Archive for March, 2007

Beginning to Blog: Part 1 – What blog package should I use?

March 9, 2007 | Comments (0) | Filed under: Blogging

Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of friends of mine asking me about just what it takes to get into running and writing their own blog. Ultimately, my response usually varies based on their technical skill and their ability. While I might take for granted a system like WordPress and my ability to get it up and running, a lot of people might not have the same luxury when it comes to their own setup.

What I thought I would do is start up a reoccurring topic here on Bookmark Bliss entitled “Beginning to Blog” where we can take a look at the different aspects to consider when you finally take the plunge and get into the game. In this inaugural issue, entitled “Part 1 – What blog package should I use?“, we’ll take a look at a few of the options available out there and the pros and cons of using them for your own blog.

The first thing you need to consider is just what tool or package you want to use to power your blog. There are a ton of options out there, and they run the gauntlet from free to commercially licensed. They also come in various degrees of difficulty from simply registering for an account to requiring programming and database knowledge.

The choice you make in each case depends largely on two things. Your technical knowledge, which is alleviated a bit by the tools provided by your web host (more on that later), and the level of flexibility you require in your final package. The two sort of go hand in hand in that as you increase the flexibility, the technical knowledge requirements tend to increase as well. If you are using a web host that provides you with PHP and MySQL support, then some of the technical issues involved in setting these up may be alleviated. Make sure you keep that in mind when deciding where you want to host your blog.

The Blogging Tools

Blogger.com (Cost: Free, Estimated Time to Launch: 5-15 mins)

Blogger.com is the easiest option for anyone setting up a new blog. Blogger is a hosted solution, which means you register for an account and pick a blog name and you are up and running in no time. It’s free, and it’s 100% hosted by their system, so there’s no need for hosting space of your own, and no technical knowledge required. If you choose to later host the blog yourself, Blogger allows you to do so by using their system to update your external blog. Definitely a good choice for any beginner, and used by millions of users already. In the long term, many bloggers eventually move away from Blogger as they require more functionality that is not available. Many professional bloggers turn to packages with more prestige (i.e. not made for beginners) and more customizability as their readership increases.

WordPress (Cost: Free, Estimated Time to Launch: 10-30 mins)

WordPress comes in two different varieties, hosted at WordPress.com and self installed at WordPress.org, both of which are free. Their system is more complicated than Blogger.com, but fairly straight forward to install with a little bit of technical knowledge. The hosted version, like Blogger, is limited in the flexibility available for customization. The standalone system though, is completely open source and customizable in every way possible, assuming you know a little PHP programming. The best thing about WordPress is its huge community of users who have written thousands of plugins (add-ons to customize your blogs functionality) that are easy to install and may save you from having to program anything to achieve the setup you are looking for.

LiveJournal (Cost: Free to get an account, Estimated Time to Launch: 30 mins)

LiveJournal is a hosted solution for people looking for a Blogger alternative with low costs. It is relatively easy to get up and running with your blog but as with other hosted solutions offers very little in customization when compared to the self install packages. Overall, LiveJournal provides more functionality and more flexibility then Blogger, but much less when compared with WordPress or MoveableType. A decent mid-range package for anyone wanting a little more complexity in their blogging software.

TypePad (Cost: $49.50/y - $149.50/y, Estimated Time to Launch: 10 – 30 mins)

TypePad is another hosted solution but this time it comes with a price tag attached. Ranging from $49.50 – $149.50 per year (depending on the option you choose) it may be a bit expensive for someone who isn’t sure they are in to blog for the long term. The TypePad system does feature a host of tools that make it a more powerful solution than Blogger, but no more powerful then WordPress, which is completely free. If you want to try something a little different though, with some different features then your standard Blog setup, you might want to give this a try. For most people it is not worth the associated costs.

MoveableType (Cost: $49.95/y – $279.95/y, Estimated Time to Launch: 2 hours)

MoveableType is another solution by the same company that brought you TypePad. It is a similar solution, however this one comes in the installable variety that allows for more flexibility. Still carrying a hefty price tag, this solution may be a bit out of reach for your average blogger. Also, MoveableType is a much more complicated solution requiring more tech knowledge to install and configure correctly.

Drupal (Cost: Free, Estimated Time to Launch: 30-45 mins)

If you want a solution that offers you the most flexibility as well as the largest opportunity to build a full featured website in addition to the blog, then Drupal is what you are looking for. Drupal is less of a blogging package and more of a content management system complete with a huge community of support to back it up. The Drupal package comes ready for blogging right out of the gate, and also allows you to develop a full website including forums, member profiles, security systems, and much more. Drupal is a bit more difficult to install and configure, and most likely requires some technical ability to custom tweak the tools to exactly fit your specifications. If you want a powerful solution that is capable of doing anything you can think of, Drupal is a perfect choice.

