Social Mallard - by Kevin Briody » Wordpress

RssCloud: Getting blogs back into the realtime conversation

Kevin — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:32:47 +0000

In the “Media 1.0″ world of a couple decades ago, where breaking news first appeared in print newspapers or on the 6 o’clock evening network TV news broadcast, the arrival of CNN’s 24-hour news coverage created serious upheaval.

While many news watchers may have stayed loyal to the paper or Brokaw for in-depth coverage and analysis, they increasingly tuned into CNN to see what was happening *right now*.

Fast forward to 2009, and Twitter is pulling a CNN on blogs. Where as recently as a few years ago the blogosphere represented one of the fastest ways to take a pulse of the online zeitgeist, nowadays it seems almost as slow as waiting for the evening news used to be.

That’s why the announcement today of WordPress supporting rssCloud matters. Automattic is trying to kick blogs back into the realtime conversation.

Part of the allure of Twitter is the near instantaneous view it provides into hot topics, reflected as trending subjects. Within seconds or minutes of a major piece of news breaking – from a celebrity passing to a politician cheating to a football player punching (arrrgh) – you’ll find thousands of people talking about it on Twitter.

With blogs, you have to wait for the posts to be composed, RSS readers to refresh, and then…you’re probably on Twitter by then anyway to find the hottest blog topics. rssCloud can’t tackle the issue of the time it takes to compose a coherent blog post vs a 140-character tweet, but it can minimize the time lag from posting to reading, and that’s an important start.

Yes, they difference can be as small as a few minutes, but in today’s obsessive world of memes that bloom and die within hours or even minutes, those minutes matter. rssCloud could be a very interesting experiment for the WordPress community, and bloggers as a whole.

As an aside: I read Andy Beal’s post asking if this announcement from Automattic isn’t just some “oooh, look! shiny!” sleight-of-PR-hand. My take – yes, it probably was to some degree. It may have been lucky timing for Matt and team, or it may have been an announcement planned for later that they pulled forward to change the subject. Either way, while Automattic still should focus on boosting WP’s rep for secure code, that doesn’t change the *potential* importance of the rssCloud announcement.

WordPress Commenting Evolved – Echo, Disqus, and IntenseDebate

When is WordPress.com just good enough?

Kevin — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 23:10:32 +0000

I get this question a lot:

“If I’m serious about my blogging efforts, shouldn’t I be hosting my blog with my own ISP?”

The answer, like so many things, is “it depends.” For most individuals and even small businesses, I actually recommend starting out with WordPress.com. Only making the leap to a self-hosted option when (and if) you run up against certain specific needs. Such as:

Do you truly *need* a heavily customized blog design? For example, to tie back in to your corporate branding?
Do you need to do something unique, such as hosting and displaying a deep video library? (though VideoPress may be a viable option now)
Do you need a custom plugin not offered by WP.com?
Do you want to run your own advertising?
Do you need to hack the core WordPress PHP files to do interesting things?

If “no” was the answer the above, then just stick with WordPress.com. After all, it does offer a wealth of free options, highly quality themes, and serious premium options, such as private branding and custom CSS, to make it suitable for most blogging efforts (such as Mayo Clinic’s excellent blogs).

So start small, focus on the content, and don’t hassle with self-hosting unless you need to.

Enjoy your long weekend!

WordPress Commenting Evolved – Echo, Disqus, and IntenseDebate

Kevin — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:17:46 +0000

It seems the era of boring blog comment sections is over – from WordPress introducing threaded comments to CommentLuv, Gravatars, and tweetbacks, there are more tools than ever to liven up your post comments and get the whole “community fu” flowing strong.

If you really want to throw caution to the wind, you can dive into one of the very cool embedded, external comment systems such as Disqus, IntenseDebate, and Echo.

What are they? Broadly speaking, they are all hosted web services that attempt to link comments by individuals across the blogosphere, embedded in your WordPress install with a plugin. They also, to varying degrees, attempt to expand on the idea of ping/trackbacks – links to your post from other blogs – and display all inbound links from across the social media landscape, such tweets, social bookmarks, and so on.

They also make commenting a bit more fun, and coherent, for your readers. Using a single sign on they can track their own comments across the blogosphere – or at least, across any other blogs that happen to be using the same commenting system (maybe someone can create a tool to integrate your comments into one viewable pane?).

