(Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes)

You need a League of Extraordinary Bloggers. People you can look out for, support, and lean on. If you don’t already have a blogging alliance, you need to build one.

So check this out…

I was wading through tall stacks of paper this week, and I found a bunch of articles I printed out last year.

Blogging articles.

I saved these web pages as PDF files, then printed them out.

I don’t print out articles any more. Decided printing was a waste of time. Finding a couple of dozen of these in a stack of old bank statements made me laugh.

But I’m glad I printed out Darren Rowse’s article on building a Secret Blog Alliance. I wasn’t ready for any alliances then, secret or otherwise; I’m game now.

Finding your natural alliance

We all want to work with people we like, but sometimes liking someone is not enough.

Like any relationship, there has to be more.

Here’s the top ten traits to look for in people when building a blogging alliance:

1. Interesting: Nobody wants to read boring junk.
2. Consistent: Blowing in and out like a hurricane makes readers evacuate.
3. Improving: Same old, same old gets stale.
4. Resilient: When they fall down, do they get back up?
5. Marketable: Can they sell themselves?
6. Networkable: Loners aren’t helping themselves, much less you.
7. Product: Do they have something people want to buy?
8. Skilled: Can they do something anything unique?
9. Style: Is there a good personality fit?
10. Direction: Are you moving towards the same goals?

In the end, you have to go with your gut. If someone looks good on paper, but just doesn’t mesh, find someone else.

What’s your secret?

I have to tell the truth here… if I were in a secret blogging alliance, I wouldn’t say one way or another.

So that’s boring.

Let’s talk about you instead.

Are you in a secret blogging alliance? If so, how long, and with whom? Is it working out? Why or why not? How did you build your secret alliance? Was it deliberate, or did it come together organically?

Or maybe you’re not in a secret alliance, maybe your alliance is all out there in the open. Same questions.

For you wonky types, or students, discuss how CommentLuv, DoFollow and good spam control induce self-organizing blogger alliances. Self-organizing blogger alliances is a topic worth at least 3 long articles, and could easily form the basis for a spiffy little Master’s project in MIS… or a senior thesis that absolutely crushes it… I already wrote mine. Who’s game?Similar Posts:

• As The Internet Evolves – Anonymity Go Bye Bye
• Saturday Morning Surfing: Programming Is “Actionary” Blogging Is “Reactionary”
• Blog World Expo Recap: Blogging Success Requires Passion and a Lot of Writing
• My Eyeballs Are Bleeding – And How I Write Thousands of Words Every Week
• Most Blogs Written by Non-Writers for Non-Readers. Is this you?

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Top 10 Traits for Finding Your League of Extraordinary Bloggers – Saturday Morning Surfing

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

You those people who always seem to get it right, the first time? I know a blogger like that, and his name is Antti Kokkonen.

I first ran across Antti when following up on some material on permalinks. The backstory is the SEO crowd gets better luck with permalinks one way (use keyword-friendly categories), but the performance crowd insists the SEO way is stupid, because looking up named slugs in WordPress takes too many queries (that means it’s slower).

The discussion in the WordPress community seems to hinge around an implementation issue, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be addressed any time soon.

In any case, Antti did something over the course of two articles which is too rare: he did research, got numbers, and published his data. In fact, he examined the permalink structure for the top 100 blogs. He found that there is no one best way to construct permalinks. Bummer!

In a second article he explains exactly how WordPress handles permalinks. While this second article is a bit more advanced, I recommend it to anyone serious about mastering permalinks. Antti also makes a definite recommendation for permalink structure, and I’ll be changing my permalink structure as a result.

Antti hasn’t posted in a couple of days. I’m getting worried. He’s working on an article on blog post SEO. My guess is it will be epic. Having written a series of articles on WordPress SEO myself, I’m very curious to see how my work compares.

You can follow Antti on twitter as zemalf.

hRecipe donations

Many thanks to these donors for hRecipe development:

• Donation from Anne B. (http://anneonline.com/)
• Donation from Branson Sparks (http://bransonsparks.com/)
• Donation from Lizzy R. (http://mpdcooks.com/)

Week in Review

• Saturday Morning Surfing: Programming Is “Actionary” Blogging Is “Reactionary”. Programming and blogging seem to be hard to do at the same time. What’s your experience? Join the conversation.
• Atahualpa Theme – Pixel Perfection, No Inca Required. Get a feel for the Atahualpa theme, and what it’s like to use for WordPress blogging. Killer guest post from Dave Thackeray.
• DIY WordPress – World’s Shortest Plugin. If you need to know exactly how WordPress handles registering plugins, you need to read this very short, 3 point article. With screencast.
• Maintain Draft Queue with Practical WordPress Tips 1 – 12. These twelve tips will quickly speed you on your way to WordPress mastery. Pick and choose what’s most useful, each tip takes about 5 minutes.
• Carlos Velez Prewriting Throwdown: Blog posts by the pound. Carlos Velez Prewriting Challenge: can you write blog posts in advance? It’s not hard, but it takes commitment. Find out who’s in, and why.