Others

There are several other solutions available, but really, these 5 cover the gauntlet for choices and pricing options. If you want more information, on other choices, you can try out ExpressionEngine, TextPattern, Joomla, Windows Live Spaces, or B2Evolution. Each of these offers similar services to the blog packages above, with slight variations.

Hopefully this article has given you a taste of what options are out there for an aspiring blogger. If you are new, start easy with a system like Blogger and as you progress in skill try others like WordPress or Drupal. As I mentioned in our introduction, Bookmark Bliss uses WordPress, and at this time we could not be happier with the functionality.

Stay tuned for more posts in our Beginning to Blog series as we take a look at many of the other aspects of starting your own blog.

WordPress: Plugin Lineup Changes

March 8, 2007 | Comments (2) | Filed under: Blogging

Ever since our initial install of 15 WordPress Plugins we’ve had to make a few changes. The first change is we dropped the Gregarious plugin in exchange for two separate plugins that accomplish virtually the same goal. While Gregarious has a lot of potential, it was extremely buggy and caused our site to lag or crash quite a bit. It also didn’t show our Digg button even after our articles were submitted. So, we’ve replaced this plugin with two different plugins:

Digg It

The Digg It Plugin is about as simple as they come. Basically, it checks Digg’s website to see if your article has been submitted, and if it has, it displays the standard digg button to encourage readers to digg your post. This was the biggest functionality we were looking to get out of Gregarious but unfortunately couldn’t get it working.

Share This

The Share This Plugin provides the other functionality now missing from our site due to Gregarious’ departure. Share This allows visitors of our site to quickly submit our posts to a dozen different social bookmarking websites. It provides a convenient AJAX based menu that is now available at the bottom of every Bookmark Bliss post.

As we continue to tweak with our site layout and design, more plugins should make it in while others are forced to walk the WordPress plank never to be seen from again. If anyone has any suggestions on other plugins we might want to try, let us know. We’re willing to try anything….once….

WordPress: How to separate comments from pingbacks

March 7, 2007 | Comments (4) | Filed under: Tutorials

As a fairly recent newcomer to WordPress, I’ve always been confused about their decision to inter-mix regular comments (ie. from visitors to your site) and pingbacks (ie. automated comments indicating someone has linked you post). If you’ve spent any time visiting WordPress blogs, you’re guaranteed to have come across a comment post like this one:

11. links for 2007-03-07 Â« HAPHT @ March 07, 2007 at 2:24 pm

[â€¦] Â» 50 sources for web design inspiration by Bookmark Bliss (tags: web-design) [â€¦]

These automated pingback posts are great, since they give you an indication of just how far your articles have spread and which sites are interested in your content. At the same time though, I find they seriously interrupt the flow of your comments and on a site that gets a lot of pingbacks, can almost make it impossible to follow a comment thread consistently.

Since this blog is fairly new, I thought I would figure out how to separate the pingbacks from the regular comments and place them under two different headings. As it turns out, it’s fairly easy to do with a few modifications to your theme and no changes to the core WordPress files. Here is what you need to do:

First, open up the comments.php file for your template. Every theme is a little different, but there are commonalities to each that should be consistent. Inside your file, you should be able to find a line that reads:

<?php if ($comments) : ?>

This line is the start of the comments section of your post. Immediately underneath this line, we want to step through our comments and split them into two sections. There are a variety of ways you can do this, but here is how I did it.

<?php
            $pingBacks = array( );
            $commentList = array( );

            foreach( $comments as $comment ) {
                 if( get_comment_type( ) == “pingback” ) {
                      array_push( $pingBacks, $comment );
                } else {
                     array_push( $commentList, $comment );
                }
           }
?>

The only new piece of code you might not be familiar with here is the get_comment_type( ) call. This call simply checks the current comment and returns whether or not it is a comment or pingback. Once you have the two sets of comments separated, all that’s left is to print them both out in whatever style you choose. For an example, this is how we do it on our site:

<?php foreach ($commentList as $comment) : ?>
   <div id=”comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>”>
       <h4>
           <img src=”images/user_comment.png” class=”contentimage” />

          <?php comment_author_link() ?> on
          <?php comment_date(‘F d, Y’) ?> at
          <?php comment_time() ?>

