The challenge is coordinating all of the places that we appear on the web. Previously we discussed possible ways to combine your blog with facebook. You could also use add the ShowYourself Widget to your blog sidebar, which allows you to collect and display your online identities on various community sites in one place. Here’s a sample:
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
The WordPress OpenID plugin lets visitors to a Wordpress blog quickly register, login, and leave comments using their OpenID Identity. Says it’s designed for WP 2.0.3 to 2.1, but may work with 2.3.
The folks at Automattic have launched their WordPress Publisher Blog, which will:
“cover features that are often overlooked, we’ll highlight plugins that extend WordPress functionality, and we’ll showcase interesting sites being built with WordPress.”
So far the blog has three posts (one of which is sticky – which plugin are you using Raanan?). It’s hard to tell from three posts, but it seems like this blog aims to achieve what a lot of us WordPress bloggers are already doing.
So, are we going to become redundant, or will the WordPress Publisher Blog just join the club? It seems that this is another move by Automattic to take control of the WordPress user community, similar to their creation of the WordPress plugin directory. With the plugin directory, WordPress became the hub for the plugin community, and now they want news and reports on WordPress to come from them too. Makes sense, and I guess they could catch up pretty quickly since they are WordPress.
Anyways, it will be interesting to see how their blog pans out. If they do a good job, I think there might not be much of a point in continuing to invest time and energy in this kind of blog.
As many of you may know, writing a blog on a regular basis can be challenging. On the one hand, the stats and feed statistics tell you that people are reading, but on the other hand, you can sometimes feel like you’re shouting out into the darkness, and you’re not sure that anyone is really listening.
Commenters and people who write to say thank you help me know that you are indeed out there reading. So first of all, thank you to my commenters, and a special thanks to Ryan Hellyer, who is by far the most prolific commenter on this site. Getting feedback on posts helps me keep going, because I know that someone is paying attention, and that it’s helping them.
Also, every once in a while I get a letter via the site’s contact form thanking me for the blog. I just got a great letter from a guy who told me he spent two hours (!) scrolling through and reading each of my posts! He says he found the site via StumbleUpon, so thank you to those of you who felt posts here were Stumble-worthy, and are helping others find this blog. Thanks Mike!
Why I write WordPressGarage.com
I write this blog for two reasons: 1. To help me and my company keep track of the many WordPress developments so that we can hopefully build the best WordPress sites and blogs possible for our clients; 2. To give back to the WordPress community. I still haven’t written any plugins, but I hope that this blog can be my contribution to the vibrant WordPress Open Source community.
The content on this site is free, as it should be. But if you want to compensate me in some way, just leave a comment, or write to me to tell me what you think. Getting concrete feedback is the best way to help me keep going. Basically what I’m saying is: a simple thank you is worth a million!
So thank you all for reading, and I hope that this blog will continue to grow and help WordPress users around the world!
Miriam
About two weeks ago, I wrote about a tip I came across at Simply Basic about how to add a favicon to your WordPress admin by adding a snippet of code to wp-admin/admin-header.php. As you probably have noticed, the WordPress admin doesn’t display a favicon on the address bar, which can be a bit inconvenient when you are working with many open tabs, and you want to quickly see which is which. But hacking the admin means you need to remember to add the code again every time you upgrade. I hinted that a WordPress plugin would be in order here to avoid that inconvenience.
Will, John at Simply Basic took the hint and created the Admin Favicon WordPress plugin that allows you to easily place the favicon of your choice in the WordPress admin!
Thanks John! People like you are what makes WordPress so great.
Admin Favicon Wordpress Plugin
Anthology of Ideas shares his method for creating a horizontal drop-down menu for categories, involving the use of CSS and Javascript.
Displaying WordPress categories in a horizontal dropdown menu
You may need to have “tinyurl” permalinks for your WordPress blog posts. One option is to go to tinyurl.com and create each permalink one-by-one. This is fine if you don’t need to create too many, but can get cumbersome when you need tens or hundreds of them.
Michael Clark explains how he used Apache’s rewrite rules with WordPress’ Post ID # to create what he calls “GoTo” URLs.
Creating a “GoTo” URL For Your WordPress-Powered Site
Weblog Tools Collection has published a good, concise guide on setting up permalinks on your WordPress blog. The tips include various permalink options, and how to set up a .htaccess file if you don’t have one.
If your WordPress blog isn’t accepting trackbacks or sending pings to other blogs, you may need to open it up so that it can talk to other servers.
Check out Donncha’s explanation of what to look for, and how to fix the problem if it exists.
Ping. The ping heard across the world
Last Thursday, I realized that this blog was being scraped. I’m sure it was being scraped before, but I never really wanted to spend time looking into it. A blog takes so much time to write and manage, that I didn’t want to add another task to my blogging plate.
But now that I have seen the sploggers in action, I realize how truly irritating and damaging sploggers are. But I guess that’s the case with all theft.
Anyways, I turned to you, my readers, to get your advice, and I got some amazing tips from the people that responded. I also did a little extra searching around, plus Darren Hoyt wrote a post with some good links in it, so here’s a summary of 10 ways to stop sploggers.
I just noticed that a few of the pages visited were mywords.info/… rather than teleclick.ca/… If the owner of MyWords hadn’t been stupid enough to keep my StatCounter code on his copy of the site, I might not have found out about it for months.
The surest way to locate mirrors of your website, however, is simply to invest a few minutes a week Googleing selections of your own content and checking for ripoffs. You’ll likely find plenty of stolen content from your sites if they’re popular enough, and can ask the re-publishers to remove it, or give you proper credit, depending on your policy.
Even with all the steps above, I suspect that the sploggers will always retain the upper hand and we will never be able to completely stop them, or any of the other dark and sleazy types lurking on the web. If we could visualize the web, I bet the dark part takes up the majority of the web, and is probably growing faster too since it’s so much easier to crank out stolen or lowest-common-denominator content than good, useful, high-quality content.
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