The Week In Review Series

Last WIAW Week in Review

iPhone Blogging – Writing is so last millennium (& the Last Week in Review). Personal dictation is becoming a reality for everyone, talk right into your cell phone. But efficient dictation takes practice. Find out more…

Next WIAW Week in Review

Stay tuned…

Similar Posts:

• How To Easily Create Permalinks With Post Slugs That Help Your Blog SEO
• Pre-Writing Is Your Friend – With Benefits (Part 2)
• iPhone Blogging – Writing is so last millennium (& the Last Week in Review)
• Lurkers, Saboteurs & Gauntlets… it’s Two Weeks in Review!
• WIAW Week in Review: September 5 – September 11, 2009

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Antti Kokkonen – When it has to be done right

(Reading time: 14 – 22 minutes)

I’m weighing into Carlos Velez’s prewriting challenge a little over two weeks late.

As it turns out, my challenge isn’t so much the writing, it’s getting everything scheduled correctly.

As a result of this exercise, I’ve adopted a publishing formula which will run on Website In A Weekend through April 12, 2010. No, I don’t have every article written, nor will I by the end. But I will have every day scheduled, with at least an article title and some bullet points.

Normally I schedule in the WordPress “Edit Posts” interface. I like keeping everything in one place. Easier to keep track of it all. In this case, the WordPress interface isn’t nearly powerful enough, so I used a custom, highly modular system allowing me to rapidly change the schedule and the content, and providing external checklisting for the WordPress interface for more than 40 articles.

That sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it?

So, check out my modular system:

Using B5 size paper for scheduling blog posts.

B5 paper.

Awesome, right?

Here’s how it works:

• Top row: each paper is a week.
• Middle row: each paper is a day of a week.
• Bottom left: Specials, partly explained below.
• Bottom right: notes for approximately 6 articles not yet in draft.

I use each piece of paper to cross check the Edit Posts interface, where every post scheduled correctly is in “pending” status.

I can’t imagine attempting this exercise using just a computer. I would need dedicated document scheduling software. Not even a calendar application works. I know this because I use Google Calendar for handling weekly guest posts, and that’s about as much as it can conveniently handle. It’s fine until you have to change dates, then it’s a lot of work.

Paper is easy. Just swap pieces.

Website In A Weekend goals for prewriting

• Get at least one month outlined and in draft, being 1 week ahead when I finish.
• As you will see when I outline the posting schedule, I’m building a sort of “magazine,” with regular features running on regular days.
• Have all the Website In A Weekend ecourse modules scheduled in advance for the next 24 weeks. These are all evergreen, and I intend on round-robin updating each article twice yearly.
• Top secret cool stuff implemented for announcement at the end of the challenge (Hi Gabe.). I don’t know if I will have the energy to accomplish this. We’ll see.

One difference between me and other people in the challenge is that I’ll use my week’s buffer immediately to get some coding done on hRecipe plugin for WordPress.

I’ll also be working hard at getting the next version of Blog Post Engineering released during this time.

The Weekly Website

About here, the scanners are going to drop out. Too much to read. Good bye scanners!

But disclosure is important. Anyone who actually reads through the posting schedule will find out I’ll be starting to sell more stuff on a regular basis. My prediction: Anyone this offends will have bailed out the article by now (too many words).

• Sunday: Repost article from Website In A Weekend course. This is harder than it seems because of how Google reader structures it’s cache. The details are boring, I’ll be posting everything I learn for Weekenders.By the way. I purchased an unlimited license for Wishlist Member. As you may (or may not) recall, newsletter subscribers are grandfathered in. For free. I’m going to charge what the market will bear for the same membership level. I don’t know what that is yet, but it won’t be free.
• Monday: Guest posts, on an unbroken run since early November, not counting the denial of service attack a couple of weeks ago. Topic is more or less wide open, as long as it fits into Website In A Weekend holistically, but I’ve been leaning towards “softer” inspirational or motivational pieces.
• Tuesday: Technical, or DIY WordPress. Boring for most people, Google seems strangely fascinated with terms like “register_activation_hook.” I aim to please. Readers and Search engines. You can set me on “skip” for Tuesday’s if code isn’t your thing.
• Wednesday: Quite likely, I’m going to explain – exactly – how some software or information helped me out, and suggest you consider being helped out in the same way. Using my handy affiliate links, of course.

  I’ve discovered I really enjoy getting money in email. I really like it. I wake up in the morning, and some mysterious stranger has decided to become my customer.

  If you’re one of those mysterious strangers, thank you!

• Thursday: The business aspects of blogging, including time management, scheduling (per this article), account management (yes, Quickbooks), and more. I have a load of stuff stashed on another website that can be rewritten and dropped in. I’m stoked!
• Friday: The non-review week in review. I’m still going to link through the week, that seems to be important for SEO, and it probably helps retain readers. I’ll very likely spotlight a blogger too. We’ll see. These articles get very little traffic, and cost a lot of time to write. No profit there.
• Saturday: The Saturday Morning Surfing will continue. I have a lot of great material stashed for these, some of which is controversial (no partly nekkid ladies though, sorry Anne . However, I might actually be surfing during the morning, so carry on the conversation and I’ll weigh in once I get out of the water.

