Top 5 Community Building WordPress Plugins
When we launch a blog, as well as getting people to read what we have to say, we are most of us looking to build a sense of community. While what we say has a big effect, how the blog works can also make a difference. Thankfully WordPress users have a good set of plugins to help:
- Make it easier to subscribe or share your blog with Add to Any
This provides dropdowns for social bookmarking sites or feed reading services, making it totally easy for the reader to make a note of your location and keep coming back for more. - Top Commenters plugin and widget will reward your top commenters with a link back. Consider the link a bit of public recognition and a small incentive. Plus, you know how competitive people can be, it’s also kind of a high score table!
Make your comment area friendly with smiling faces - Add Gravatars with this easy plugin. Gravatars are “globally recognised avatars”. Basically anyone can set up a Gravatar picture centrally and any website that supports them will show your face whenever they are available, using your email address as a key. Seeing recognisable faces along with comments really helps build community.- Fire off a thank-you email to new commenters using Comment relish. We all like to feel valued, this email can be a nice touch, and also provides the opportunity to point out your feed or useful introductory content they might have missed.
- An essential for creating conversation, bring commenters back with Subscribe to Comments. Just like with popular forum software, this will notify you when someone replies to your message, keeping the conversation flowing.
Have you any suggestions for great community building WordPress plugins? Please share your faves in the comments …
WordPress 2.5 Versus WordPress.com
With all the buzz around WordPress 2.5 you might think I would have rushed to upgrade. Yes, I am a geek, and yes I also love playing with the latest shiny gadgets and toys, but hold on, there is more to it than simply installing every update that comes along.
The fact is, whenever there is any significant update to blogging software, inevitably something breaks. To get all the gizmos we desire there are often hacks, template tricks and not-so-standard plugins that we like to cruft our blogs up with. Those are always the first to break.
WordPress are doing their best to help. There is a growing list of plugins and their 2.5 compatibility. If you look down you might find there are a good number that still don’t work.
It’s good to know which plugins work and which do not, but it becomes a pain to keep changing, trying, finding alternatives. Many programmers put out one version of a plugin and then find it is too much trouble to support it. Some of my most used features will have to be sacrificed or I will need to fix them up myself, or hire a programmer.
This is where the lure of fully-hosted solutions like WordPress.com become attractive. They keep the software up to date, they manage the hosting. No more worries about Digg front page stories putting your site offline. No more expensive or cheap and unreliable hosting. Security, stability, features and management are all handled on your behalf.
What you sacrifice of course is control and flexibility. You can pay for a domain, and some amount of visual tweakage, but you can’t put any old plugin or widget in there. And there lies the rub. While I do not need the ability to show advertising, and they do allow business blogs, they are a bit funny about pushing the boundaries of commercial use, plus I need my gizmos.
I don’t want to give up my many wonderful WP toys! Please Matt and Co, give us a geeked-up pro version of the hosted WordPress.com service so I can get off this update cycle for good!
QIK Live Streaming Internet Video from Your Phone
There are many streaming video tools out there for watching video. Not that many for recording video, even fewer to record live video from your phone.
That’s what Qik does. It records and broadcasts live video right from your phone.
I must say I am impressed.
From grabbing the application to sending out video live took all of 20minutes, anyone with a more reliable internet connection would be able to do it in a quarter of the time. Quite a few smart phones are supported:
Nokia S60 phones: N71, N73, N75, N76, N77, N80, N91, N92, N93i, N95, E50, E51, E61i, E65, E70m E90 Communicator, 3250, 5500, 5700 Xpress Music, 6110 Navigator, 6120 Classic, 6121 Classic, and 6290.
I can see a lot of bloggers switching their iPhone for a n95 just to get access to this system.
Your streams can be public or private, although I had a bit of an issue with all my streams being set to private and now I don’t know how to make them public - D’oh!
Just like YouTube, you can easily link or embed the created videos, but most importantly viewers can watch in real time and send comments as you stream. Impressive!

You can see videos as I add them to my profile, but you would be much better off watching the fun and games over at the SxSW group from folks such as Scoble and the b5media crew.
33+ Top Software Tools for Bloggers
Whenever I help a new blogger get started I tend to recommend the software tools I use myself. While that does help, I often wonder if I should show more choices. There is no reason why anyone would use exactly the same setup as me, particularly as I am now a Mac user!
