WebProNews - WordPress

Google Connects Friends on WordPress Blogs

Chris Crum — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:32:38 +0000

Google has developed a plug-in for WordPress that adds the social features of Google Friend Connect to WordPress blogs. The plug-in allows visitors to these blogs to authenticate using any OpenID account, including Google, Yahoo, or AIM and then comment on posts without having to register. When a visitor authenticates, it creates a WordPress account.

"You can later add or remove permissions for the visitor from the WordPress site administration pages," explains Mauro Gonzalez, who developed the plug-in. "If desired, WordPress comments can be replaced by Google Friend Connect comments gadgets. In this case, no WordPress account is created, since Google Friend Connect handles both the rendering of the comments as well as comments moderation. Regardless of whether the Google Friend Connect comments gadgets are enabled or not, comment entries display the user profile picture and link to the user’s profile."

There is a set of social gadgets available that includes the Social Bar, Members, Recommendations, and Global Conversation gadgets. "When recommendations are enabled, a 'Recommend' button is displayed below your posts allowing the site members to choose the content they like most," says Gonzalez. "The most popular posts will surface to the top of the list within the recommendations gadget."

When a user of the WordPress blog posts content or comments on a post, this information will appear in the Google Friend Connect activity stream. Features of the plug-in like colors, size, labels, etc. can be customized in Wordpress like anything else.

The plug-in is available on the Google Code site. Examples are live in demos here and here.

WordPress Lets Bloggers Help Make the Mobile Web Better

Chris Crum — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:05:43 +0000

WordPress has launched a couple of new mobile themes for bloggers who use WordPress.com. The themes are designed to display automatically when the blogger's blog is accessed with a compatible mobile device.

Making moves to get blogs to display properly on mobile devices is a good move considering recent research, which found that consumers are generally not pleased with the way mobile web sites display.

"While mobile users may accept sites that are 'light' on richness and small in form factor, they are evidently not willing to sacrifice performance," said Matt Poepsel of Gomez, the company behind the research. "The mobile Web is all about convenience - the Web in your pocket -and slow mobile pages contradict that benefit. To avoid ongoing dissatisfaction and to capitalize on the mobile opportunity, businesses need to place mobile performance management squarely at the top of their to-do lists."

The WordPress themes should make that easier for on the blog side of things.

One theme is a modification of WPtouch, and will be displayed to phones with modern web browsers like those on the iPhone and Android phones. The other was developed from an older version of the WordPress Mobile Edition and will be displayed to all other mobile devices.

"Mobile visitors greeted by WPtouch will get easy access to posts, pages, and archives," says WordPress. "They'll get fancy AJAX commenting and post loading. If you are using a custom header image, it will be scaled to size and displayed at the top of your blog. When viewing your blog on other phones, the focus will be on loading the blog quickly while displaying the important information about your content."

According to Wordpress, over 60 million page views a month of WordPress.com blogs have been on mobile devices.

WordPress Receives Grammar Check Plug-In

Andy Beal — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:52:18 +0000

I’ve always maintained that it’s dangerous to take a single Marketing Pilgrim post and assume you understand our sentiment and bias towards any one company. If you read yesterday’s criticism of WordPress, you’d think we were “automattic” haters.

Today, you’d be eating humble pie.

Automattic has announced the acquisition of After the Deadline, a service that provides spell checking, style checking, and grammar checking. Huzzah!

While I’m somewhat puzzled that WordPress.com users get After the Deadline baked-in, while us .org user are left once again with just a plugin, I still applaud the acquisition. Why? Because spell checking and grammar checking are the bane of any blogger’s existence!

For example, despite my own best efforts, I’m plagued with the curse of “its” versus “it’s.” It’s not that I don’t know how to use each, it’s that sometimes my fingers move faster than my brain. Judging by a demo offered by After the Deadline, I need to install this plugin ASAP:

(Note: It’s not perfect. Notice it missed “ads” when it should be “adds.”)

You can learn more about the deal via After the Deadline’s founder Raphael Mudge.

Comments

Wordpress.com Launches WP.me - URL Shortener

Jeremy Muncy — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:17:00 +0000

If you're a blogger with WordPress.com, you'll be happy to learn that you now have the capability to shorten your URL's within Wordpress.com with the new WP.me service. You can see an example of a WP.me link below.

Original
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/shorten/

Shortend Version
http://wp.me/sf2B5-shorten

Will you use the new WP.me URL shortener? Tell us.

What's so special about WP.me, besides the link being 70% shorter? Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, updated the WordPress blog where he sheds some light on some key features:

WP.me is the only two-letter .me domain in the world.
Every blog and post on WordPress.com has a WP.me URL now.
These are all exposed in the <head> using rel=shortlink.
It doesn’t work for any URL in the world, just WP.com-hosted ones.
The links are permanent, they will work as long as WordPress.com is around.
WP.me is spam-free, because we are constantly monitoring and removing spam from WP.com.

Matt goes on to say:

"I think a few of these points are worth following up on. While URL shorteners have had some incredible usage tied to the growth (and constraints) of Twitter, I question their sustainability as a business. This point was underscored a few days ago when a popular one, tr.im, announced they were going to shut down at the end of the year.

Their story had a happy ending in that someone came in and saved them, but it was hard not to think of what would have happened if all their links stopped redirecting one day: part of the web would go dark. I also worry that because shorteners are essentially open proxies of HTTP they’ll be exploited by spammers and malware distributors to the point where businesses, anti-phishing, and anti-virus services will be forced to block them.”

With popular micro-blogging site Twitter gaining so much popularity this year, will people still find time for Wordpress? It's unclear at this point, but by the looks of things, some people are already using WP.me.

Do you think Wordpress has lost some bloggers to Twitter? Let us know what you think.

Cutts Explains How Blogs Can Rank Higher In Google

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:30:25 +0000

If you want your blog to do better in Google’s search results, Matt Cutts recommends WordPress. According to a presentation Google’s Webspam captain gave at WordCamp San Francisco, Word Press takes care of about 80-90 percent of SEO mechanics.