So that’s what to expect through April 12, 2010. If I miss a day, I won’t be catching up, I’ll just continue where posting left off.

Occasionally you might see two articles in a day, likely a Tuesday or a Wednesday. But we’ll see.

I could be open to guest articles on any particular day, let me know if you have something you think I need.

Who are these people?

I’m not the only inmate in this asylum. Here’s the rest of the crew:

Author:  Justin Matthews

Pre-Writing Challenge Page: Catharsis of the Bogue

Bio:  Justin is a 35 year old stay at home dad. He started blogging in December 2009 to help himself practice writing. In January 2010 Justin decided to get serious and make his little blog something that will make him money. He has been learning and writing ever since. Justin has 3 kids with one due in July. He love fishing and working out with Kettlebells. He also loves to write, saying “It is one of the only things I have ever been really good at. I will have 10 posts by the end of the challenge!”

Goal:  “I normally publish 5 times per week and fiction on saturday.  I have Saturdays taken care of so my goal in the challenge will be 10 posts.”

Name:  Bert Padilla

Pre-Writing Challenge Page: Cite-Technologian

Bio:  Bert Padilla is a 23 year old part-time blogger, blogging about technology, internet, and social media. He has a full-time job at Teradyne, Philippines. He started blogging in late 2008, and finally put up his main blog in March 2009. He also writes articles for Cebu Bloggers Society, a local group in the Philippines geared toward a civic and social awareness.

Goal:  “My average post per week is 5, normally 400-500 words, except for product reviews.  I don’t spend much time on my computer during weekends, so my goal is to post 10-12 articles per week by the end of the challenge.”

Pre-Writing Challenge Page:  Limitless Living – Open Yourself to the Possibilities

Bio:  Megan Potter is a Spiritual and Intuitive Coach and Speaker and strives to be a general, all around inspirer (is that a word?) of people – aka a Muse. And that doesn’t even include all her normal girl jobs! Her blog at Limitless Living is meant to inspire all the normal, everyday women, just like her, to believe that they are really Gorgeous, Brave women who can change the world and live a life with no limits. She’s all about Spirit and Passion and Living Your Purpose with Creativity and Joy; even if she is learning as she goes.

Goal:  “My goal is to post three time a week (one of which is a Meme I’ve been running) so my goal would be six posts plus the ones I have to blog in the interim.”

Updates:

February 26 – I decided that I needed to look at this challenge as the entire 6 weeks of writing (18 posts) rather than just the 2 weeks of pre-writing (6 posts) otherwise I would be so focused on the 6 post topics I’d forget to think of things for the others. So this is where I stand on all of them.

I have, at least, an idea for something like 13-15 of the 18 posts. Three are now in draft format (fully written and linked, waiting for editing and finalizing), and three have either been posted or are already scheduled to post.

I’ve written at least two of the six around midnight when I should be in bed – or at least not working. I just can’t stop writing! Although, I imagine there’s a good chance I’ll crash and burn in about three days  .

Yours,
Megan

Author:  Amanda Farough

Pre-Writing Challenge Page:  Violetminded | Code & Creativity

Bio:  Amanda Farough is a web rock-star, currently peddling her wares in web design and development; in a previous incarnation, she was a bad-ass software developer. Her blog is a smattering of various topics: design, development, literary debauchery, freelancing, tasty creative non-fiction about her life, love letters, and various other bits and bobs of geekery. On her off hours, she designs (and plays) video games, writes novels that may never be published, and dances in the rain.

Goal:  “I’m completely erratic in my posting. This should force me to be a bit more disciplined. Most weeks, I’m anywhere from 1-3 times a week. I’ll shoot for 3 times a week during this challenge.  Goal: 6 posts.  Rock on. Let’s get this party started.”

Pre-Writing Challenge Page:  Bad Deacon Design | Fine Art Woodblock Printmaking

Bio:  Deacon is an artist, a mechanical engineer, and is rather handsome and charming (or so he will tell you). Deacon’s Woodblock Printmaking Studio is in the heart of Downtown San Francisco, blocks from Union Square. He writes about the art he makes and sells, printmaking, and pursuing a career in Fine Art while maintaining a DayJob to pay the bills, and what all that stuff has to do with life.

Goal:  “Well, I usually publish 2 to 3, but I’d like to publish 4 to 5.  Since this is a challenge, we’ll make 9 posts my target.”

Author: Antti Kokkonen

Pre-Writing Challenge Page: The Blog of Antti Kokkonen | Tips, Guides, Reviews and Resources to Help You Unleash the Power of Online Media

Bio: Antti Kokkonen is an IT Specialist by profession, a blogger by heart, from Finland. Antti shares his expertise and enthusiasm for all things online by writing articles, blogging and helping others. Antti has a down-to-earth approach to both his personal and business life. In addition to helping the largest companies in the world to reach better results, he helps people and their businesses to become more effective and more profitable online by focusing on all aspects of online media, including blogging, social media and online marketing.

