe to one list and blog registrations to another — both checkboxes are connected to the same list. So if you are contemplating the membership-site option, you won’t be able to also use this plugin to add newsletter subscribers from your comment form.

Even with these small limitations, the new “Subscribe by Commenting” feature is a welcome addition to the AWeber WordPress plugin.

Comment card image adapted from Boonerator on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License

Related posts:

1. WordPress Plugin: AWeber Web Form
2. Updated version of “How to install a WordPress plugin”
3. New free PDF goodies: WordPress Essentials Toolkit and How to Upgrade Anything