The presentation, which spans 50 pages, is available at Cutts’ blog in Google Docs or PowerPoint. Other than how WordPress helps automatically, Cutts gave tips about how to get a blog to rank better in Google. The two biggest ones are be relevant and be reputable.

Being Relevant

Some of this is voodoo and some of this technical, obviously. The big questions are necessary, equivalent to who am I? Why am I here? Cutts recommends asking yourself: “What do I love?” “What am I really good at doing?” What do I have to say?”

Once you’ve answered those questions and commit to exploring them via bloggery, there are some technical things for gaining relevance, like keyword relevance. Choose words users are likely to type, and include them naturally in blog posts. For example, a blogger can use name variations referring to the same device: usb drive, thumb drive, flash drive, pen drive.” Cutts recommends ALT attributes.

Also consider URL structure. WordPress default URL structure uses question marks and numbers, instead of day and name, month name, etc.. Cutts says these types of URLs improve aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility. For URL paths with keywords in them, Cutts says dashes (hyphens) are preferred over underscores to separate words, but no spaces between words is a bad idea (example.com/my-keywords).

Don’t overdo keywords in the text. Make sure they flow naturally. Otherwise, Google could bust you for keyword stuffing.

Being Reputable

Cutts recommends the following to boost a blogger’s reputation:

Be interesting

Update often

Find your niche

Provide a useful service

Do original research or reporting

Give great information

Live blog

Make lists

Create controversy

Meet people on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed

Other Useful Information

Google crawls in decreasing order of PageRank, which means if a site has a low PageRank, it will be crawled last, behind sites with higher ranking.

Cutts’ simplified definition of PageRank is “the number and importance of links pointing to a site.”

Cutts also recommends plug-ins he uses for his blog, which include Akismet (a comment spam catcher), Cookies for Comments (another comment spam catcher), Enforce www. Preference (301 redirects to no-www or yes-www preference for link building), Feedburner Feedsmith (for tracking subscribers), and WP Super Cache (for fast caching).

Google, Twitter, WordPress Reps Go To Iraq

Doug Caverly — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 13:50:52 +0000

Don't be surprised if a lot of blog posts, tweets, and YouTube videos start pouring out of Iraq in the near future. The U.S. State Department has led a number of corporate representatives to Baghdad, and the group includes executives from Google, Twitter, and Automattic/WordPress.

Employees of AT&T, Blue State Digital, Howcast, Meetup, Wired Magazine, and YouTube are also part of the team, which has been dubbed the "New Media Technology delegation." Their journey began yesterday, and should end on Thursday the 23rd.

As for what exactly they'll be up to, Robert Wood, Acting State Department Spokesman, stated during a briefing, "During the trip the delegation will meet with representatives from the Government of Iraq, the public and private education sectors, Iraqi technology companies, and groups active in Iraqi civil society."

He also explained, "[T]hey will provide conceptual input as well as ideas on how new technologies can be used to build local capacity, foster greater transparency and accountability, build upon anti-corruption efforts, promote critical thinking in the classroom, scale-up civil society, and further empower local entities and individuals by providing the tools for network building."

So Google and the other companies may soon be involved in pretty much every aspect of online life in Iraq.

You can follow the delegation's trip, if you want, through Jack Dorsey's Twitter account and Raanan Bar-Cohen's blog.

Pingdom Names Most Reliable Blogging Services

Doug Caverly — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:42:21 +0000

Running a blog can be a big nuisance; you've got keep up with current events, write posts, and monitor comments on at least a daily basis. But new Pingdom statistics should lighten the load by helping people make sure their blogs remain accessible.

Pingdom observed nine different blogging services for a period of four months in order to find out which ones suffered the least amount of downtime. The uptime-monitoring company's test ran through March 10th, so its findings should be quite current.

TypePad came out on top, spending just 14 minutes in non-working order. Blogger and WordPress.com were next, with both services losing 20 minutes. Then there was a significant drop-off, as Windows Live Spaces, Blogster, and Squarespace experienced 250, 279, and 313 minutes' worth of downtime, respectively.

Vox, LiveJournal, and Blog.com wrap up the list with performances too bad to bother reporting.

So there's some significant (and even potentially valuable) data for all the bloggers out there. If you're using one of the less reliable services, consider making a switch and testing what sort of effect the move has on your readership and ad revenue.

Top Blogs' Favorite Platforms Identified

Doug Caverly — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 20:58:59 +0000

Whether a given blogger takes pride in being a weirdo or feels safer as part of a crowd, a new report will help him (or her) sort out exactly where he (or she) stands. Pingdom staffers took a close look at which platforms are most common among the most popular blogs.

WordPress grabbed first place with no problem, with 27 out of the top 100 blogs (as ranked by Technorati) using it. The platform's fans range from big corporations like the New York Times to individuals such as Chris Brogan.

Then came TypePad, with 16 followers, Blogsmith with 14, and Movable Type with 12. There are some pretty impressive names to be found on their sections of a user list, as well. (Think Wired properties, Autoblog, and Boing Boing, respectively.)

We'll skip down to Blogger next. It seems like a bit of a defeat for Google to find it in ninth place, being used by only three out of the top 100 blogs. Worse still: one of those three blogs is the Official Google Blog, landing the platform in "my mom thinks I'm handsome" territory.

Ah, well. Hats off to the Royal Pingdom crew for the research they did, and good luck with the transfer if you decide to choose a new blog platform for yourself or your company.

WordPress Creators Acquire PollDaddy

Chris Crum — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 01:00:27 +0000

Integrating polls into your WordPress blog just got easier. WordPress creators Automattic have acquired poll and survey service PollDaddy.