Goal: “I post 3-4 times a week, so for this challenge I set target at 8.”

Author: Dustin Evenson

Pre-Writing Challenge Page: Professor Budget | Financial Budgeting, Debt Reduction, Wealth Building

Bio: Dustin Evenson considers himself a theologian and philosopher first, and a financial coach second. He knows about the theory and practice of budgeting money, and draws on his experience and knowledge of theology and philosophy to bring this to others.

He wishes to teach through his blog and inspire others.

His blog provides practical information and opinions about budgeting money, debt reduction strategies, and wealth building.

Most articles revolve around simple ideas and practical use.

Dustin would eventually like to comment on budgeting spirituality and philosophy into one’s life through his blog.

Goal: “I normally post three times a week, but want to push towards publishing every weekday, so my goal is 10 posts.”

Author: Aaron Pogue

Pre-Writing Challenge Page: Unstressed Syllables | Writing advice for everyone

Bio: Aaron Pogue is a Technical Writer with the Federal Aviation Administration. He has a degree in Writing and has been working as a Technical Writer since 2002. He’s also a creative writer with nine novels, a dozen short stories, and countless essays and poems under his belt.

Most recently, he’s a writing professor at Oklahoma Christian University where he teaches Technical Writing to a bunch of people who aren’t writers. That experience became the foundation of his website. While Aaron brings decades of training as a writer, he is more and more convinced that everyone can learn to write better, with less effort.

Goal: “I post two articles and two writing exercises every week, so my goal would be eight posts total.”

Author: Eleanor Edwards

Pre-Writing Challenge Page: GiveABrick.com | Give A Brick (i.e. just £1) then ask your friends to do the same

Bio: Eleanor writes for UK registered charity, Give A Brick. Give A Brick think they are the first charity to ask all their friends to give just one brick (£1) and then ask them to ask their friends to do the same. Your £1 will buy bricks (and roof tiles, concrete and slabs) to provide a place for children to play, young people to hang out in safety and older people to meet. All deserve to feel valued and loved. That’s what Give A Brick is about and you make the difference.

At Give A Brick, Eleanor is building an online community of people helping each other out, listening and being listened to. That aspect of Give A Brick doesn’t cost a penny 

Goal: “I normally post twice daily; one a short motivational piece designed to be actioned in about a minute and the other, a slightly longer piece around 500 words in length. Therefore, I’m aiming to pre-write 28 posts by the end of the challenge *gulp* This might be slightly insane but given that these are short posts compared to some, I believe this can be done  ”

Author: Ralph Carlson

Pre-Writing Challenge Page: Ralph Carlson Blog

Bio: Ralph Carlson is on his second blog and just retired for the second time. He has no interest in moving on to number three in either category. The intent of the blog was to establish a web presence for Ralph Carlson. In addition his goals include making money using the web whether that means using his blog or not. “In short,” he says “I don’t know what I am doing but I intend to do it with gusto.”

Goal: “I post 5 times per week for ’serious’ posts and one on Sunday for fun. I intend to double that output for four weeks to provide a one month cushion of posts to refine or give me time to work on other key areas like making money.”

But wait! There’s more…

Stay tuned for Blog Maintenance Month

Some of these same kooks are going to roll right into the next challenge: Blog Maintenance Month. We’re going to systematically work our way through a host of annoying blog chores for 4 weeks. Stuff like:

• Fixing SEO metadata. For our entire blogs.
• Checking broken links.
• Fixing image SEO alts tags.
• Internal linking to tie articles together.
• More. Much, much more. I misplaced my list, but it doesn’t matter, more information is coming.

If, on the vanishingly remote chance you want in, watch for details in a week or two. It will be committing, and it helps to be slightly crazed to even consider attempting it.Similar Posts:

• Distributed Denial of Service Attack is Over – Back in the saddle
• WIAW Week in Review: September 5 – September 11, 2009
• Bootstrapping Your Search Presence Using WordPress Blog Stats
• Value Versus Effort: How Much Time to Write a Blog Post?
• Pre-Writing Is Your Friend – With Benefits (Part 2)

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Carlos Velez Prewriting Throwdown: Blog posts by the pound

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

Learn something new about WordPress in 5 minutes. That’s about as long as each of these practical tips take to learn. That’s I call them practical, they are easy to do.

These tips form a series of articles. Note how each one is linked (you will have to click through). As explained in Blog Post Engineering ebook, each tip also has a specific structure allowing you to grab what you need, quickly.

The Practical WordPress Tips series started way back in mid-2009, so it’s likely many new readers haven’t stumbled across one yet.

If this looks like it might be leading up to sales copy for a future product, let’s just keep those suspicions to ourselves.