          <p><?php comment_text() ?></p>

      </h4>
   </div>

<?php endforeach; ?>

<?php foreach ($pingBacks as $comment) : ?>
   <div id=”comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>”>
       <h4>
           <img src=”images/user_comment.png” class=”contentimage” />

          <?php comment_author_link() ?> on
          <?php comment_date(‘F d, Y’) ?> at
          <?php comment_time() ?>

      </h4>
   </div>
<?php endforeach; ?>

All of the above code is standard for most WordPress themes. It is modified slightly to work with the template at Bookmark Bliss, but you can easily make changes to match your own. Once you’ve made these additions, you’re set! If your interested in seeing an example of these changes in action, check out our 50 Sources for Web Design Inspiration post and look at the responses section at the bottom of the page.

Not the most elegant solution by a long shot, but it gets the job done nonetheless. If you have any questions or suggestions on this example, let us know.

Alexa bias and the need for alternatives

March 7, 2007 | Comments (2) | Filed under: Ranking

If you’re just starting out in the world of online publishing, you may not yet even know what Alexa is. Alexa.com is Amazon Inc.’s resource for measuring web site popularity and ranking amongst other sites and it currently enjoys a position of status when it comes to the web development community. Alexa’s system provides anyone who’s interested with a breakdown of site traffic as well as an overall ranking amongst all other sites. It also generates a detailed forecast that lets you see whether the site is on an upward or downward trend.

Sounds great doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, it sounds great but actually isn’t. The problem with Alexa is fairly substantial and has the potential to greatly impact anyone who is new to online business. The bottom line is, Alexa is biased. In order for a site to receive traffic that is counted with Alexa, it must be visited by someone using a web browser equipped with the “Alexa Toolbar.” This is great if your community happens to be users of Internet Explorer because it’s currently the only web browser capable of installing the toolbar. Even if your users are primarily visiting with IE, there is a good chance many of them have never even heard of Alexa, let alone taken the time to seek out and install the toolbar. What this means is that even if your site is getting a ton of daily traffic, to Alexa you might be nothing but a flake of snow in the arctic.

It’s because of the detail Alexa provides, and the fact that it became sort of a defacto standard with its timing to market, that it currently plays a fairly large part in the online marketplace. Many online advertising firms place a lot of weight on Alexa rankings to determine, not only a sites acceptance into their program, but also to set a base rate for advertising pricing.

As a result, anyone who understands Alexa’s role is basically forced to install the toolbar and run Internet explorer just to ensure their site gets ranked. This biases the results even more. Obviously, web developers and publisher’s websites are going to rank disproportionately higher then other sites simply due to the fact that they are intentionally trying to build Alexa rank while other sites are not.

Even the Alexa team itself acknowledges these issues. From their FAQ:

â€¦the Alexa user base is only a sample of the Internet population, and sites with relatively low traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa due to the statistical limitations of the sample. Alexa’s data come from a large sample of several million Alexa Toolbar users; however, this is not large enough to accurately determine the rankings of sites with fewer than roughly 1,000 total monthly visitors. Generally, Traffic Rankings of 100,000+ should be regarded as not reliable because the amount of data we receive is not statistically significant. Conversely, the more traffic a site receives (the closer it gets to the number 1 position), the more reliable its Traffic Ranking becomes.

Recently, Google engineers Matt Cutts and Peter Norvig estimated a webmaster skew based on the traffic of each other’s respective blogs. In summary:

The data would be good if it truly represented a random sample of Internet users, but in fact it only represents those who have installed the Alexa toolbar, and that sample is not random.

The samples must be sophisticated enough to know how to install the toolbar, and they must have some reason to want it. It turns out that the toolbar tells you things about web sites, so it is useful to people in the SEO industry, so it overrepresents those people.

In the end, it is obvious that while Alexa is a stop-gap measure, it is in serious need of an overhaul or some aggressive competition. Until it receives such attention, I think many advertisers and developers should take its results with a grain of salt.

The ultimate solution would be for sites like Yahoo, Google, or MSN to release more comprehensive details on site access statistics. Each of these giants could easily report this information, especially Google who already tracks it via its page rank tools. In addition to these sites, there are other emerging sites with potential to better gauge traffic. Sites like StumbleUpon, which allow users to randomly browse sites and leave reviews, are probably already tracking statistics through their own toolbars. Other direct competition, such as Compete is already putting the pieces in place to directly, well, compete for Alexa’s market share.