With that in mind, here is my round up of all the software and tools I can think of that a blogger needs. Please add any I have missed in the comments …
Blogging Software
Feed Reading Software
Traffic and Statistics Software
Editing Software
RSS to Email Distribution Services
Social Bookmarking Tools
Audio/Visual Tools
My Essential Daily Tech Feeds

Staying up to date with the technology field is a lot easier than it used to me. Back when I started my career at age 16 it was tough to keep up, the only source of information was expensive telephone directory weight magazines. Not ideal, especially as my weekly salary was only in double figures.
Switch to today and the problem isn’t the cost and lack of good tech information, but the wealth of free information. We are deluged and it is hard to know the truth from the rot.
My routine is to check the following sites and feeds. Depending on how much time I have will depend how far down the list I go, from the top, essential, to #4 onwards, interesting but non-essential.
Here are the top 10 tech sites that I turn to every day:
- TechMeme - If I am really in a rush I don’t even check my feeds, I go right to TechMeme and by scanning the front page I can get a good idea if there are any big stories today. TechMeme is a brilliant service and every niche should have an equivalent!
- TechCrunch - Feed - With bloggers spanning the globe, TechCrunch either gets the scoop or gets the news soon after. If there is a big story you can be sure it will be on here.
- The Register - Feed - Living in the UK it is nice to have a British perspective, plus tech doesn’t have to be serious.
- GigaOM - Feed - If I have time I like to read the analysis and insight from the mighty Om
- ReadWriteWeb - Feed - I make my living from the web so a lot of my reading is focused on that. RWW is the best of the bunch.
- Scobleizer - Feed - There are not as many occasions now where Scoble breaks a story first but it is always interesting to catch up with what he is up to. His Twitter feed is making a daily visit to Scobleizer less essential.
- Engadget - Feed - I’m a gadget fan but as most gadget fans will tell you, there are more gadgets arriving than hours in the day to keep up with them
- Gizmodo - Feed - Another fine gadget blog, you do need that second point of view
- Wired - Feed - I used to buy the Wired print magazine, now when I have time I like to read online. It’s not always to my taste but some of the stuff on there is both brilliant and content you can’t find anywhere else
- BBC - Feed - There is rarely anything on BBC tech that I would miss but there is often something new and interesting.
Which sites do you check regularly for your daily dose of Tech?
Google Reader Causes RSS Revolt
My feedreader was alive with chatter about Google Reader recently. What was initially heralded as a cool feature has turned into potential fuel for mutiny. Watching from the sidelines, it is all fun, but does have an impact on bloggers, particularly those wanting to sell advertising.
What is this controversial feature?
If you add a feed in Google Reader but rather than set an explicit URL you do a search, Reader will come back with a list of potential matches along with how many people are subscribed.


Knowing that a good percentage of people are now using Google Reader as their main feed reader, up to 20% at times according to my own blog, means you can extrapolate readership for any blog now without those numbers being made public by the blogger.
Of course we all know bigger is not always better but you try telling that to the kids who are getting upset at the counts.
Unfortunately, it is not all that accurate. While it does broadly work for some blogs, other blogs are getting their subscriber numbers heavily discounted or bloated. There are two main reasons:
- Multiple feeds - Many people have various RSS, Atom, and category specific feed options. Some even allow you to subscribe to both full and partial versions of the same feed.
- Feed Bundling - Most feed readers “helpfully” recommend feeds you might want to subscribe to. Most users do not delete these default feeds. This makes some subscriber counts look way better than they really are.
The thing many people are forgetting is RSS reader counts are inherently unscientific. With an email subscriber list you know who has subscribed but not much more with any confidence, with RSS it is even worse, you just know a certain IP address has requested your feed at some point. You don’t know if the article has been read, by whom, nor if they liked it.
I wrote about what I called RSS+ a while ago, I think this Google Reader debacle proves we need something new to replace the whole RSS/Atom/Feed thing. Let’s get feeds that work for both readers and publishers.
More coverage:
100,000+ Free Images and Photos for Your Blog
Images and photos breath life into your posts. When used right, they enhance your message. But using the Google/Flicker image search usually returns copy-righted images. Bloggers that use these images (without permission) can find themselves on the recieving end of a lawsuit
PictureSandbox.com is a new search engine that enables you to retrieve only CC Licensed images from the Flicker database. You can freely use the images in your blog, usually, by just giving credit to the artist/photographer (in CC speak that’s called attribution).