"Now whenever you do a post you’ll be a few clicks away from having your own poll, and you can have as many as you like!" says WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg. "We’re also going to be working on a lot more styles and customization of the polls, so you’ll be able to match it exactly to the look and feel of your blog." PollDaddy contains the following features:

"For a year or two now, I’ve been minorly obsessed with polls and surveys as a method of lightweight interaction that engages casual users of your website and also can get you some really fun data to play with," says Mulleneg. "I’ve also mentioned at a few WordCamps that a polling plugin is one of the top 10 WordPress plugins in the world. Polls are really popular with WordPress users."

There's no doubt that polls can be a great way to inspire audience participation (or user engagement if you will). They can be great way to come up with interesting statistics (more so for more popular blogs) and get feedback from readers about your blog itself, which can then lead to improvements. Polls make for a nice interactive element that people often just happen to find fun.

With so many of the Blogosphere's blogs running on WordPress, PollDaddy could potentially have an impact on a great number of them. For a nice demo on how PollDaddy for WordPress works, check out the video below.

Facebook Connect Plugin for Wordpress Glimpsed

Chris Crum — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 21:21:19 +0000

Lately, we've been seeing blog platforms making moves to become more social. Movable Type started incorporating the ability to set up social networks apart from the Facebook Connect plugin that is available. Blogger discussed adding new features including integrating Google Friend Connect into it.

Apparently the Facebook Connect Wordpress plugin has now leaked. Though still in beta mode, it would allow Facebook members to connect with one another via comments on Wordpress blogs. This is not unlike what Movable Type has done.

"The difference with the Facebook Wordpress plugin is that the Wordpress plugin is an internal Facebook project," writes Nick O'Neill at AllFacebook - the Unofficial Facebook Blog. "This also means that Facebook wants to be able to own the comments on your site. Anytime you enable users to login via Facebook, you won't have access to their email address, unlike Disqus and native Wordpress comments. That would probably be my greatest complaint."

Facebook did contact O'Neill and said that it was not an official Facebook project, so I guess it is still up in the air when it comes to that. With the Movable Type version, Facebook users who visit Movable Type sites can sign in to their Facebook accounts without creating a new one. Profile pictures and names can be displayed, and friends updated when you "participate on the web."

I'm assuming that the Wordpress version will serve basically the same purposes. There's no word on when it will be released to the public. Facebook made O'Neill remove it, and probably have had others do the same.

UK To Get First WordCamp Event

Neville Hobson — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:54:37 +0000

This is an event I’ve been looking forward to for quite a while - WordCamp UK 2008, the first WordCamp in the UK, takes places in Birmingham during this weekend July 19-20.

There is a packed agenda planned for the two days, offering something for everyone with an interest in WordPress, whatever your knowledge or skill level and however you’re involved with blogging on WordPress.

If you’re a developer, there’s a lot of interest for you. Likewise if you run a WordPress blog. If you are simply a blogger writing a WordPress blog and don’t care much for the tech stuff, this is still an event for you.

Perhaps of greatest interest from a participant’s point of view is that WordCamp UK 2008 gives you an opportunity to connect with influential bloggers and talented designers and developers in the UK who have a passion for WordPress. That’s a big attraction for me.

Check the event wiki and blog for more information.

I’ll be there but only on Sunday July 20. Just can’t get there for Saturday as I have an unbreakable family commitment.

This first UK WordCamp is the result of an awful lot of volunteerism and planning by just a handful of people, starting with Tony Scott. Thanks to Tony and everyone who have made this event happen.

WordCamp UK 2008 takes place at The Studio in central Birmingham (map). Entry is by ticket only and ticket sales will stop late on Friday. So if you plan to be there and haven’t yet got your ticket, buy it today!

Hope to see you there.

Comments

WordCamp Coming To The UK

Neville Hobson — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 20:02:51 +0000

If you’re a WordPress user in the UK and are keen to get involved with others to share tips and experiences about blogging with WordPress, take note that a WordCamp is coming to the UK.

From an initial idea by Tony Scott, the concept starting gaining traction last week via a mailing list discussion.

Now, it’s becoming more official and organized with formal support from Automattic, the company behind WordPress, with a wiki as the place to focus planning and organization for what will be the first UK WordCamp.

What’s a WordCamp? you might be wondering. Here’s a succinct explanation:

WordCamp is an informal gathering of WordPress bloggers, podcasters, designers and developers.

An unconference might be another way to describe it. Maybe along the lines of PodCamp UK last year (which was a terrific experience).

Neither the venue nor the dates are known yet. But if you’re interested, dive in and join the planning discussions.

Whenever it happens, I definitely want to be there!

Comments

Automattic Acquires BuddyPress

Doug Caverly — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:43:33 +0000

We could say that BuddyPress has a friend in Automattic, but following a recent development, it's actually more accurate to say that BuddyPress is a friend in Automattic. BuddyPress was acquired by the WordPress parent company.

Matt Mullenweg

On BuddyPress.com, a single line of text states, "BuddyPress will transform a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform." In a post on his blog, Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, explain why this idea is of interest to him.

"It's clear that the future is social," Mullenweg writes. "Connections are key. WordPress MU is a platform which has shown itself to be able to operate at Internet-scale and with BuddyPress we can make it friendlier. Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape."

With the implication being that Automattic and BuddyPress might be the ones to bring the alternative into existence.

We're not there yet, though, and Mullenweg didn't say anything further on the matter. Also left unsaid are BuddyPress's purchase price and the terms under which its creator, Andy Peatling, agreed to work for Automattic.

Mullenweg Indicates Over 30 Percent Of Blogs Are Spam

Doug Caverly — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 22:06:09 +0000

If you're willing to trust Matt Mullenweg, and believe WordPress is fairly representative of blog platforms everywhere, then have we got a statistic for you: it seems that at least 30 percent of all blogs may be spam.

Matt Mullenweg - Developer Of Wordpress

During an appearance at the Future of Web Apps conference, Mullenweg stated that WordPress powers 2,523,000 blogs. Also, as Caroline McCarthy wrote, "WordPress has deleted more than 800,000 'splogs,' or spam blogs."

