WP Addict

Intense Debate: More Ways To Log In

Nile — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 21:18:15 +0000

I actually use Intense Debate on my main website, Blondish.net and at first, it was an experience I was conducting to see what would be better – Intense Debate or Disqus?

I have really enjoyed the updates in the past few months that have come up and even deciding to try Disqus on another blog has been pushed to a low priority. Sad, because I could be blogging my own experience here at WPAddict, but great because that means I really do like Intense Debate.

So far, Intense Debate has integrated CommentLuv, and just a few days ago rolled out automatic logins from various places including Facebook, Twitter, WordPress.com, and OpenID as mentioned at Introducing WordPress.com User Accounts & Auto-Login to IntenseDebate.

Truthfully, I think it would be wild if they tried working with Disqus to allow a login for that since there are a lot of Disqus users too. Though, it is just a whimsical thought.

This is great as Intense Debate has finally started to catch up to Disqus. I can only wonder what else they have planned.

Watch Out! Some Premium WP Plugin Companies On the Prowl

Nile — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 21:03:22 +0000

I have been tagging quite a few commenters for spam and noting at other WordPress related sites, that there have been a lot of people leaving comments for their premium plugins.

The message has nothing to do with the original post and in my case, it was on a post of a plugin that had nothing to do with the premium posts.

Rather than go about it this way, perhaps the plugin makes should consider releasing the plugin to notable people in the WordPress community to try out and write their feedback. Commenting and leaving a spammy link does nothing but go to the trash or get ignored.

There are better ways to get the word out including affiliate programs, effective advertising on various networks, and as I have said, through word of mouth through product testing. My concern is that these commenters are the type who were hired cheaply at some freelancer website and by someone with no grasp on how to use social media marketing effectively.

So, this is just a heads up to those in the WordPress community. If you talk about WordPress or WordPress plugins, you might be targeted for comment spam.

Have you experienced this? How did you respond to it (or did you)?

WordPress Plugin Review: Email Chat Contact Button Sidebar

What Is the Best Permalink Structure in WordPress?

Nile — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:31:19 +0000

A lot of people who are into search engine optimization vary on this. Personally I use /%postname%/ and set it up for my own clients. Why?

It is easy and contains the keywords necessary for the optimal search. I am not known as an expert, but I have built quite a few sites that have improved well through ranking. I believe this has been the best. I know there are people that like %postname%.html and /%category%/%postname%/.

Why is it not as great to put the date or category in the URL structure?

Well, you are telling the search engine that the day and the category are more important than the article itself. For those who write tutorials and helpful topics, it is not the date or category that people are looking for in the search engine.

The great thing about WordPress is that is is easy to choose a custom structure and while posting, you can have a page slug that sums up the article, while the actual post name is longer. A lot of times this is to focus on keywords.

By the way, I really think that if you have not, you should check out Matt Cutt’s article Straight from Google: What You Need to Know. If you noticed, Matt Cutts uses a post name structure, but he also utilizes custom slugs where his URL path contains keywords the sums up his post, and his title is different. The article contains a slide show and video too. Another person I recommend that has a lot of experience is Joost de Valk.

What permalink structure do you use for your website and why? Any SEO tips for WordPress users?

Poll: What framework do you use for your WordPress site?

Nile — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 06:25:56 +0000

Lately I have been seeing a lot of talk about frameworks. Rather than go into it right away, I just thought it might be fun to have a poll here at WP Addict about what people use as a framework.

You can leave a comment if you want, but it is not necessary. And the plugin used for the poll is WP-Polls by Lester Chan

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Benefits of Using Comment Luv

Thoughts On Autoblogging Software for WordPress

Nile — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 10:39:44 +0000

At first, when I thought about this issue, I had a brain fart and about calling software that scrapes content onto WordPress blogs were autobots. See what happens when blond hair takes over the brain…

I think it is because of WP Robot, that started the idea off. WP Robot is a plugin for WordPress that allows a use to basically scrape keyword related content selected by the website owner. I see a lot of the sites out there and they are using plugins like WP Robot.

This is without anyone’s permission to post. Often, I see in my WordPress admin panel links to these sites and have to delete them. They have no real value! This is not autoblogging – it IS scraping content. There is no human interaction. How can such a product make people money? Forgive me, but perhaps I just do not understand or it is the fact I would rather physically write my own articles. These sites cannot provide valuable back links no matter how many articles a day the site auto posts. This defeats the purpose of having a site with original content.

What are your thoughts about autoblogging and sites that use them as an article mashup?

No related posts.

WordPress Plug Review: WP-CopyProtect

Nile — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:38:32 +0000

With so many blogs out there, I keep hearing about people copying material or ripping off graphics. The plugin, WP-CopyProtect apparently takes care of this issue – for the most part. A person can just view the source of the site by going to the browser’s menu and filch the code directly.

The plugin is suppose to prevent selection text and disables the right click on the site. It is a pretty simple plugin created by Chetan Gole. I am all for preventing theft of hard work. However, this plugin is not a necessity. There are ways to disable right click. If you search the words javascript disable right click on Google, you can find really easy code to insert into your theme. Same goes for searching javascript disable select text on Google.