This free image search is coupled with an efficient image browsing interface that makes finding images fun.
Here are some cool photos I found at PictureSandbox.




How the baby that ate its own head can help you get readers and links
Every day the baby helps bloggers, columnists and journalists get front page exposure for their content . Well, OK, it’s not really the baby. It’s that undeniable urge that compels us to read the article about the baby. It’s the same thing that killed the cat…yep folks, you’ve got it - it’s…curiosity.
In his book “Tested Advertising Methods,” John Caples lists curiosity headlines as one of three successful headline types. So, let’s familiarize ourselves with the curiosity factor and start reeling in those links and readers.
Irresistible headlines due to curiosity
These three headlines were taken from Digg’s Home page. In fact, more than 50% of the home page articles (at the time this article was written) relied heavily on the curiosity factor.
Blueprint For Dictatorship - Notice how the contrast between the feelings of order/security we associate with blueprints and the feelings of fear/instability we associate with dictatorship make this headline irresistible. Isn’t this headline much better than the obvious - “America is becoming a dictatorship”.
Anti-piracy group pirated my data - It’s the tale of David catching the thieving Goliath red-handed. You absolutely have to know what happened. This title is all good.
Marijuana Shrinks Tumors, Government Knew In 1974 - If you are a cancer patient, a marijuana smoker or a fan of conspiracy theories, you cannot resist reading this article.
How to use the curiosity factor to create irresistible blog posts
This technique has three steps:
- Mine Digg/Reddit/Netscape for a curiosity headline (not news headlines) - go to the Digg home page. Look at the articles that became popular in the last 7/30 days. Select one that is not news-oriented.
- Figure out what makes this headline unique - Try to understand why this headline is so compelling and if there is an underlying pattern to its drawing power.
- Remix the headline - Use the pattern to create new headlines.
Let’s do a couple:
| Original Headline: |
How to tell if you are a fanboy |
| Underlying Pattern: |
How to tell if [you/someone close to you] are/is a [something that no one wants to be] |
| Remixed headlines: | How to tell if you are a cold fish |
| How to tell if your boyfriend is a male chauvinist pig | |
| How to tell if you are still stuck in the 80s |
Let’s try another one:
| Original Headline: |
Condemned To Google Hell |
| Underlying Pattern: |
Condemned to [Do no evil type of object/entity] Hell |
| Remixed headlines: | Condemned to Hawaii Hell |
| Condemned to Candy Store Hell | |
| Condemned to George Clooney Hell |
So start weaving curiosity into your headlines and you’ll see those readers and links rolling in.
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Announcing PostWisdom for FireFox: Your Personal Blog Writing Coach
Imagine reading an article about blogging from your favorite blogging guru. After a couple of sentences you become excited. The article is really good. It contains an amazing technique. A technique that will make you a better blogger. Using this technique, you immediatly whip out a shining blog post.
When it’s time to write another post you use the technique again, and again the results are great. But since you don’t want to be monotonous/boring, you avoid using that technique for a couple of weeks. And then a new really good article captures your attention and the old technique is forgotten.
I’ve been suffering from the “using only the latest writing advice” syndrom for quite a while now. And that is why we developed PostWisdom. PostWisdom is a FireFox Plugin intended to help bloggers remember and use the best writing techniques. It is easy to use and free.
You can download it and read about it here.
I am looking forward to hear what you think about it, so please, leave a comment.
Update: It seems there was a problem with the download link. My apologies. It’s working now. Thank you Dan for the heads up.
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How You can become a Happier Blogger - A Simple 4 Step Technique
While I can’t guarantee it, using this secret yet simple technique will probably make you smile and improve your blogging experience.
And the secret technique is…
Stop reading blogs! (some of them at least)
You shouldn’t dump all your feeds. Just the malicious ones. You know which ones, you have a couple of them in your feed list. These blogs are written by people that abuse others, that try to gain popularity by picking fights and are just irritating. It doesn’t matter how happy you are. These blogs will suck the life out of you.
Here’s how to do it:
- Open your blog reader
- Go over the feed list
- When you reach a blog that is abusive/insulting/irritating …
- Press the unsubscribe button
That’s all there is to it.
Warning: It is difficult to avoid smiling while applying this technique
Abusive and insulting people have no place in your feed list. Your mind is not their playing ground. Go and unsubscribe their ass. You will be a happier blogger!