Divide the second number by the first, multiply by 100, and you get 31.7 percent. Almost one-third, if you round up, or three out of ten, if you'd prefer to round down. That's high, and that's ignoring McCarthy's "more than" and the possibility that WordPress missed some splogs.

Still, Dan Frommer, who inspired this little analysis, pointed out that things could be worse. "Anti-spam software firm Commtouch says 96% of global emails are junk," he wrote.

Let's just hope blog spammers don't take the comparison as a challenge.

Google Indexes New Blogs With Few Delays

Doug Caverly — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 18:47:27 +0000

Owners of new Blogspot or WordPress sites may worry that Google won't index them. And we can't guarantee that Google will do so quickly, or even that the search giant will do so at all. There's a fair amount of evidence suggesting that things will be taken care of sooner rather than later, however.

We'll start with the slightly disquieting stuff. On the WebmasterWorld forum, "dhirajch" writes, "I think it is not always. but yes definetly much more faster than any website."

The other less-than-assuring piece of information comes from Ted Ulle, who states, "Without any external links, google is not likely to index any site, whether it's a blog or not. They're definitely not likely to keep in the index for very long even, if they do discover the url somehow."

But people like "IncrediBILL" and Tamar Weinberg, along with at several others, have said there's little to worry about. Several examples were given in which Blogspot or WordPress sites showed up in Google's search results either quickly or without any effort on the author's part.

In the end, maybe it's best to toss a few outside links into a piece to make sure. Also, all the other usual SEO tips are liable to help, as well. But it seems like no special actions are necessary (and no anxiety is in order) when trying to get a new blog indexed by Google.

Answers To Your Blog Commenting Questions

Abby Johnson — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:27:00 +0000

I guess that could be the case if you’re not very serious about your blog. However, if you truly possess the passion to even take the time to blog, you’re going to want to make the most of it.

First and foremost, you want readers. But how do you get them there? I had a nice chat with two well-known bloggers who gave several helpful tips relating to blog comments.

Leo Laporte, host of TWiT.tv and blogger of Leoville.com, told me a few pointers for driving traffic to your blog:

1.    Have good content
2.    Update your blog regularly
3.    Present it well
4.    Have a clear point of view and clear speech
5.    Participate in other blogs, conferences, and forums
6.    Use social media tools

Another important point relating to blog comments is how to get readers to comment. Matt Mullenweg, the Founding Developer of WordPress and blogger of photomatt.net, echoes Laporte’s word that content should be solid and well written. He also suggests leaving your content open-ended. According to Mullenweg, readers are likely to respond if this criteria is met.

What happens if someone leaves a negative comment? Everyone’s first instinct is to delete anything negative, but is that always right?

Laporte and Mullenweg both believe some negative comments are good. Everyone is entitled to an opinion and if they choose to share it, they have that right even if you disagree with them.

The experts say it is appropriate to remove a comment if it is not intelligent and is slanderous to the blogger. However, if all the comments on the blog are positive and praise the blogger, it could turn readers away and result in low traffic and few or no comments.

Laporte points out that it is a good idea to have a set of commenting guidelines. Let the readers know if you do not allow racist, homophobic, or obscene comments. It is also good to specify what age group the audience is.

To find out more information on blogging and blog comments, tune into the WebProNews video, “A Few Comments on Commenting...”

Create Your Own Blog Version of Twitter

Andy Beal — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 20:24:04 +0000

It seems Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg and team have gotten the Twitter bug. In fact, they love the idea of micro-updates so much, they’ve launched a new WordPress theme that lets you create your own blog version of Twitter.

They’ve named it Prologue.

Here’s how it looks:

(click image for live demo)

Here’s how it works:

Basically how it works is when someone has the ability to post to a blog they see a short form at the top of the home page with a post box and tags. There they can post short messages about what they’re doing.

Below the posting box is a list of everyone’s latest tweet or message, with their Gravatar next to it. You can click on an author to see all their messages, or a tag to see all of the messages in a given tag (which we use for projects). There are RSS feeds for everything: the entire prologue, each author, each tag, and even combination or searches can be subscribed to in your RSS reader.

Just like any WordPress blog, you can decide on the contributors, set privacy options, and leave comments for each other.

Automattic just invented a new reason for everyone to grab a WordPress blog. My wheels are turning already–maybe we could have a Marketing Pilgrim Prologue, where readers add their own news.

How would you use Prologue?

Comments

Times Helps Post $29.5M To WordPress

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 10:45:16 +0000

The popular blogging platform drew a sizable investment from The New York Times Company, which expanded its minority stake in WordPress parent Automattic.

Now we know why Matt Mullenweg could be so generous with the added storage at WordPress. His company received its second round of venture funding as the Times joined existing investors in pumping up Automattic's coffers.

"Automattic is now positioned to execute on our vision of a better web not just in blogging, but expanding our investment in anti-spam, identity, wikis, forums, and more - small, open source pieces, loosely joined with the same approach and philosophy that has brought us this far," Mullenweg said on his blog.

Om Malik noted some of the investment round would be used to give Automattic's founders and other senior management types the chance to cash in some of their holdings. Doing so gives those folks motivation to stick around until the bigger payday arrives.

WordPress has an impressive collection of companies using its platform for blogging, including the Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and other big media properties.

Automattic CEO Toni Schneider said this round of financing helps the company achieve a couple of goals: financial security, and the further development of other products like the Akismet spam filter.

Integrating Bidvertiser with FeedBurner, Blogger, WordPress

Manoj Jasra — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 16:37:17 +0000

BidVertiser has recently added the ability to integrate its services with FeedBurner, Blogger and WordPress:

WordPress Plugin to allow you to seamlessly embed the BidVertiser Ads in your feeds.

Solution for FeedBurner that allows you to embed the BidVertiser Ads in your current FeedBurner address.

Solution for Blogger that allows you to embed the BidVertiser Ads in the footer of each of your post feeds.