The need is there, we just need someone to step up and take some ground away from Alexa. In the meantime, lets hope publishers and advertisers alike start placing less emphasis on Alexa rankings and start giving the little guys a better chance of coming in off the bench.

Website Review: JohnChow.com

March 6, 2007 | Comments (3) | Filed under: Reviews

For quite some time now, JohnChow.com has been testing a sort of social experiment within his blogging community in an attempt to see if he can improve his chances to make money online. His site, subtitled “The Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Mogul,” runs a series of posts with the headline: Review My Blog which has already reached installment 32. What’s the idea behind it? Well, it’s basically a mafia style “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” scenario. Anyone who follows a few simple rules will have their blog prominently featured on John’s very popular blog and all you need to do to get that link is send one right back to his site.

While I’m sure by now you’re thinking, wow, that’s a great deal for me and it really is. A link from his pagerank 4 blog is guaranteed to send you traffic, at least for the day or so it remains on his front page. At the same time though, it’s a great deal for John Chow as well. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Technorati all use site links as a measure of the significance of a website. So, even though your site might not be the largest out there, no press is bad press when it comes to linking.

For those of you unfamiliar with JohnChow.com, it’s a little hard to explain the type of site he has running. For the most part, his content focuses on the business of the web, with some derivations into areas of fine dining and hardware reviews. What I think is the most refreshing aspect of his site, coming from a reader attempting to build his own online business, is his very candid posts. From reading his site I get the impression that he has a genuine interest in spreading whatever knowledge he has with his entire community. While other blogs might hint at ideas and techniques for making money, John consistently describes his ideas and lays them out for others to follow. I think this aspect alone is what has helped him build such a loyal community base in just the 6 months his blog has been actively updated.

Obviously, this post serves two purposes for Bookmark Bliss. Of course, the link back from JohnChow.com is a huge factor considering our site is still basically in its infancy, but as a resource, John Chow has been instrumental in ideas and techniques that are in use in this blog as well has thousands of others. If you’re just getting started in online business, I highly recommend adding John’s site to your list of bookmarks. I guarantee you’ll find something that will help you along the way.

We recently participated in the John Chow review my blog campaign and examined the John Chow Effect on our traffic.

Bookmark Bliss: 50 sources for web design inspiration

March 6, 2007 | Comments (45) | Filed under: Web Design

When Bookmark Bliss first got started, I said that our goal was to build content that other people can use to improve their own projects. Almost every day, while I’m checking out a blog or social bookmark site like Del.icio.us or Digg, I see a post entitled something along the lines of “50 beautiful web designs” or “25 amazing wordpress templates.” As a web developer and not really a web designer, I always love these posts because they’re great inspiration for the next time I need to create my own template, theme, site, etc. Over the years I’ve managed to build up a decent bookmark list of these “inspirational” sites so I thought I would put them all in one place for other people to take advantage of as well. So, without further ado, here is my list of 50 sources for web design inspiration…A little help for us artistically challenged individuals

50+5 Bonus Sources

83 Beautiful WordPress Themes (smashing magazine)
Go Drupal
One Pixel Army
CSS Mania
Design Shack

Well, that’s it for this round. Some of these sites offer their templates for free but others charge a fee for you to use. This list is intended to help you with your “designer’s block” and give you the inspiration you need to come up with the perfect design for your next blog, community portal, social networking hub, or corporate e-commerce resource. I’d love to keep this list growing and possibly release updates on a regular basis.

Have you found this list useful? If so, show your support by subscribing to our news feed. We’ve posted several other entries in our Bookmark Bliss series that you might find interesting as well…

As always, your comments are welcome and please let us know of any sites we might have missed.

Top 15 WordPress Plugins

March 5, 2007 | Comments (19) | Filed under: Blogging

Now that our site has officially launched, I thought it would be good to give you guys an idea of just what exactly is running under the hood. For starters, Bookmark Bliss uses the latest version of WordPress (2.1.2) and runs on an Apache webserver. It also uses a wide variety of WordPress Plugins to enhance the user experience here. Some of them are visible in our posts and sidebars while others affect things behind the scenes. Here are the top 15 WordPress Plugins currently running on this blog, in alphabetical order:

Adsense-Deluxe

Adsense-Deluxe is a WordPress plugin that offers advanced customization options for inserting Google Adsense ads into your Blog. This plugin is currently used to serve all our AdSense Ads and includes many features that allow you to fine tune it to match your theme and layout. For anyone using Google Adsense on their site, this is a must have plugin.

Akismet

For anyone who intends on building a large community around their blog, spam comments are an unfortunate guaranteed effect that comes with getting more and more popular. