I found a new Wordpress plugin some of you may be interested in, that’s sort of a way to take dofollow to the next level. The CommentLuv plugin will display the last post of the commenter within their comment. The plugin visits the site they’ve inputted into the URL field, and scrapes the last post made, and displays the link at the bottom of the comment they’ve left.

I don’t think I’m going to implement this on any of my blogs, since I’m already pretty hot and heavy with dofollow, but figured I’d throw it out there as an alternative for my readers.

I’ve found a new plugin that will help me to continue blocking comment spam on my blogs, and make using the D-list and do follow plugin a little easier.

Delink Comment Author is a new plugin that makes removing a URL from a comment a one click process. Sometimes, the comments I get are horrible, and it’s completely obvious that they’ve been left to take advantage of my dofollow links. Other times, it’s more a gray area - a great comment, but a link to a mortgage site, or a dog training school. Up til now, I’d been editing the URL’s out of those comments so that I could approve the comment but not give a link back to a site that isn’t a blog. It was a 5 step process that consisted of going to the comment, clicking edit, clicking into the URL field, removing the URL, and saving the comment.

This new plugin allows you to just click a link and the URL will be stripped from the comment.

In general, my comment policy is to allow comments with URL’s listed, as long as those belong to blogs. My comments aren’t the place to promote your non-blog business website.

Despite some people (who I refuse to link to) attempting to sabotage blogs using “do follow” by selling others comments on those blogs, I’ve not removed the do follow plug-in from any of my blogs. I’m extremely vigilant in deleting / moderating comments however, and I’ve been known to edit the email / URL from a great comment before approving it. That eliminates that commenter from being able to get his next comment automatically approved, but still allows their thoughts to appear here.

If you’d like to join the list of blogs using do follow, just jump onto the D List train here.

If you’re using do follow, I’d like to hear what steps you’re taking to keep spammers posing as interested readers from taking over your blog comments.

I put out a plea 2 days ago for help in getting 2 PHPBB mods installed on the forum here. Ok, ok, you got me. When I said “help”, I meant not “assistance”, but “I tell you what I want and hand over my passwords in a real trusting fashion and you do all of the work”.

I had 3 offers for help, and went with the first guy who replied. Bucky, also known as The West Virginia Blogger, installed those mods in record time for me, one on his lunch break, and the other in the wee hours while I was still sleeping. He even included screen shots for me so I could find everything easily enough once he was done. What a guy!

I’m now the proud user of 2 little mods designed to combat spam on the forums. The Admin Userlist allows you to view a long member list, and sort by name, url, # of posts, etc. Next to each name is a checkbox so that you can delete (or ban) a group of accounts at once. Much quicker than deleting accounts one by one.

The Only Active Members Can Post URL’s mod allows you to force members to belong to your forum for a set # of days, and have a set # of posts, if you wish, before they can post a URL. Since most of our spammers registered and then immediately posted their naughty, dirty spam messages, this is another great too.

I came across an entry on Bloggers R Us about a great plugin for Wordpress called Optimal Title. Always interested in improving my search engine results, I read the entry and decided to immediately implement it on my blogs - so far, I’ve added it to this blog and Simple Kind Of Life. The whole process takes about 2 minutes, and the results should be worth it.

As Eve pointed out in the article, instead of having your blog appear in Google or other search engine results with your blog title first, and THEN your post title, like this:

GeekySpeaky >> Optimal Title

They’ll appear with your post title first, like this:

Optimal Title >> Geeky Speaky

That may not seem like a big deal, but when you’re seeking out specific information and scrolling through pages of results on Google, having the most relevant information up front is important!

The D List I started, of blogs using the “Do Follow” plugin, has taken off like crazy. The entry has 54 comments and trackbacks right now - a new record for this blog! I wanted to address a few questions I’ve seen asked more than once though.

When you install the plugin, you won’t see any changes on your blog. It will look and act the same. There are no plugin options for the do follow plugin. If you want to verify it’s working, go to an entry with comments and view source - search for “nofollow”. You won’t find any. Success!

To find other blogs using the plugin, use the tags at the bottom of this post, and my original post. Or just tag your friends and fill them in on this great plugin - most people don’t know that the comments in Wordpress contain the nofollow by default, and they’re happy to switch.