1. Practical WordPress Tip #1: Use the “View” link for URL shortcut. Find out how to use the “View” link on your post admin page to rapidly extract URLs useful for linking to your content… which increases search engine ranking!
2. Practical WordPress Tip #2: Make Your Draft Queue Work For You. Find out an easy way to leverage WordPress built-in post editing work for you.
3. Practical WordPress Tip #3: Keep A Few Spare Posts Handy. Keeping a few spare posts handy for emergency situations is slightly different than scheduling in advance. Find out how you can use this technique.
4. Practical WordPress Tip #4: Use inline styling for testing CSS. Use this simple procedure to help you make small changes in your CSS styling… without killing your website.
5. Practical WordPress Tip #5: Keep rough drafts ready to publish at any time. Use these simple techniques to keep your article queue full of easy-to-publish drafts… save time and never run out of material ever again!
6. Practical WordPress Tip #6: Limit word count per post to create article series. Here’s an easy procedure for creating series of articles practically compelling people to return again and again to your website.
7. Practical WordPress Tip #7: Use Redirected URLs to help build traffic. Simple, easy URLs are easy to type and remember, making it easy to promote individual posts and driving traffic. Learn 3 different ways to make simple URLs.
8. Practical WordPress Tip #8: Have your profile URL point to other blog. Drive traffic from one blog to another using different URL’s in your profile. This easy tip explains all.
9. Practical WordPress Tip #9: Use Sitemap page for fast URL. Find out how you can speed up your deep linking chores to help improve your SEO results… get more work done faster!
10. Practical WordPress Tip #10: Rename your modified themes. 4 simple steps to preserve all those little tweaks you put into your customized WordPress theme. It’s easy and you can save your skin with 5 minutes work.
11. Practical WordPress Tip #11: Spot check your posts. Use this Practical WordPress Tip to improve all of your SEO metadata on your blog for getting better search engine results.
12. Practical WordPress Tip #12: Use date ranges to control “Edit Posts” page. Here’s an easy and practical 4 step procedure for better blog post scheduling… key for increasing productivity for dedicated and serious bloggers.

Here’s a complete list of all the Practical WordPress Tips. As noted in Blog Post Engineering ebook, each is tagged with “Practical tips,” so each is stored in a virtual index. Click on the tag, you get them all!

Please leave a comment or three on any of these tips you find useful, and I’d love to have your questions or suggestions as well. Please leave a comment here in any case.

Similar Posts:

• WIAW Week in Review: September 5 – September 11, 2009
• Practical WordPress Tip #17: Use the tail of your Drafts queue for “notes”
• WIAW Week in Review: August 29 – September 4 2009
• Practical WordPress Tip #7: Use Redirected URLs to help build traffic
• Practical WordPress Tip #8: Have your profile URL point to other blog

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Maintain Draft Queue with Practical WordPress Tips 1 – 12

(Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes)

This little article isn’t for everyone, but if you have ever wondered exactly what a WordPress plugin is, it’s for you. Also, I have an ulterior motive for this snappy little article, but you’ll have to wait for a couple of weeks to find out.

The short answer is this:

A WordPress plugin is it’s “Plugin name,” which must be in a file where WordPress can find it when WordPress scans for plugins.

As long as you have at least this, WordPress will activate and register your plugin:

1

<?php /* Plugin name: A Minimal Plugin */ ?>

One line, can’t get any shorter than this.

How WordPress plugins work

1. WordPress scans the plugin directory.
2. Files in the plugin directory are parsed for “Plugin name.”
3. Plugin state is stored in options table

Disclaimer: this is based on 1. common sense, and 2. cursory inspection of the WordPress source code. I’ll be doing more digging later into the scanning and parsing code.

Screencast!!!

Uh, no. Youtube is down. Can’t upload. Can’t link. Bummer. Maybe later.

See how easy that is? Here’s the script:

1. Introduction and explanation of minimal plugin. Why I always seem to have a cold when I make these screencasts is beyond me.
2. The plugin name is “A Minimal Plugin” and it’s located in wp-content/plugins/minimal.php. You’ll see the file name when we look at the active_plugins key in the options table in the WordPress database. In any case, we activate the plugin here.
3. After activating A Minimal Plugin, we take a look at the source code. It’s really just one line, but the WordPress editor reformats for display, something you need to know about if you take on any programming in WordPress. (It’s also intensely annoying and will screw up your escape codes.)
4. Next we examine the options.php page which lists out the keys and values for the options table in the WordPress database. The data containing plugin names is serialized, not shown in this display.
5. Lastly, a quick check of the active_plugins key using an SQL browser shows, indeed, that the minimal.php file name is stored.

In a couple of weeks, I’m going to show you why this is important when you’re building plugins for yourself. (Weekenders are going to get why you should consider building (or having your web team build) your own little plugins too.)

Your turn

Implement this plugin and take a screen shot, I’ll link the first three here:

1. First up is Ricky Buchanan, posting her screenshot example on Skitch. Very cool!
   
   

   Ricky's Minimal Plugin

2. Second isn’t bad… here’s Marshall’s:
   

   Marshall's Minimal Plugin

   Visit Marshall & family at Real Off Grid Living.

3. Third, could be worse.

Seriously, this takes about 5 minutes to do, and you will get something out of it. (deliberate practice)

Similar Posts:

• DIY WordPress: 5 Ways to Speed Up Slow WordPress Blogs
• Install Plugins to Extend Your WordPress Blog’s Functionality
• Technical Tuesday: Another Look at WordPress register_activation_hook
• Monitoring File Downloads in WordPress Using Drain Hole Plugin
• Quick Tip: Add Existing Code as New Project in Aptana Studio

Post from: Website In A Weekend

DIY WordPress – World’s Shortest Plugin

(Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes)

Dave Thackeray is a writer driven by creativity… and results. Dave writes in his own voice, clearly and distinctly. He’s on a lifelong quest to discover the remarkable in people and products – but would settle for a machine that washed dishes AND clothes.

Atahualpa – premium theme, freemium price

-by Dave Thackeray

I’ve spent the past few weeks observing with great interest the raging debate over the merit of premium themes for WordPress. I think it was Justin Tadlock who ignited the urns of oil tipped over the growing band of cats creaming spoils from the WordPress mothership.

I admire Justin for his commitment in part to the freemium concept eulogised by Chris Anderson in his book ‘Free: The Future of a Radical Price’. I admire Tadlock because he gives of himself to those who subscribe either to his words or by beer tokens to his members’ guild. I also melt in the shadow of his words because I’m the biggest bargain hunter I know, and Justin gives you the burger with as much relish as you can eat when it comes to some of the most useful WordPress plugins on the planet, each carrying zero cost.

His Hybrid construction of the framework genre also presides aloft the podium when it comes to machinations of a lightweight but infinitely customisable and developable nature for established couturiers of WordPress, or even those who simply wish to cut their teeth on action hooks.

But there’s a third tier (and I don’t want to appear presumptious here) of intermediate WordPress users who want something somewhere between the framework and the premium theme.

Somewhere in the universe beyond the complimentary but tricksy frameworks, yet with a degree of automated customisation that omits need to become an emeritus professor in the dark art of PHP.

You could go down the Thesis route, but it’s messy money.
You could avail of Woo Themes’ free Bueno look, but it can really only ever look, well, just Bueno.

You want incredible. You want to appear to have magicked your site design from scratch without the inhumanistic endeavour needed to go through the motions.

Enter Atahualpa which, in some corners of the world, has a fan base so devoted that they’d walk over Jesus to get their fix of the next update.

I’ll admit I was sceptical as to the claim that Atahualpa was truly a one-size-fits-all solution for WordPress users. It’s pretty, well, ordinary directly out of the box.

But I pondered this idea for a moment and realised this was actually A Good Thing. Zero interference, let the content speak for themselves. So I was satisfied that, in its immediate, freshly unwrapped and deliciously naked state, Atahualpa would just about cut the cord and make it on to my list of ‘nice themes’.

And then I logged in, switched the theme on. I’d heard some people near-fainted when, moist of mouth and brow, they pulsed the left mouse button over the Atahualpa Theme Options link. But I was sceptic. Stoically disaffected by the hype.

Well, BAM.

To a WordPress aficionado, it was a bit like a gambler handing in slips marked with the Kentucky Derby, NFL, AFL and World Series winners. And finding out he’d also won a date with Cindy Crawford.

Swathes of options. An abundance of choice to dictate every which way your blog should digress. And the coup de grace, an integrated, powerful and near-endless array of SEO options. Right there, gazing out of the page that stretched to infinity with a reassuring train platform-sized reset button in case everything went wonky under my control.

If you have eyes, you’ll understand. If you have both eyes and a mind, you’ll risk losing the latter as you begin to tweak your blog site to an iteration worthy of a monarch. For this is the king of free themes, replete with the kind of descriptive help for each option you’d expect from a teacher sat by your side.

This is WordPress pro, made easy. It’s like coming out of design school five years too early with the certificate and the gawky smile.

Columns, comments, footers, pages, widgets, forms, blockquotes, and of course, complete control over the darn CSS if you feel the need to go native. There’s even a custom field to let you automatically tweet out your blog post.

Of course there’s a ‘but’. No special page templates built-in as standard. But you can figure that out, right?

Hybrid has 12. But it also needs you to find a darkened room for a couple of weeks to master code alchemy and a wig to replace all that torn-out hair.

Atahualpa may well have been the last sovereign emperor of the Inca Empire, fighting in vain to defend Ecuador from his Spanish foes in the 16th century – but he’s inspired a WordPress winner that’ll be remembered by me for at least the next 500 years.

Dave Thackeray writes for love and beer, switching the importance of each indiscriminately. Dave adores making people smile, by documenting his writing career, or with impromptu tickling. Tell him your saucy gossip at davethackeray.com.

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Post from: Website In A Weekend

Atahualpa Theme – Pixel Perfection, No Inca Required

(Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes)

I have a problem: I need to maintain and extend two blogs, two WordPress plugins, and start work on a new piece of code for a web application.

I have to blog and program…

…but blogging and programming seem to require slight but important differences in how I work. Blogging requires a different sort of attention than programming. This difference is suggested by the following observation: most bloggers do not program, and most programmers blog only once in a while, if at all.

Reactionary blogging

So much of what I read about blogging success seems to require “reactionary” behavior. Successful bloggers have to stay on top of everything, all the time. Having Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) seems to be an advantage for successful bloggers.

Successful bloggers must:

• Regularly keep an eye on trending topics.
• Watch traffic on a regular basis.
• Manage business systems for advertising, affiliate sales, etc.
• Maintain the blogging system, i.e., WordPress.
• Promote on social networks, bookmark, leave comments, promote promote promote.

These activities require a lot of thin “time slicing.” You don’t have to pay much attention to any one thing for a very long time.

Successful blogging also seems to be as much about figuring out which way the wind is blowing, and staying with it. When some new technology comes along, you need to be ready to exploit it as fast as possible.

Actionary programming

Programming requires action, forethought, planning and long spans of concentrated attention. I call this “actionary.” People with ADD, otherwise brilliant, sometimes have a hard time sitting down long enough to be effective on a long term programming project.

You have to commit to a course of action.

You have to eliminate distraction.

For example, I’m not paying any attention at all to Google Buzz. I’m using that time to work out database schema for hrecipe microformat plugin. Am I missing anything? I don’t know. I do know that Jason Calacanis (mahalo.com) believes Buzz could seriously cut into Facebook’s market share for such conversations. He said so in an email this morning.

Perhaps I should pay more attention to Google Buzz. What should I give up?

Blog and program together, if possible

Blogging and programming together can be very difficult, unless you limit the blogging topics to stay very close to your programming. This isn’t always possible. How many people really want to spend an relaxed morning pondering a few thousand words on symplectic integration? Three or four, maybe.

However, I’ve been moderately successful (in terms of search results) blogging a bit about WordPress and PHP programming. It’s a natural fit here on Website In A Weekend, and I’ll be doing more of it.

Of the two, I’d have to say blogging is substantially easier for me. But I get far more satisfaction from a beautiful, easy-to-read, well-written piece of code.

What’s your experience?

Do you have experience doing both? Would you like to discuss it?

If so, please tell us about it!

What about other activities that might conflict with blogging? Tell us your experience with those.
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Post from: Website In A Weekend

Saturday Morning Surfing: Programming Is “Actionary” Blogging Is “Reactionary”

(Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes)

Wouldn’t it be great to just tell your blog what to post? The heck with all this writing stuff! That’s just a one way express ticket to carpal tunnel city. What I want to do is dictate blog posts, and have them turned into text automatically. Maybe not all my blog posts, but some of them for sure.

This should be easy. I have an iPhone, right?

As soon as it’s done with the dishes, I’ll put it on writing blog posts.

Ok, so it’s not quite that easy. Yes, it has built-in sound recording, but that’s not quite the same as built-in dictation. You still have to purchase software specifically written for dictation.

Fortunately, Ricky Buchanan already has everything I need to know about speech-to-text dictation for all things Mac. 21 articles so far, and growing I’m sure. Ricky is your one stop shop for everything you need to know about speech to text on a Mac, from hardware to software, to how to use it all.

For example, I’ve been looking at the Windows Dragon NaturallySpeaking product, as it seems to be a well-regarded at a decent price. But I’d like to use my Macbook. Ricky reports that Nuance (makers of Dragon) recently purchased MacSpeech, a major player for the Mac platform. This is probably good news for everyone, customers, users, and MacSpeech employees.

Here’s some questions for you:

• Are you using any dictation products?
• If so, which product on which platform? And how is it working out?
• If not, why not?

I’m really interested in your experience and thoughts. Speech-to-text may not seem that important right now, but suspect that, all of a sudden, we’re going to find it everywhere. Not a train I want to miss.

New direction

I just looked through my statistics over the last couple of days: around 600 hits… and none for Week in Review articles.

Week in Review gets ZERO traffic.

So this is the last one.

Which is too damn bad, really, because these Week in Review articles are some of the most enjoyable articles for me to write. However, writing Week in Review articles is really time consuming. I’m not Jimmy Thudpucker, I can’t cut these turkeys by mail.

I will continue linking to interesting people, and I will continue current story lines. I’ll open new story lines as well, just differently.

I’ll be watching the blog stats over time as well. If for whatever reason the Week in Review series starts to get traction, I’ll start writing them again.

However…

As you will notice below…

I’m still listing out the week’s articles, their SEO Descriptions, and linking back to previous Week’s in Reviews.

So what’s changed?

What’s changed is the focus, it’s going to be tighter with fewer but better outbound links. I won’t be titling these articles “Week in Review” and won’t be doing any direct promotion for the series. I’m continuing this way because the internal linking and SEO Description accountability benefits me in the long term.

