Today’s Whimsday post is a celebration! I started this blog on a whim, it seemed a good way to share and learn new things. Last week I reached a minor milestone, my WordPress stats show that I’ve had a quarter of a million page views since I started the Knetwork. To celebrate I’ve changed my theme, something I’ve intended to do for a while now. I hope you enjoy the theme and thanks to everyone that reads this for making running the site such a rewarding endeavor!
I am a big fan of the Disqus commenting system, I’ve found it to be a great addition to my blog as well as a wonderful personal tool to use on other’s blogs. I’ve had few problems and with commenting syncing now in place on the WordPress plug-in, I’ve had very few change requests until now. There has been a dramatic increase in human generated spam over the past week or two and if I was a spammer I would jump on this too, because DISQUS does not use nofollow. It’s not even an option that I can find!
Let me give you an example, here’s a post I did on Disqus SEO that has been targeted for spamming (seems fitting, yes?) The comments were on point enough that I replied before i figured out what was going on. I replied by e-mail and the formatting is still screwed upon line wraps when you do that (My other major gripe with Disqus).
If you take a look at the page source and search for iphone and discount office supplies you’ll see some nice free dofollow links headed off to the spammer’s sites. This makes me unhappy – unhappy customers uninstall. Given the nature of SEO, where an outgoing link from your blog counts as a vote, Disqus should have ZERO dofollow links out of my blog’s comments unless I say otherwise!
If this isn’t corrected shortly then look I’ll be installing this Disqus Hack to handle it, and if it’s not upgraded soon i guess I’ll take a look at intense debate and see if they do a better job.
I was a little hesitant to install the Disqus comment system, but I took the plunge to see how I liked it and I find many of the features so helpful and superior to WordPress‘s native comment system that I’ve decided to make the switch permanent. The Disqus dashboard, the universal login for all other sites using Disqus, and the ability to reply and delete comments by responding to the notification e-mail are all major reasons that I’ve decided to stick with the switch. There were two concerns that I had that almost had me hit the uninstall:
1.SEO- I’m not an expert in SEO but I have explored the basics and have seen the value that comments on a post can add to your search ranking, so I was concerned about losing that traffic source. In looking into the subject this issue was one that many bloggers had expressed and is one that Disqus is taking seriously. For WordPress users, the Disqus plugin uses their API and there doesn’t seem to be a problem. I did a little experiment to make sure that the Disqus comments are being indexed correctly, and while I can’t say they have the same value as a WordPress comments, what I see is good enough for me:
WordPress comment w/ #1 rank from my post helping people having trouble opening files with an .efw extension:
Obviously not heavily searched terms, but it’s what I could quickly pull from my existing comments, I encourage you to try the same thing for yourself. You’ll also note that there is no duplicate content from Disqus showing in the searches.
2. Not Hosting Comments – The problems with not hosting your own comments were made clear this past week as a database error at Disqus made all comments unavailable for a short time. Hopefully this point will be moot in a month or so as Disqus implements the export to WordPress feature that’s in the works. If Disqus goes down, you’ll still have all the data. It will be a huge reduction in risk and should help sway those bloggers who aren’t quite sure about making the change.
I first learned of Triggit due to their selection as a finalist in the 2008 Web 2.0 Launchpad event. I’m really impressed with the service, it’s like Zemanta for advertising! I’ll write more on it later but for know I wanted to announce that I threw together a quick plugin for self-hosted WordPress users who feel more comfortable adding a plugin then editing their theme files. This is also useful if you don’t want to have to re-add the code every time you change your theme.
To use this plugin download and unzip it and place the file into your WordPress plugin folder. Activate the plugin and go to the Settings Triggit screen and add your Triggit User ID.
This plugin requires your theme to have the wp-footer hook, if you it doesn’t seem to work that’s the most likely reason and you’d have to edit your theme’s footer file and add <?php wp_footer(); ?> before the /body tag (or just paste your Triggit code since you’re there anyway). If that wp-footer code is there and it’s still not working then leave me a comment and I’ll try to help.
I’ll pretty it up a touch later so check back for updates!
When it was released, the Yahoo! Shortcuts plugin seemed like it was going to be a HUGE help in making my posts more useful and more attractive, and while it helped, I finally got fed up with it and turned it off. There seemed to be very little development going on for it and some of the major bugs, like stacking the photo credits if you use the same picture for multiple posts and the fact it blew up and spewed code on my archive page led me to deactivate it. The Yahoo! search links were also not very helpful in adding other relevant content, and for some reason it didn’t like double spaces after a sentance. so blah! and bye bye.
Now, new on the scene is Zemanta, currently available as a Firefox plugin. I’ve installed it and am giving it it’s first run and I have to say I’m impressed. It’s still in heavy development but is very impressive, here are a few of things they are doing better than Yahoo! shortcuts:
Zemanta puts everything on the Write Post screen, With Yahoo! you had to jump to a new page, make your additions and then jump back and fix anything the plugin made a mess of.
Link suggestions are single click and go where you would naturally want. Right now you can generally pick between the site’s home page or a Wikipedia entry, more options are on the way.
Tag suggestions! Zemanta suggests tags for your post from your content and semantic search for related keywords you may not have written about.
Related Article Suggestions from around the web (see below). You may not like this if you hate the idea of sending a reader to another site, but it increases the benefit to your reader and that’s important for return visitors.
There are a few things that I would like to see added, or if they exist make it easier to find them:
A WordPress plugin. It’s not hard to install Zemanta, but if it were a WordPress plugin I could use it on any computer and any browser. Then it would have access to suggest from my existing categories and make use of other internal WordPress functionality.
Gallery Scroll for more pictures, everything I see now is Firefox and WordPress none of which I want to use so let me scroll for more than just the 9 available.
Internal links – give me a section of related links that are only from my site
OPTIONS! Give me options! What if I don’t want suggested articles with adult content and want all my inserted links to be no follow? Even changing the color scheme or the ability to turn off some of he features would be nice.
Overall, I’m impressed. I’m not real sure about the Zemified button down there, but I’ll certainly leave it up for this post!