The integration is actually quite simple and literally takes less than a minute to setup. Below are the instruction for Blogger and Feed Burner:

Blogger (full instructions)

Click Settings -> Site Feed.

Copy your BidVertiser Feed Code to the Post Feed Footer area.

You must also set Enable Post Pages to Yes (in Archiving settings) and set Allow Blog eeds to Full.

Click Save Settings.

FeedBurner (full instructions)

Click Edit Feed Details.

Type your new feed address from BidVertiser under Original Feed.

Click Save Feed Details.

Comments

WordPress Pumps Up The Storage

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 15:58:30 +0000

Storage space at WordPress.com became more plentiful after Matt Mullenweg announced a big increase for free accounts to 3GB.

Google's Blogger service offers 1GB of storage and occasionally suffers frustrating service outages. Mullenweg thinks bloggers can do better at WordPress.

The popular blogging platform turned more desirable after a welcome storage upgrade greeted users of the service. Out with the old 50MB limit, in with a boost to 3GB.

"To get half that much space (1GB) at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year," wrote Mullenweg. "We’re doing the same thing for free."

He compared the move to Google opening Gmail to the masses with a gigabyte of storage when other web-based email services still provided a few meager megabytes to their users.

"Over the past year we’ve developed our file infrastructure, replication, backup, caching, and S3-backed storage to the point where we don’t feel like we need to artificially limit what you folks are able to upload just to keep up with growth," said Mullenweg.

Extra storage buyers on WordPress.com will see higher limits available for purchase soon. Currently, those who paid for an upgrade to 1GB will have that level of service moved up to 5GB at no additional charge.

Tracking Blog Effectiveness

Lee Odden — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 14:48:28 +0000

There are a lot of data points that can be meaningful for tracking blog effectiveness.

That is, tracking what happens when visitors arrive at and engage with your blog content. It really comes down to the purpose of your blog. Metrics for a blog that’s focused on making a web site more search engine friendly by adding crawlable content and attracting links is quite different than a blog that’s meant to build thought leadership or brand credibility.

Many of the metrics tools used for blogs are also used for basic web site analytics. That makes sense because many blog initiatives do not have the same kind of budget as web site marketing programs do. Therefore, the analytics employed tend to be low(er) or no cost.

Regardless of the purpose, I’ve assembled a list below of the various tools we use, or have tested to report onsite blog metrics. Pick the service or tool you like the most from the list below or something new for your unique purpose and please share in the comments. The list is in no particular order.

103bees - Free web stats (ad supported) up to 100k visits per month, then it’s $9

Enquisite - Free, extremely detailed web stats

Hittail - Provides suggested topics for your blog by keywords used in referral traffic

Crazy Egg - Provides overlay, list and heat map web stats

RobotReplay - Lets you record visitor actions on your site and play them back

Clicky - Web stats plus feed and Feedburner stats

Google Analytics - Web stats, not really the best for blogs but it’s free

StatCounter - Free web stats

Co.mments - Track comment threads starting on your blog and follow them elsewhere in a feed

Blog Tracker - Free from IceRocket but limited functionality

Performancing Metrics - Basic is Free, or $3.99 to $16.99 per month for more features

Site Meter - Basic Free and Premium versions $6.95 and up

Mint - Popular web stats with bloggers for $30 per site

MyBlogLog - Basic blog visitor stats and social networking. Free and paid versions.

Feedburner Stats - StandardStats Free, TotalStats $4.99/mo

Wordpress Stats - Free basic blog stats plugin for Wordpress blogs

Google Analytics and Feedburner Stats - Free plugin for Wordpress blogs

eXTReMe Tracking - Free web stats with a paid version for $4.50 per month

Web Stat - Many web stats features for $5/mo

TraceWatch - Free but you need access to your server which should be running PHP/MySQL

What are your favorite analytics tools for blogs?

Comments

Wordpress Sees Huge Growth in 2007

Janet Meiners — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:57:08 +0000

Here are some numbers about blogging and social networking sites according to Nielsen Online. They just released November’s numbers on the top 10 social networking sites. The biggest gainers are Flixster (where you share movie reviews) and LinkedIn, a social network for professionals.

Quick Facts

MySpace.com is #1 social networking site in the US, with nearly 57.4 million unique visitors last month.
Google’s Blogger rests is #1 for blog site rankings with 33.6 million visitors and 49% more than last year with 33.6 visitors in November.
#2 social networking site, Facebook is keeping double digit growth rates compared to last year. The number of visitors is nearly 22.0 million - 89 percent higher compared to MySpace visitors which rose just 7 percent year over year.
WordPress, the #2 blogging platform grew 310 percent from last year with 12 million visitors, — up from 2.9 million last year. #3 is Type Pad, which grew — 22 percent from last year with 11.0 million visitors in Nov.

Here’s a chart that shows last month’s comparison of the top blog sites. Blogger is far ahead but Wordpress and Thatsfit (a health-oriented blog) are growing very quickly. Judging from this social networking sites are topping out more than blogs. There is positive growth for all but Xanga.

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Yahoo Talks Wordpress Shortcuts

Navneet Kaushal — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 16:26:07 +0000

Yahoo! Search Blog discusses the new technology they've come up with. They say that making a blog involves collating pictures, links, maps, etc and that sometimes there's "the hassle of digging up that supporting content... the most painful part.

So, to help bloggers address these pain points, we built Yahoo! Shortcuts for Wordpress — a technology that sits in the background and finds and offers content to help build out your post in real-time."

According to them the shortcuts can be helpful by setting you free from finding additional content and integrating it, and this would allow you to focus whole-heartedly on the writing part.

You can download the the Yahoo! Shortcuts plug-in here

It gets into action as you type, and "it will begin to find terms in your post such as company names and tickers, locations, news and product names — and, with no additional effort, integrates a roll-over or preview badge into your post." They cite an examples: "Crater Lake" brings up a map of Crater Lake to answer the "where the heck is that" question and "Citigroup" calls up a dynamic finance chart of the company's stock performance. Similarly "…The product Shortcut (e.g. Nintendo Wii) displays the latest product reviews and price comparisons from retailers across the web via Yahoo! Shopping."

They say further that "Now, under Creative Commons licensing, we'll recommend Flickr images based on the key themes of your post, with proper attribution to the original author of the picture included." A complete list of shortcuts has been made available by them here.

Photo Credits: Yahoo!

They say that they've made these capabilities to give the publisher control, it's up to the publisher to select or reject the recommended content. Here's a link to the tutorial or you can even learn about it at Yodel Anecdotal There's also an offer from them, that the first 500 bloggers to install and use the plug-in will get some cool t-shirts."

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Yahoo Plugs Shortcuts Into WordPress

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 13:55:43 +0000

The company expanded its Yahoo Shortcuts into a dynamic set of tools available as a plug-in for blogs using the WordPress platform.

A clever toolset newly announced by Yahoo offers WordPress bloggers a sidekick bearing additional content from Yahoo's various content services, including the Flickr photo sharing site.

Yahoo Shortcuts have been seen in Yahoo's pages as dashed underlined links. Doing a mouseover of one of these provides a popup with additional content related to the linked term.

The process takes a step forward for WordPress bloggers. After installing the plug-in, Yahoo Shortcuts watches what one writes. After the post is completed, the plug-in's "Review this post" button leads to suggestions for Shortcut content.

Bloggers can leave suggested Shortcuts in place, or remove them as desired. When keeping the Shortcut, the blogger has the option to keep it as a link, or make it a badge that can be embedded in the post.

Yahoo's Flickr integration with the WordPress plug-in will be the feature that catches a log of attention. The company said in the Shortcuts description it searches for relevant, Creative Commons-licensed photos based on terms appearing in the post.

Photos can be resized and placed anywhere within a post. The plug-in automatically attributes the photos to their owners who have made them available under those Creative Commons terms.

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Debunking Wordpress SEO "Expert" Articles

Andy Beard — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:52:49 +0000

I am going to attempt to debunk almost every Wordpress SEO "Expert" article ever written, and in some respects this article even debunks some of the things I have written in the past.

This article does not reference Google Toolbar PageRank in any way

First of all you are going to need to do a little homework.

Eric Enge interview with Matt Cutts

The Eric Enge interview with Matt Cutts was truly exceptional and revealed a number of gotchas that for some reason continue to be circulated.

Key takeaways

Matt Cutts: … Now, robots.txt says you are not allowed to crawl a page, and Google therefore does not crawl pages that are forbidden in robots.txt. However, they can accrue PageRank, and they can be returned in our search results.

Matt Cutts: … So, with robots.txt for good reasons we've shown the reference even if we can't crawl it, whereas if we crawl a page and find a Meta tag that says NoIndex, we won't even return that page. For better or for worse that's the decision that we've made. I believe Yahoo and Microsoft might handle NoIndex slightly differently which is little unfortunate, but everybody gets to choose how they want to handle different tags.

Eric Enge: Can a NoIndex page accumulate PageRank?

Matt Cutts: A NoIndex page can accumulate PageRank, because the links are still followed outwards from a NoIndex page.

Eric Enge: So, it can accumulate and pass PageRank.

Matt Cutts: Right, and it will still accumulate PageRank, but it won't be showing in our Index. So, I wouldn't make a NoIndex page that itself is a dead end. You can make a NoIndex page that has links to lots of other pages.

For example you might want to have a master Sitemap page and for whatever reason NoIndex that, but then have links to all your sub Sitemaps.

I have just provided a couple of highlights, I am not attempting to replace a need for visiting the site I am citing. This is something I hate seeing, when people take other people's content and repurpose it, thus making the original article worthless.
There are a few other gotchas in there, I suggest you read it 2 or 3 times to really understand what was said, and what wasn't said.

Dangling Pages

One of the best descriptions of dangling links is on the Webworkshop site, though they are assuming that links are totally taken out of the equation based on what they quote from the PageRank paper.

"Dangling links are simply links that point to any page with no outgoing links. They affect the model because it is not clear where their weight should be distributed, and there are a large number of them. Often these dangling links are simply pages that we have not downloaded yet……….Because dangling links do not affect the ranking of any other page directly, we simply remove them from the system until all the PageRanks are calculated. After all the PageRanks are calculated they can be added back in without affecting things significantly." - extract from the original PageRank paper by Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.

Alternate interpretation

This is just an aside, as the amount of juice lost to dangling pages currently is hard to determine, and could be handled differently

They are assuming that if page A links to 6 other pages, 5 of them being dangling links, then the website will be treated as only having 2 pages until the end of the calculation.

Whilst I haven't delved into the maths (and probably couldn't through lack of information and lack of knowledge), it also seems to me that at the time the pages are taken out of the cyclic calculation, a percentage of the link value can still be taken with them.

Thus though the site for cyclic calculations will be just 2 pages, the link from A to B might only transfer 1/6 of the juice on each cycle.

At the time the original paper was written, Google only had a small proportion of the web indexed due to hardware and operating system restraints.
In modern times they have a lot more indexed, thus a more complex way of handling dangling pages could be possible.

More food for thought, a link to a page that is considered supplemental could be treated as a full link or as a link to a dangling page, or some other variant.

Even more food for thought, a site with multiple interlinked pages with no external links at all could be looked on as a "dangling site".

Ultimately what is important is that dangling pages are a juice leak, though it is difficult to determine exactly how much

Additional Research On Link Juice Flow

I have referenced these works before, and I am just going to keep on referring people to them.

SEOFastStart by Dan Theis - a good introduction to SEO, and also introduces the ideas of controlling juice around a website - no email signup required
Revenge of the Mininet by Michael Campbell - a timeless classic as long as PageRank continues to be important - the download page isn't hidden if you really don't want to sign up to Michael's mailing list, but I have been on his list for years.
Dynamic Linking by Leslie Rhode - A bonus that comes with Revenge of the Mininet

I mentioned these is a comment on SEOmoz recently in a discussion on PageRank, and for some reason my comment received just 2 up votes and one down vote.