Technorati Tags: plugin, Wordpress plugin, blog comments, backlinks, SEO, I Follow Movement, nofollow, do follow plugin, wordpress, blog promotion, do follow, D list

I’ve been using a plugin called Do Follow on my blogs for months. You may not know that when you leave a comment on a WordPress blog, a “no follow” tag is automatically inserted so that the link is NOT spidered by search engines. I know a lot of people out there love to leave comments in hopes of increasing backlinks, but you’re spinning your wheels if you’re doing it on blogs that aren’t using Do Follow yet.

When you add a Do Follow plugin (there are few different ones to choose from!) to your site, it strips the nofollow attribute from your comments, so you’re giving link love to each person who comments on your site. Since I moderate my comments and don’t allow dirty spammers to get through, this is a neat way to thank people for commenting on your blog, by giving them some extra exposure for their links.

To make it easier for all of YOU to find blogs that are using Do Follow, I’m officially starting the “D List“. Not only can you visit the blogs on this list, leave a comment, and get a REAL link back to your site (because they’re all using Do Follow), you’ll increase links to your blog by adding your blog to the D list. I believe Michael Scott would call that “Win - Win - Win”.

(Note: Any blog using any Do Follow is welcome - not just the one I linked above!)

***Begin to copy here***

1. Write a short paragraph at the beginning of your post and link back to the blog that put you on the list in the paragraph. This isn’t a suggestion. You need to break up the duplicate content. Someone took the time to add you so the least you can do is give them an extra link back.

2. Copy the list of originals below COMPLETELY and add it to your blog. If you would like a different keyword for your blog then change it when you do your post and it should pass to most blogs with that keyword.

3. Take the adds from the blog that added you and place them in the “Originals” list.

4. Add at least 1 new blog that you KNOW is using the DO FOLLOW plugin to the list in the “My Adds” section. (Add no more than 5!) Let the people you’ve added know, so that they can keep the list going! (Link all the blogs in your post too!)

5. Leave relevant comments on the blogs listed and get a link back to your site thanks to Do Follow!

My Adds:

Midlife Musings
Utterly Geek
Whatever I Feel Like
My Dandelion Patch
Surviving NJ

The Originals:

GeekySpeaky
Simple Kind Of Life
3DayMom
BuyMeBlog
The Hockey Dad

***Quit Copying Here***

Technorati Tags: plugin, Wordpress plugin, blog comments, backlinks, SEO, I Follow Movement, nofollow, do follow plugin, wordpress, blog promotion, do follow, D list

My friend Julie and I were talking about Google Sitemaps this week on the new GeekySpeaky forums. She was amazed that I was able to get my blogs indexed, and that they all are PR4, without ever making a Google sitemap for my blogs. What can I say? Dumb luck strikes again. Once Julie posted this neat plugin for generating Google sitemaps on Wordpress blogs, I was hooked. I immediately installed it and set it up on ALL of my blogs. It was incredibly easy to use and I hope that it will help to give me a boost with Google. I’d like to see the PR increase on one of my blogs, if not more, in the next Google pagerank update.

Solo Technology makes the “pro” list for upgrading to Wordpress 2.1 a bit longer. There are extra editing options available if you hit alt-shift-v (Firefox) or alt-v (IE) while using the Wordpress WYSIWYG editor. According to an entry on Digg, you can also use alt-shift-n to spell check entries.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress 2.1, wordpress, wordpress upgrade, easter eggs, WYSIWYG

I’ve been using the WordStats plugin on my other blogs for a while, and then realized I never installed it here. I absolutely love this little plugin, because it’s a quick and easy way to get a word count for those of us doing a little paid blogging. Before this, I was copying and pasting drafts into Word and getting my word count there - no more of that. Once you hit “save and edit” on your post, you’ll get the word count and the number of sentences. Be advised - if you’re not using the text editor, your word count will include all of your raw HTML as well.

The plugin, in addition to giving you a wordcount, analyzes your post to give you an idea of how difficult it is to read, based on the average number of words per sentence, the average number of syllables in a word, and the percentage of “hard words”.