I do appreciate that this plugin is available, but there are far better alternatives. In fact, a lot of places online provide some nifty javascript tools for site owners and come with easy directions for installation. Most of it is just inserting code in a certain place in the theme’s code. There are also ways you can encrypt your website’s code too.

Have you tried this plugin? What other alternatives can you suggest to those not wanting to install yet another plugin?

WPVote.com Re-launched!

Nile — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:41:52 +0000

Remember the website Jean-Baptise Jung started called WPVote.com? During mid-2009, WPVote.com was the talk amongst WordPress bloggers. Why? Because it was a site built with the WordPress core as a digg-like site. This was a break through for those who were still doubtful of the power of WordPress as a CMS.

When Jean-Baptiste did not have time to keep up WPVote.com, he left it in the capable hands of Ben Gillbanks (@binarymoon on Twitter.) Bill is the guy behind Binary Moon and he has created several popular and sleek WordPress themes and plugins.

WPVote.com is a social bookmark site for WordPress related articles and has been open since August 2008. Surprisingly, for those who did not know, WPVote.com was not always run solely on WordPress. It was run on Pligg, which has known issues to be spammed. Anyone who runs large sites with members who have to sign up, this is a pain!

The site is very easy to use. Simply register, confirm your registration, fill out your profile, and then you can submit articles. All you have to include are the title, link to original article, short description, and a few tags.

WPAddict.net sends a big kudos to Ben for re-launching WPVote.com and a big good luck to the further success of the site!

(Note: Please note that I did change to Ben… It originally said Bill. I do truly suffer from dyslexia and bound to get it wrong.)

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WordPress Plugin Review: StatPress

Nile — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 01:03:19 +0000

I really enjoy using StatPress. Let me re-phrase that – I really enjoyed using StatPress for a time. I would review StatPress Reloaded, but it is only compatible to 2.7.1 and seems to not have any updates soon.

StatPress is a real-time statistics plugin for users to install on their WordPress blog and be able to check through their administration panel. Stats includes are visitors per day, feeds per day, what browsers people are using when visiting, referring sites, and IPs. The plugin was created by Daniele Lippi. Note: Recently Daniele introduced StatPress.org, but still has a StatPress support forum at his site.

The plugin is great, but word of caution is to make sure anyone using this plugin limits the days that they will allow StatPress to collect information. This is important as you can drive up your database. This is also a plugin that does not remove itself fully when you uninstall. You have to go in and manually remove the data tables. This plugin can be bulky and even crash at times.

Sometimes it is slowly when gathering data, so if you have a larger site, you might have to wait a few extra moments for this plugin to do its work. It is useful, but for larger sites, this plugin might not be ideal.

In my humble opinion, it is probably better to try Google Analyticator or the WordPress.com statistics instead.

Do you use StatPress or have you? Or do you use another statistics plugin.

On Installing And Uninstalling Plugins

Nile — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:43:57 +0000

I have noticed a lot of plugins over the years lack the ability to totally uninstall files. What I mean by totally uninstalling is that when you use your WordPress admin panel to delete the files, it does not always take away the database tables that were installed in the beginning. A couple I can think of up front, are Next Gen Gallery and WP Link Directory.

While it might not seem so important for most people, it is important to remove any resources that you do not plan to use on your webhosting space because it could prove to be a way to hack into later on in the future. If hacked, this can run up your resources and suspend, or with some webhosts, they may ask you to upgrade or say they cannot host you.

Also, when you are having some issues with installing a plugin, you may need to uninstall before going back to re-install. Those databases might be conflicting with what you are trying to re-install. It is usually something the plugin author may ask you to do alongside clearing your cache.

These also take up unnecessary space.

As much as you could download a database manager plugin, or Clean Options, a plugin to clean up your MySQL database tables for your WordPress. The problem is, you really do not need to install another plugin to remove plugins. It is unnecessary because it is easy to do.

For those with phpmyadmin, you can simply go in, browse your WordPress database, and look for the tables that reflect the plugins you removed from the front end. A lot of times, plugin creators try to name their database tables as close as possible to the plugin that they can. Just checkmark, select drop, and click the submit (‘go’) button. Presto! They are removed.

WordPress Plugin Review: Revision Diet

Nile — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:44:12 +0000

I came across Revision Diet after looking for a temporary plugin solution for my blog, Blondish.net. For those unaware, I just cute 150 static pages from the site, but I still have over 120 static pages, and over 300 blog posts. Just imagine the number of revisions I have hoarded! It was insane an putting some strain on the allocation I gave to my individual hosting account on my server.

Installation was easy, and using the plugin is really simple. All you have to do is put the number of revisions you will allow your blog to remember. After that, you can eliminate or as the plugin says ‘trim’ your revisions on your blog by simply clicking a button. It takes a moment to do, but it is worth it. For me, I make a lot of revisions – some even months after I wrote the page or post.

Other plugins I have tried, even the popular ones do not have a way to trim out the posts, and as the Revision Diet plugin creator, David Miller noticed, some of the plugins were only hiding the revisions, not removing them completely. While some people do not even like the revision option at all, this is a way to at least limit how many revisions are saved so any accidental deletions will not occur.

Have you tried this plugin? How has it worked for you? Or if not, do you use a similar plugin?