I should note – this isn’t a review post, as I haven’t used all three systems enough to make a properly informed judgement. This is just to highlight three alternatives to help make your blog comments a bit more interactive.

However, based on the various reviews I’ve seen, the cheat sheet version based on my own quick judgement is:

Disqus: Most established player, in wide use, new updates. Works decently well on my current blog.
IntenseDebate: Owned by the guys who built WordPress, so lots of hope for future development, though enough complaints on current stability to give me pause.
JS-Kit Echo: Newest entrant, loaded with interesting functionality and a clean UI, though this one is a “premium” (you pay) plugin.

Disqus

From my incredibly unscientific scanning of the Web, armed with patented Mark I Eyeballs, Disqus is the “grandpa” of the crowd, having launched first. It offers very easy integration with WordPress, a nice moderation screen (both in WP dashboard and external), and a fantastic sidebar. I use it on my Social Mallard blog and have seen it in heavy rotation throughout the blogosphere, though that may reflect their early entrance into the market.

The Disqus team launched a recent update (August 25, 2009), effectively splitting the service into two parts: Disqus Comments, the comment management system for bloggers, and Disqus Profile, a separate comment management system just for commenters.

IntenseDebate

A relatively recent (one year ago) acquisition by the team at Automattic, I’ve been hesitant to try it on my blogs due to some bloggers having significant challenges with it (example) To be fair though, I’ve come across a lot of bloggers who love it and prefer it over Disqus. To each their own.

The fact that ID is now run by the guys at Automattic inspires a bit of confidence, as they put out some world class products.

See the complete feature list.

Echo (or JS-Kit Echo)
The new kid on the blog, Echo looks to be off to a promising start. One nice upside is CommentLuv now works with Echo.

See the complete feature list – it’s fairly exhaustive.

A big difference between Echo and the others? Echo isn’t free – $12 a month for the “Live” version, and I can’t locate a totally free option.

Oh I love clean WordPress themes

Kevin — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 02:49:02 +0000

After my recent post questioning the future of free, quality themes for WordPress, I decided to re-familiarize myself with what’s available and also discover a theme or two for use on an upcoming side project.

Ask and ye shall receive, it seems. A couple days ago Weblog Tools Collection posted one of their common theme release updates, and this one included “Empty Canvas” from Rubiqube.

I’m tiring a bit on complex theme frameworks, and love the idea of a nice, basic canvas with clean typography to draw a new design on. What I also like about Empty Canvas is I can see myself converting my personal blog (now on Thesis) over to it as is, perhaps with a tweak or two in the header – it’s just refreshing to look at, and under the covers it has none of the complexity (and, of course, none of the admin features) of some of the more popular premium themes on the market today.

I’m looking forward to trying out Empty Canvas on any upcoming project – I’ll share here how it turns out.

Are free WordPress themes a dying breed?

Kevin — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:21:28 +0000

To paraphrase a Mony Python sketch “We’re not quite dead yet!” But some days it sure seems that way.

A couple years back, the idea of “premium” themes for WordPress was still relatively new, and it seemed like most of the truly creative work around WordPress themes was published free. A few premium – read: for pay – themes were around in various forms, but they didn’t dominate the conversation. Personally I obsessed with forever-in-beta K2, and hacked that thing to oblivion on my personal blog at least a dozen different ways.

Then Thesis* came along (*no affiliate links here), and the WordPress world was never the same. While others were first out the gate, once Brian and Chris showcased how much money was to be had via a strong premium theme and a rocking affiliate program, the flood was on.

Premium theme vendors are now so common, and their products so commonplace, that it’s as if a light switch was thrown on the WordPress community and it became the norm for self-hosted WordPress users to pay for their themes. (If you host on WordPress.com, you may not have even noticed)

For theme developers the shift to premium was obvious – why invest a huge amount of work in a free theme (except as a traffic hook to upsell to your premium version, of course) if you could spend that time building something you’d actually get paid, potentially handsomely, for? It’s hard to argue with that line of thinking – many premium themes obviously reflect huge amounts of work by the designers and developers, and if there is a way for them to be compensated for it, why not give it a shot?

It’s also hard to argue, to my eye, that the quality of WordPress themes (free and premium) in aggregate hasn’t improved dramatically in the past few years. I firmly believe a large part of that is due to very talented designers investing their efforts into premium themes.