Now, if they could just build spell check into it…

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, plugin, word count

Laura told me about a nifty little plugin I could use to show the people who have commented the most on my site. I installed it on tonight on another blog, and even figured out how to excluse myself from the results after poking around the code a bit. Yay me! You can see it in action in my left sidebar on my main blog.

I’m seeing MyBlogLog in the sidebar on more and more blogs lately, and I’m wondering what those of you who paid for the service think of it? Specifically, what you think of the stats package versus something in a plugin, like ShortStat for WP. I realize that I got a weeks worth of free stats when I signed up for MyBlogLog, but I never bothered to check them to compare the package to anything else.

My friend Marcus needed some assistance this week setting up PhotoPress, and since I thought this might help others, I’m sharing the info here too. If you’re using the HTML code in PhotoPress (and I recommend it) you’ve probably tried aligning your pictures to the left, or to the right, and noticed that they’re a bit off, like my example above here. Here’s how to easily fix that. Upload your picture in PhotoPress, and then browse to select it. Select thumbnail or full image, and then pick left or right alignment. Once you put the code in your page, you’ll see this if you’re using the HTML editor. (If you’re using rich text, view your HTML source to see and edit your code):

<a href=”http://www.geekyspeaky.com/?pp_album=main&pp_cat=&pp_image=logo_button.jpg” title=”logo button”><img src=”http://www.geekyspeaky.com/wp-content/photos/logo_button.jpg” alt=”logo button” width=”144″ height=”130″ class=”alignleft” /></a>

If you keep the code as is, your picture will look like the one above, where the text doesn’t start until the bottom of the image. If you’d like to make it truly aligned with the few few lines of text, change the code. Instead of class=”alignleft” put align=”left” (or right)

Here’s what that will look like. Much nicer, eh? It makes your text butt up to the image for the height of the image, and I think it looks more polished and professional too. Oh, and if your theme/CSS is set to put a blue border around all your links, you can add a border=”0″ to your code to remove that. So your code would end up looking like this:

<a href=”http://www.geekyspeaky.com/?pp_album=main&pp_cat=&pp_image=logo_button.jpg” title=”logo button”><img src=”http://www.geekyspeaky.com/wp-content/photos/logo_button.jpg” alt=”logo button” width=”144″ height=”130″ align=”left” border=”0″ /></a>

Technorati Tags: Photopress plugin, Photopress, Wordpress plugin, plugins, editing HTML, formatting HTML

Last week, I talked about a great WordPress plugin called Photopress. This week, let’s talk about how to customize it to make it work best for you!

From your WordPress dashboard, go to options. You’ll see a Photopress link. Clicking on that link will show you all of the options you can change for this plugin - and they’re are quite a few! I’m going to go through these one by one and clarify things for you.

Path to your photos folder:

This should already be filled in. Remember when you installed PhotoPress and you were told to put a folder called “photos” in your wp-content folder? You should see the path to that folder here. Did you remember to make the photos folder writable? You can do this via your FTP program - right clicking on the photos folder should give you the option to change the permissions or CHMOD properties.

Wordpress address:

Again, this should already be filled in, and it should be the main address of your blog or website, e.g. “http://www.geekyspeaky.com”

Address of your photos folder:

Should be filled in already, and it will be the URL to your photos folder that you created in step 1, e.g. “http://www.geekyspeaky.com/wp-content/photos”

Use permalinks:

You have the option to choose yes or no here. If you choose yes, it will give you a URL for your blog album (where all your uploaded photos live) like geekyspeaky.com/album. If you wish to call it something else, just fill in the blank here with the new name.

Keep original images:

Photopress deletes the original uploaded photos to save you disk space. If you’d like to keep them, make sure you’ve got the room on your server for them.

Originals prefix:

Will already be filled in with “orig_” - no need to change.

Minimum level to upload and browse:

Simply put, how many pictures do you want to upload at once? Pick a number between 1 and 10.

Minimum level to use mass edit and maintain tools:

Same concept as above, different tool. Pick a number!

Maximum allowed size for uploads:

The default here is 512MB, which should be plenty big enough. This setting does not always work. PHP also has its own maximum allowed upload size.

Maximum resized image dimensions (width or height):

This sets a limit on the width or height of your full sized uploaded pictures. Mine is set to 450 pixels, so that my pictures aren’t too big for my theme. You can edit it if you wish though.