I don't gain in any material way from promoting these free ebooks, though I might gain some goodwill. The main reason I link to them is because they are a superb resource, and it saves me countless hours writing beginners material.

OK, On to some debunking

Blocking Pages With Robots.txt Creates Dangling Pages On The First Tier

In the quoted paragraph above, Matt clearly states that pages blocked with Robots.txt still accumulate juice from the links they receive.

Those pages don't have any external 2nd tier links that are visible to a 'bot, thus they are dangling pages.

How much juice they leak depends on how Google currently factor in dangling pages, but Matt himself suggests not to create dangling pages.

If you read any SEO Guide that suggests that the ultimate cure for duplicate content is to block it with robots.txt, I suggest you might want to question the author about dangling pages.

Meta NoIndex Follow Duplicate Content

This is a better solution than using Robots.txt, because it doesn't create dangling pages. Links on a duplicate content page are still followed, however both internal and external links are followed and thus are leaks, often multiple leaks for the same piece of content when using CMS systems such as Wordpress which create site-wide links in the sidebar when using poorly designed themes, plugins, and especially Wordpress Widgets.

If you read an article suggesting using Meta Noindex Follow, ask the author how they are controlling external links on duplicate content pages.

Meta NoIndex Nofollow Duplicate Content

If you use Meta Noindex Nofollow, whilst this is handled slightly differently by Google to Robots.txt, as the page won't appear in search results, it is still a page accumulating Google Juice if you link to it, another dangling page or node.
Second tier leaks from the page won't leak, but the page as a whole will leak depending on how Google are currently handling dangling pages.

I don't see people recommending this frequently, but as with Robots.txt, ask the author about dangling pages.

Dynamic Linking & rel="nofollow"

Extensive use of Nofollow and other forms of dynamic linking are the only way to effectively prevent duplicate content pages in some way having a effect on your internal linking structure and juice flow. The Wikipedia page on Nofollow really isn't correct.

The Dangling Sales Page

To finish I want to give you an example of how a sales page that previously might have benefited from lots of links can easily be turned into a dangling page and effectively discounted from cyclic PageRank calculations.

Sales pages started off just as a single page with no links:-

Despite all the links coming to the site from external sources, this website is a dangling page, thus excluded from iterative PageRank calculations. It might still benefit from anchor text and other factors, but it effectively is not part of Google's global mesh and passes on no influence.

Add Legal Paperwork And Reciprocal Links Directory:-

A much more structured site, and whilst it gains some benefit from reciprocating links there are 2 factors that are almost universally overlooked.

No Longer A Dangling Page - because the site now has external links, it is valid as part of the global ranking calculations. Other pages as mentioned above were previously stating that the amount of juice passed to dangling pages was minimal, so this could be potentially a huge boost.
More Pages Indexed - it is only a few pages, but with PageRank it is often not just how much juice you have flowing into a site, but what you do with it.

The reciprocal low quality links might not have had a huge amount of value compared to the benefit of being a member of the "iteration club" and having a few more pages indexed.

Add a link to the designer

Some early single page sales letters were not dangling pages, but didn't benefit from any internal iterations, and acted as a conduit of juice to their web design firm.

The Danger of Using Nofollow or Robots.txt on Unimportant Pages

I have actually seen this on a few sites:-

Reciprocal Link Directory Removed
Link to web designer removed
Nofollow added to legal papers that are looked on as being unimportant

Such a website is now out of the iteration club, it is a dangling page as it is no longer voting on other pages.

My Own Gotcha

I mentioned that this catches me out as well.

A while ago I wrote an article about linking to Technorati being a problem. It might still be true, but the amount of juice lost through such links might also be lower than I thought, due to Technorati using meta nofollow on every page. Technorati tag pages are themselves dangling pages with no external links.

Wikipedia and Digg on the other hand are not dangling pages. They still have external links to other sites, and thus any links to them are part of iterative calculations.

I would still say it is best to have tags pointing to your own domain tag pages, and to use nofollow on links to Wikipedia and Digg, though with Digg I suggest that is only on links to submission pages which contain no content.

Stumbleupon is also tricky - there are no external links from individual pages, but there is extensive internal linking.

With Digg and Stumbleupon, profiles rank extremely well, so you can use them for reputation management even if you get no juice direct from the profile.

I think I was the first to describe Wikipedia as a black hole of link equity, explained why you should nofollow Wikipedia extensively, and was one of the first to promote Ken's Nofollow Wikipedia plugin.

You would have thought in 10 months they would have come up with an alternative to using nofollow on all those out-bound links.

They do however link out to a few trusted sites without nofollow, from just a few pages. I suppose Google does still allow them to be part of their iterative calculations.

Another Own Gotcha

This isn't 100% something I can fix. I have suggested people use robots.txt on certain sites knowing it wasn't the perfect solution.

You might notice on this site I don't use an extensive robots.txt, and the design of my site structure is deliberate, but then at the same time I use nofollow with lots of custom theme modifications, and should use it a lot more.

Eventually I will come up with solutions to make things a little easier.

Tools In The Wrong Hands Can Be Dangerous

Using Robots.txt and Meta Noindex, Follow as a cure for duplicate content is a SEO bodge job or SEO bandaid. It may offer some benefits depending on how dangling pages are being handled, but is certainly not an ideal solution due to the amount of leaks that typically remain or dangling pages that are created.

Comments

*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

HP Blog Printing

Neville Hobson — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 19:25:21 +0000

One of the frustrating things about some websites, including many blogs, concerns printing.

Let’s say you’re on a site reading an article or post and you want to print out a hard copy. It’s common to get a result that runs into pages, more than you actually need, and not formatted for the purpose. Worse, especially if a website uses frames, you may get lots of blank pages before (or after) you get that one page you want.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get your hard copy in a format that’s designed for print, doesn’t waste half a rainforest of paper and is easy on the eye to read?