And many premium themes are just stellar, either in design or code – I’m obviously a big fan of Thesis, have built sites on StudioPress (great for magazine/community sites), and am furiously brainstorming some excuse to build a video-based site using something from Press75. I recommend premium themes continually.

But with all the focus on premium, I realized I’ve lost touch with the state and quality of free WordPress themes. Turning to Smashing Magazine, purveyor of great mega lists such as this, I found: 100 Amazing Free WordPress Themes for 2009.

There are some fantastic themes in there, but it’s an open question as to how many of those are recently developed, or will continue to be updated as WordPress evolves.

The natural follow on question, for me at least:

Is there is a viable future for truly high quality, professional yet FREE themes or will premium become the dominant theme model in the WordPress community’s future? I’d love your thoughts.

A/B Testing with WordPress (h/t Carsonified)

Kevin — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 16:16:22 +0000

Every now and then you come across something so ridiculously useful, you just have to share it. So it goes with this great video on how to do A/B Testing using WordPress from the team at Carsonified. Check out the original post for some great links and more information.

How to do A/B Testing with WordPress from Carsonified on Vimeo.

On Thesis Customizations

Kevin — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 06:21:45 +0000

Some days you just feel the love…

When I built the Social Mallard site I was determined to both use the Thesis theme, and still make it reflect my own brand. Fortunately some great folks at ThesisThemes.com are starting to build skins for Thesis, so I used one as the basis for the site design, and then added my own flourishes (for example, look at the variable “sub header image” of ducks on the home page vs Services page vs blog or the RSS/email icons floating off to the top left).

If you’re using, or planning to use, Thesis for your own blog and want design tweaks – large or small – consider sending me a note. In addition to providing blog content and general strategy, I love working with WordPress themes and Thesis in particular, and would be happy to help make your blog reflect your unique “you.”

I’m a small shop, just starting out, so my client list isn’t vast (here is a recent site I built – LalaTravels.com, hip mom travel blog plus landing pages using Thesis, with an iWeb migration thrown in to boot). But I’m passionate about customer service, charge very reasonable rates, and love working with interesting people and projects. I think you’ll find working with Social Mallard on your Thesis-based blog well worth it.

Creating a Simple Mac Workflow for Posting Blog Images

Kevin — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 19:57:55 +0000

Blogs look better with nice in-post images, just admit it. Yes, content is king, but pure text without some eye candy is just plain boring. Continually adding images though, from a blogger’s perspective, can be a real pain, from finding them to editing to ensuring fit and finish. To keep things simple, here is my workflow:

1. Find the Image
If you have an expense account and are looking for solid rights to generally high quality images, go over to www.istockphoto.com and search to your heart’s delight. There are some wonderful images for incredibly reasonably prices. However, thanks to Flickr’s fantastic use of Creative Commons, and the Advanced Search feature (check the CC search option towards the bottom), finding legally usable, high quality, and relevant imagery for your everyday blog posts can be fast and easy.

Just *always* remember to check the type of CC license, and ensure you provide proper attribution to give the photography credit for their work.

For screen caps and shots, the easiest tool I’ve found is Grab, which comes with OSX (search for it in Spotlight). Add this handy utility to your Dock.

2. Understand Your Layout
Figure out how wide your main blog column is, so you know the max image width. An easy and fast way to do this is by using the Firebug extension for Firefox. Right click somewhere over some text in one your blog posts, select Inspect Element, and then look at the bottom right window. Select Layout, and look at the first number (e.g. 520 x 190) in the center box. That *should* be the pixel width of your main blog content column. Your mileage may vary.

3. Use ImageWell Templates for fast editing
I highly recommend ImageWell for fast image editing on a Mac (and no, that’s not an affiliate link). It may cost $20 or so, but it’s well worth it and saves you from trying to string something together with iPhoto or firing up that beastly overkill known as PhotoShop. Open ImageWell, drag your saved image into its window, click “edit” and resize/crop the image to your desired width.

If you use full column width images on every post – which makes things much easier by obviating the need for text wrap, IMO – you only need to do this once by hand in ImageWell. Set up the max width, ad a border if you like, then select “Add Template” and name it. From then on, every time you edit a photo in ImageWell, just select “File > Templates > yourtemplatename” and done. Your image will be resized, border applied, etc.