Maximum thumbnail dimensions:

Same option as above, but for the thumbnail size. I set my thumbnails to be 100 pixels.

Make square thumbnails:

I set this one to no - if you say yes, you’re thumbnails will be cropped into a square.

Quality for resized JPEGs:

Photopress will set a quality level for your resized pictures - it’s recommended that this be between 70 and 95, but you can adjust it if you’re not happy with how the pictures look.

Allowed file extensions (and MIME types):

Recommended: jpg jpeg png gif, as the resizing function only supports these types of picture files.

Insert thumbnail or full image by default:

Both options will be in a dropdown, this selects the default. I have it set to thumbnail, as most of my full sized images are too large to be in a post.

Thumbnails prefix:

String to add to the thumbnails Photopress creates - you shouldn’t need to change this.

Link to album:

Choose yes or no - The code for inserted images can point to the image in the album or straight to a popup containing the image. This also causes thumbnails on category pages in the album to point to popups, instead of image pages. I initially had mine set to the album, but now I’m experimenting with the popup.

Insert tags or HTML:

The popup tool can insert tags (like ) or regular HTML. HTML gives you inline images in the rich text editor, which can be nice. However, since tags are rendered into HTML when posts are displayed they can respond to changes to Options and image sizes, so you should be less likely to end up with broken or weird images in old posts. I’m currently switching all of my blogs to the HTML option, so I can have more control over aligning my pictures.

Hide the built-in uploader in WP 2:

Having both Photopress and the built-in uploader can be confusing. This just hides the built-in uploader.

Use buttonsnap library:

If the button does not appear on the toolbar, try disabling buttonsnap. The button will appear at the start of the toolbar instead, and will be ugly but possibly more reliable.

Insert link in Meta:

Adds a link to the photo album in the Meta sidebar list. I turned this option off, because I don’t plan on using the album feature as a place for people to view pictures as a group.

Insert random image in Meta:

Adds a random linked thumb to the Meta sidebar list. I turned this option off, because I didn’t want the photos appearing in my sidebar.

Show posts with image in album:

Do you want to users to be able to pull up all posts with an image in the album?

Shows a list of posts containing the image in the album.

Same concept as above, will only return results if image is used in more than one post.

Show thumbs in mass edit in the album manager:

Toggles thumbnail display in the Mass Editor part of the album manager, speeding up display a bit.

Allow images used in posts to be deleted:

A good option to say no on - this will prevent you from accidently deleting an image you’ve used in a post.

Images per page:

Number of images to show on pages with multiple images. (The album, the browse list, and in the manager.)

CSS classes for inserted images:

alignleft, alignright, and centered are available in the default theme, or you can add new classes to your theme style file and enter the names here. Separate the classes with spaces. These will appear in a dropdown list in the uploader and browser, and the first one will be selected by default.

CSS class for random thumbs:

alignleft, alignright, and centered are available in the default theme, or you can add a new class to your theme and enter the name here.

Watermark type for inserted images:

Descide wether your images will be shown as they are or be marked by a text-string or an image of your choice. I don’t use watermarks.

Vertical watermark alignment at image:

Choose the vertical position of the watermark.

Horizontal watermark alignment at image:

Choose the horizontal position of the watermark.

Watermark transparency:

Choose the transparency of the watermark - it has to be between 0 - 100.

Watermark padding:

Choose the padding around the watermark in px.

Watermark logo:

Address of your watermark-logo, beginning from your wordpress-folder. Must have if you choose watermark type ‘image’

Watermark text:

Text of your watermark. Must have if you choose watermark type ‘text’

Watermark text size:

Size of the text of your watermark. Must have if you choose watermark type ‘text’ Must be between 1 - 5.

Watermark text color:

Color of your watermark-text in hex style. Must have if you choose watermark type ‘text’

Watermark text shadow color:

Color of the shadow of your watermark-text in hex style. Must have if you choose watermark type ‘text’

Hopefully seeing some of these options and how I’m using them will help you decide how you want to customize and use Photopress. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: customize Photopress, Photopress, Wordpress plugins, plugin, Wordpress, Photo blog

My comment spam on all of my blogs is handled by Akismet. If you’re a WordPress blogger, this is without a doubt, THE musthave plugin. You won’t have to deal with your inbox flooded with spam comments to moderate - Akismet is a huge timesaver. It will hold any suspected spam comments in a queue for you to review or delete, much like comment moderation on Wordpress, but you won’t get emails for each suspected spam comment. Each comment is run through a spam test. You don’t need to ever upgrade Akismet, because it’s constantly learning from how others use it. It literally becomes MORE effective as time goes on.