I recently discovered a great way to do this on this blog, with a plugin for WordPress from Hewlett-Packard.

Called HP Blog Printing, once you’ve installed and activated it, you get a little widget to position wherever you want to in your blog. That widget gives you a button called ‘print posts’ - you can see it on every page here at the top left of your screen.

When you’re reading a post and click on the button, you get a popup window like this:

The page you’re on is selected; clicking the print button in the window starts the printing.

Here’s where the plugin really is good.

Rather than just print out a hard copy, it creates a PDF file of your page which downloads onto your computer. You can then print that out, or not as you wish.

This is what the example highlighted in the window above looks like:

The one thing to watch out for is if you click on the ‘print posts’ button on a blog’s home page. The popup will appear with every single post highlighted, which may not be what you want or were expecting.

My take: Overall, very nice indeed. Also take a look as what Richard Gatarski says about HP Blog Printing - he’s elaborated a bit on installation and usage, and points out a couple of niggles he had with installation (I had no problems with that).

Still, a nice job from HP’s Tabblo developer community. And it’s free. In addition to the version for WordPress, there’s also one for Movable Type.

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Tag:

WordPress Overtakes TypePad

Doug Caverly — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 20:52:27 +0000

If this were a car race, TypePad would now be seeing WordPress’s taillights; Automattic’s creation just passed its competitor in terms of traffic.

“WordPress is now the No. 2 most-visited blog host,” notes Dan Frommer, and its sites “drew 11.4 million unique visitors last month, representing 444% year-over-year growth, while TypePad-hosted sites drew 10.6 million uniques, up 20% year-over-year.”

That’s extraordinarily impressive and pretty decent, respectively, and the stats come courtesy of Nielsen//NetRatings, so they’re not too open to criticism.

As for the number one spot in this competition, Blogger remained the far-and-away leader of the bunch, with 34.1 million unique visitors. Its growth, expressed as a percentage, stayed strong at 58.

It looks like we’ll be staying with this ordering for a while, then - TypePad doesn’t look ready to receive 800,000 extra unique visitors next month, and there’s no way WordPress will gain an additional 22.7 million. Yet some other movements may take place close to this arena, as rumors swirl about Automattic’s founders and $50 million.

BlogWorld: Matt Mullenweg Keynote

Doug Caverly — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 19:40:18 +0000

Matt Mullenweg is the man behind WordPress, Automattic, and the popular blog “Photo Matt.” So as the keynote speaker at the BlogWorld & New Media Expo, he discussed blogging, Automattic, and WordPress.

WebProNews presents videos and stories from the BlogWorld & New Media Expo taking place in Las Vegas. View our interviews and coverage of the event.

Mullenweg wasn’t self-centered, though; instead, he gave advice that could benefit everyone. “There’s a million different ways to approach your blog, but you have to find what you love,” Mullenweg advised listeners. “There’s other people out there like you, and they will find you and love your blog.”

More concrete suggestions included a tip to use Google’s and Technorati’s tools - they may help you get noticed.

Still, not everything’s foolproof. On the subject of Automattic, Mullenweg was humble enough to state, “Hopefully we will stay alive.” And assuming survival occurs, he plans to keep the company “as small as possible.”

As for that well-known blogging software, Mullenweg readily admitted that there are “parts of Wordpress that suck” (such as its spellchecker). But in looking to the future, he believes that writing itself is “the soul of WordPress,” and merely wants to see the software used in different ways and on different platforms.

WebProNews Video anchor Abby Prince contributed to this report.

Segmentation in Google Analytics for WordPress Readers

Joost de Valk — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 21:09:41 +0000

One of the things I've been wanting to do for a while seems to be finally nearing completion. Google Analytics allows you to segment users into custom segments, and there's one segment I've been aching for.

I want to be able to segment RSS readers, to be able to see the different browsing behavior of new visitors versus my loyal visitors.

Getting to the point where I actually can acquire that data has been a pretty long ride. I first had to create a way to change the URL's used in RSS feeds, so I could detect this different URL, 301 redirect it to the right URL, and set a cookie while doing that. To do that I filed a bug in WordPress' Trac, which I wrote a fix for as well, someone else improved on it, and it was committed into the WordPress core. As of WordPress 2.3, you can apply a filter to the_permalink_rss, which allows me to add ?source=rss to any URL (or &source=rss when the blog uses the default ?p= permalinks).

The next step is detecting that parameter in the URL, and 301 redirecting to the original post URL. Before doing that 301 redirect however, I drop a cookie, which lasts for 30 days, identifying the user as an RSS reader. This allows me to, in the last step, add the following code to the Google Analytics script tag when the user has that cookie:

view plain copy to clipboard print ?

__utmSetVar("RSS");

__utmSetVar("RSS");

I will know if this works tomorrow, and if it does, I'll release a new version of my Google Analytics for WordPress plugin with this possibility in it. Since I can imagine other people want to identify RSS readers for other purposes, I'll release that small bit of code as a single plugin as well.

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Wordpress Sees Huge Growth in 2007

Top Ten Sphinn Posts for the Year

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Yahoo Plugs Shortcuts Into WordPress

Debunking Wordpress SEO "Expert" Articles

Eric Enge interview with Matt Cutts

Dangling Pages

Additional Research On Link Juice Flow

Blocking Pages With Robots.txt Creates Dangling Pages On The First Tier

Meta NoIndex Follow Duplicate Content

Meta NoIndex Nofollow Duplicate Content

Dynamic Linking & rel="nofollow"

The Dangling Sales Page

My Own Gotcha

Another Own Gotcha

Tools In The Wrong Hands Can Be Dangerous

HP Blog Printing

WordPress Overtakes TypePad

BlogWorld: Matt Mullenweg Keynote

Segmentation in Google Analytics for WordPress Readers