The Week in Review March 6, 2010

• Saturday Morning Surfing: How’s Your Blog Traffic Lately? Has your blog traffic plateaued? Here’s a few reasons why that happens, and suggestions getting out of your traffic rut.
• How a 9 Day Denial of Service Attack Affected Blog Traffic. Having your website attacked is no fun. If you get attacked, do what I did and learn from all your traffic statistics. You might be pleasantly surprised.
• How to Read Your SEO Metadata Like Google (really fast). Search engines will display your metadata. Ensure it’s well-written “teaser” copy with relevant keywords. Marshall shows you how to quickly check your result.
• Technical Tuesday: Another Look at WordPress register_activation_hook. register_activation_hook is a perennial stumbling block for WordPress programmers, but it’s not that hard to understand, as shown by examples in this article.
• Consistency – A 7th Characteristic of Trust Building (Everyone can do this). Being consistent is a great way to build trust, and there’s more than one way to practice consistency. Read more then share your blogging consistency.
• No blog post today. Two releases this week. Sometimes, you just don’t feel like writing a blog post. When that happens, do what I do and don’t write one. Read more to see what I didn’t write.

Last WIAW Week in Review

Carlos Throws Down, and Closed Means Closed. Yep, the Week in Review. Meet Bindu, Ricky, & Carlos: custard powder changes a relationship, success is a habit, and you really don’t have an excuse. Everyone can succeed.

Next WIAW Week in Review

Stay tuned…

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Post from: Website In A Weekend

iPhone Blogging – Writing is so last millennium (& the Last Week in Review)

(Reading time: < 1 minute)

No blog post today.

I’ve been bustin’ it since middle of last week to catch up on posting (which I haven’t, really), spending serious time extending hRecipe Plugin for WordPress for release 0.5.3, and getting the 0.6 release ready for Blog Post Engineering.

“Whoa… back up there, man… say what?”

Yeah yeah, I’ll explain everything soon.

But I’ll tell you this right now: don’t try and release two projects during the same week. You will end up not caring a whit about either.

In the meantime, what’s your excuse for not posting today?

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• Caressing Alien Species, and, a (late) Valentine… Take cover! It’s two Weeks in Review

Post from: Website In A Weekend

No blog post today. Two releases this week.

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

Do your readers trust you? How would you know one way or another? What does trust mean, anyway?

These are excellent questions.

Fortunately, building trust is not difficult, to do or to learn.

Darren Rowse wrote an excellent article explaining 6 factors of trust building. If you haven’t read it, you should jump over there and check it out. We’ll be here when you get back.

You’re back. Excellent.

Let’s recap Darren’s list of six factors:

What I’m on about is helping bloggers to not only be profitable and have traffic but to build blogs that have profile, influence, authority, credibility, respect and a brand that opens up opportunities beyond quick profit.

I’d like to suggest one more characteristic of trust-building, which anyone can practice right away.

An additional trust factor: consistency

A seventh factor for building trust is consistency.

Your readers should have some notion of what to expect. For example, consider Walter Yu and Aaron Pogue, very different in style and substance, yet both consistent:

• Walter Yu posts articles on topics of general civil engineering interest about twice a month. Each article is 300-500 words, nearly always with an informative photograph of the article’s topic. Walter’s article about Three Gorges Dam has a picture of Three Gorges Dam. Walter kicked off in October, and earned a page rank 3 by the start of 2010.
• Aaron Pogue writes about writing; absolutely hammers on it. He posts fresh content about 3 times per week. Each of Aaron’s articles runs between 700 to 1500 words, and covers an essential aspect of writing. You know what you’re in for. His blog, Unstressed Syllables, started in mid-December 2009. Aaron isn’t yet ranked by Google, but I suspect he’ll start with page rank 2 in an intensely competitive market.

However, such consistency risks becoming stale, for both the writer and the reader.

Build interest by broadening scope

Consistency doesn’t – necessarily – mean posting on a single, narrow topic.

It can mean finding your voice and consistently writing in that voice, over a range of topics.

Even if you’re apparently inconsistent, you can be consistently inconsistent. Take Extreme John for example.* Is he going to post on limousines, on football, fighting or tanning and smoothies? Will zebra stripes by involved? Hard to say. At first glance, John is all over the map. After you read a few articles, you see that he’s still Extreme John, no matter what he’s writing about.

Received opinion in Blogistan would have John writing only about limousines, or only about smoothies. Never mind the zebra stripes, the UFC and the football. Or even SEO!

Extreme John demonstrates the power of having a consistently strong and consistently clear voice.

Consistency doesn’t mean boring

When readers always know what to expect, you’ll have to work hard to keep them intrigued.

Think of consistency as a characteristic of your strategy, not your tactics.

Keep the scope of your blog well-defined, but experiment freely within individual blog posts. Strive to surprise and delight your readers in the small. Sure, you’re going to fall flat sometimes, but sometimes you’re going to knock it out of the park.

And you cannot predict which articles are going to fly.

What about you… are consistent in topic, in voice, or in some other way?

Let’s build a list of consistent attributes anyone can develop. Leave your ideas in a comment, I’ll write everything up later, and link back to your comment.

• What’s Your Story? Tell Me Something I Don’t Know
• iPhone Blogging – Writing is so last millennium (& the Last Week in Review)
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Post from: Website In A Weekend

Consistency – A 7th Characteristic of Trust Building (Everyone can do this)