Here’s my idea to make Akismet even better - a lot of spam comments I receive are easily 500 characters in length. It makes it difficult to review the spam once you get several long comments in there. I’d love to see Akismet work in a module to limit the # of characters that can be used in a comment. Heck, I’d even use a plugin like this if it weren’t tied into Akismet. I can’t believe no one creating WordPress plugins has some up with this idea! Limiting the character count would be just one more way to combat spam, and it would certainly make it easier to look for legit comments.

Technorati Tags: combat spam, fight spam, Akismet, Wordpress bloggers, Wordpress plugin, plugins, Akismet plugin

If you’re looking for a great plugin for WordPress to help you add photos to your entries, I highly recommend PhotoPress. I originally found it on the Target Culture blog that I contribute too, and I’ve now added it to all of my blogs.

Initially, I started out using the photo insert tool that is available in the WYSISYG (what you see is what you get) editor in Wordpress. I wasn’t very happy with the way it formatted the pictures, and I stopped using the editor due to it deleting code when I tried to embed YouTube videos, so I was in search of something new.

Enter PhotoPress! If you’re using the rich-text editor for Wordpress, never fear, you can still use this plugin. PhotoPress is easy to install and start using. Once you’ve got it all set up, in your editor you’ll notice a “photos” button when you type a new entry. Hitting this allows you to browse for, and upload a new picture. You’ll then have the option of displaying a thumbnail, or the original in your post. All the photos are also added to an album on your site, and the thumbnails can also be displayed in your sidebar.

The whole thing is very user friendly. The pop-up uploader, pop-up image browser, the random image function, and the album are great tools to add to any Wordpress blog.

Technorati Tags: PhotoPress, WordPress, WP, photo plugin, Wordpress plugin, photo blog

If you’re not using stats on your website, you should be. I use a plugin called ShortStat which shows me unique visitors, last pages viewed on my site, the last keywords that brought people, domains that came, an dother information. It’s an interesting way to see where your visitors are coming from, especially when your site is brand new, like this one.

For instance, my last visitors came from:

blo.gs 5
wc5.worldcrossing.com 4
boards.payperpost.com 4
clicknewz.com 3
bloghijinks.com 1
whois.sc 1

I posted the link to this site on boards.payperpost.com. I have a trackback at clicknewz. And I listed this site in bloghijinks. The worldcrossing link isn’t a site I belong to, but in clicking the link, I was able to view the forum name, and I know people who post there. I didn’t post the site at blo.gs.

Interesting, eh?

Technorati Tags: Wordpress plugins, Wordpress, plugins, ShortStat, referral stats, referral logs, track your stats

Simple Tags is a plug in I started using on my other blog about a month ago. It’s so easy to use, that I’m adding it to all of my blogs. Why use tags?

Tags are just another way of thinking of catagories, or keywords. But by using tags in your post, you’re linking yourself to others using those same tags all over the web. For example, if I had an entry about Google and pagerank, my tags might be Google, pagerank, and SEO. Visitors to Technorati looking for blog posts on one of those keywords would find my post. Likewise, you can link from a post using tags, to see like results in Technorati. Once you have posted the tagged post, there are two ways to have your post included on a Technorati Tag page. If your blog software is configured to ping Technorati, you’re already done. If not, you can manully ping Technorati. Oh, and it’s a good idea to claim your blog at Technorati. You’ll then be able to add your name photo, and description, as well as list it in Blog Finder.

If you want to use tags to up your readership, that can be done as well. Visit your own tags via Technorati and see what others have to say on the same topics. Leave comments, and you may just see new visitors to your blog to see what YOU have to say.

Want to know more? Lynn over at Click Newz has a great article on tagging tips that’s a must read. She’s the one who first shared the simple tags plugin with me, and she’s got lots of tips to share.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress plugins, Simple Tags, Technorati, tags, tagging, wordpress, traffic