4. Upload and enjoy!
You can either use the handy “Send To” feature in ImageWell to FTP the image directly to your blog’s content folder, or use something like WordPress’ image gallery upload feature to get the image where you need it.

Once you get the hang of it, the longest part of the process will be fretting over which image to actually use. The download/edit/upload process should take mere seconds, and you’re on your way to blogging bliss. Good luck!

Photo within the screen shot is by vernhart on Flickr via CC License. Screenshot itself taken of ImageWell during a sample editing process.

4 design steps to make your Thesis blog unique

Kevin — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 17:11:11 +0000

Does your blog have more than a passive resemblance to this? If so, you’re not alone.

You’re a Thesis Theme for WordPress user, which is great. I love Thesis, use it for most of my blogging efforts, including this site. I recommend it often, including for a recent client project. Judging by the thousands of Thesis-based sites that seem to exist and the hefty revenues the creators are generating, so do many other consultants. Its ubiquity attests to its quality and utility, however it also leads to a depressing, and increasing, sameness in blog design.

Why? Because Thesis has several distinctive default design features, which most bloggers don’t see fit to modify. For the most part, you can identify a blog built using Thesis within seconds thanks to these tells: default fonts, menu bar, RSS button, comment brackets, and of course, the famous multimedia box. Spend enough time visiting blogs, and you’re likely to start to thinking some higher blog authority has approved one basic design standard which all bloggers must adhere to.

In a world where content is king and most readers interact with your blog via RSS anyway, is that a bad thing? Yes, because first impressions still matter, and showing you took the time to tweak and customize your blog design, even in small ways starting from a common base, shows pride in your product (your content, personal brand, etc).

So…dare to be different.

Take all the wonderfulness of the Thesis Theme and make it your own. Beyond the standard design suggestions – header graphics, page image/pattern, color changes, and so on – make sure you change in some way, ANY way, these four classic “tells”:

1. Default Fonts
Just change them, to anything really. Go sans serif for the body font, change up the default sizes, live it up, be crazy. I prefer using header graphics, which eliminates the default serif header font, one of the most common “tells” of Thesis fonts, but the in-post headline and body fonts also should be looked at. Also consider changing up the line space in the sidebars for an even bolder departure.

2. Menu Bar
This is perhaps the most distinctive and yet least modified (by users) design element of Thesis. Let’s face it, it looks good and is pretty damn useful, which is why you see it everywhere. Keep the basic functionality, by all means, but change up the design some. Kristarella has a nice tutorial to get you started. Or grab Firebug, hit Inspect Element on this blog or some of the wonderfully designed Thesis menus (such as here, here, here, or here).

3. “Subscribe RSS”
It’s easy and a one-click solution to displaying your RSS feed, again why you’ll see it live on unchanged for so many Thesis-based blogs. At a minimum, try modifying the wording somewhat, or drop it altogether and move your subscription call-to-action to the sidebar or elsewhere. Use the built-in Subscribe widget or all-in-on widgets like Add to Any.

4. The Multimedia Box
The multimedia box is fantastically useful and relatively unique among WordPress themes – the blessing and the curse of this feature. The blessing is in its utility: include a page-specific promo video, a rotating ad series, beautiful photos to liven up your site, or even custom code of your own. The curse is in its ubiquity – it’s so damn useful that huge numbers* of Thesis users keep it, making it an instantly recognizable and hence repetitive design element.

It’s so damn useful, it’s become a bit boring.

So what are your options? You can just drop it by selecting “do not show box” under the Multimedia Box section of Design Options. This leaves you with the standard sidebar(s). Alternatively, make it your own by changing up the CSS and image sizes and using the rotating images option or limit it only to specific pages (for example, where you’d like to promote a particularly relevant video or ad).

*based on my unscientific angst-fueled observations of a bunch of blogs

One relatively new option is trying out a Thesis skin, which are appearing in increasing numbers and quality. This blog uses my own variation on the Fresh Company skin from ThesisThemes.com, which does some interesting things with the header other design elements. Even then, it’s worth taking a few minutes to change up the defaults to give the skin your own personal style.

The beauty of Thesis lies in its flexibility and simplicity for the average blogger – you have a wealth of design options right there with not a line of code in sight. Just consider playing with those defaults, or spending some quality time in the custom.css file to truly make your blog design your own.