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Social Proof: Increase subscribers to your blog by displaying your feed stats

Last night I attended MashBash Tel Aviv, an intimate gathering of Mashable’s Adam Hirsch and 800 of his closest friends from the Israeli hi-tech industry. In between having fun and getting served free drinks for three hours, I managed to learn something new. I learned about “social proof.”

Social what?

I met a guy at the event who I “knew” through twitter. Harry runs a snazzy new website about Jerusalem attractions and other stuff. We were discussing the right steps to take to increase blog traffic, and how he’s managed to get really decent traffic to his site in a relatively short period of time. He mentioned one tip that I had never heard before in all my blogging years, and it struck me as so simple yet so smart.

Social Proof.

Harry said that once you have at least 50 RSS subscribers, you should display the number of subscribers on your blog to encourage others to subscribe as well. The reason is that people like to try out things that lots of other people like. Think of a restaurant or cafe – if you’re walking down a street of cafes, would you rather go into the empty cafe, or the one overflowing with patrons? When lots of people patronize something, by showing up, subscribing, or in other ways, it encourages others to join as well.

(Harry learned this tip from Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind Course, which actually sounds like it might be worth the investment from what he says.)

So take a look over to your right here. See that little feed reader thingy? As you can see, WordPress Garage has 781 subscribers. We’re a really cool crowd, having lots of fun. Doesn’t that make you want to subscribe too?

You can subscribe to the feed, or via email in the sidebar.

Posted in Tips | Tags: feeds, RSS | 2 Comments »

I want a WordPress plugin to…

So you’ve got a shiny new WordPress blog, and you really want to add a cool feature that either demands programming the feature into your site, or even better, finding the perfect plugin so that you can add the feature with a few clicks.

The conventional way of finding plugins is to either search the WordPress plugin directory, or to do a search. Well, here’s a new way that is actually really smart and useful – visit this site: I want a WordPress Plugin to … 450+ solutions.

At the top of the page, there is a hyperlinked list of related features for plugins, like Related Authors, Admin, Stats, Posts, Tags, etc.

You click on one of those links, and it takes you to a list of plugins that can help you achieve that feature. So for example, if I click on Calendars, I get a list of 4 plugins that can help me add a calendar to my WordPress blog. I personally know that there are many more calendar-related plugins for adding calendars to your blog, but you can submit more plugins for them to add to the list.

I think the idea behind this site is good, but it really needs a lot of community contribution in order to make it more complete.

I want a WordPress Plugin to … 450+ solutions

Posted in Plugins, Themes | Tags: miscellaneous | 4 Comments »

WordPress Garage comments feed fixed

Ryan Hellyer just pointed out that the comments feed here at WordPress Garage was not working, and apparently hasn’t been working since the end of April. I wonder if it had to do with upgrading to 2.5…

In any case, I’ve fixed the problem and it’s working now, so you can subscribe to it if you like at http://feeds.feedburner.com/WordpressgarageComments.

Thanks as always for reading!

Posted in Shorties | Tags: miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

Get to know every line of your comments.php WordPress theme file

There is one WordPress theme file that I almost never touch when working on a theme: comments.php. I usually style WordPress comments via the CSS sheet, and that’s that.

Well, there’s a lot you can do to customize and extend WordPress comments if you just know how. Nettuts has published a comprehensive tutorial on how the comments.php file works, and what every line of code does. The tutorial also explains how to add extra goodies to your comments, like Gravatars, comment numbers, comment links, alternating colors (which we’ve discussed here), displaying the HTML tags users can use in the comments text box, and displaying a link to the comments RSS feed. The tutorial did not discuss how to give each comment its own link, a tip that I find particularly handy for referring to specific comments.

Check out this tutorial if you want to strengthen your relationship with your WordPress comments.

Unraveling the Secrets of WordPress’ Comments.php File

Posted in Tips | Tags: comments | 2 Comments »

When a WordPress plugin for foreclosures is released, you know it’s a recession

I always think I’ve seen everything, until something even crazier comes along. Foreclosure.com, a site that lists nationwide foreclosure data, has released a WordPress plugin that adds foreclosure listings to their Web sites.

The WordPress Foreclosure Listings Plugin delivers a complete real estate search and navigation environment quickly and easily by querying the Foreclosure.com database in real-time. Once a partner activates the program, the plugin will automatically create a WordPress page and a search widget.

This has got to be one of the most depressing plugins in existence. Profiting from people who are getting kicked out of their homes seems cruel. We know banks do it, but banks are cruel so it suits them.

When the vultures hover like this, it makes me think that maybe we are heading towards a recession, and maybe it really has already hit the US. Scary.

Posted in Plugins | Tags: silly stuff | 2 Comments »

Automatic thumbnail image resizing options

I manage a few blogs that use thumbnail images to spruce up the appearance of the site, and make it more enjoyable for readers. As we’ve discussed here in the past, an efficient method for adding thumbnails to your blog is with custom fields. But finding the right image, resizing it (ugh), uploading, etc., is such a pain in the neck that I often find myself not blogging because I can’t face it. On one of my blogs, I’ve just decided to post without the images, since I know it’s the only way I’ll ever publish anything.

So imagine my delight when I found the following two fantastic solutions: Justin Tadlock’s brilliant Get the Image WordPress plugin and Darren Hoyt’s TimThumb PHP Script. Both the plugin and the script take most of the annoying work out of inserting thumbnail images in your blog.

Justin Tadlock’s Get the Image plugin

This plugin works in three steps (as explained on Tadlock’s blog):

1. It activates a script that gets an image either by custom field input or post attachment.
2. Then it tells the script what the default image size should be. It tells the script to look for the WordPress-generated thumbnail if there are no custom field images found. You can use the values “thumbnail,” “medium,” or “full” for this (those are three image sizes WordPress generates).
3. If there are no images found, the script displays a default image found at “/wp-content/my-image.jpg.”

As Justin says, this has a lot of potential applications – you can use to for feature images, for displaying images in your sidebar, etc. He even offers to help users implement the plugin on their blogs if they ask in his forums.

Darren Hoyt’s Tim Thumb PHP Script

Hoyt originally created this script for use in his Mimbo Pro premium WordPress theme. To use it, you need to complete two steps:

1. Copy the source code into a new document called ‘timthumb.php’ and place it in a folder on your site (ex: /scripts/).
2. Call the source code from the place in your theme files where you want the resized image to appear as follows:
   <img src="/scripts/timthumb.php?src=/images/whatever.jpg&h=150&w=150&zc=1" alt="" />

This script is more complicated than Tadlock’s plugin, and when I tried it I couldn’t get it to work. But many people are happily using it in their themes.

Talk about filling a need. If you want to include thumbnail images on your blog without the headache, this plugin or script is a must.

Get The Image WordPress Plugin

TimThumb PHP Script

Posted in Plugins | Tags: custom fields, Images, PHP | 6 Comments »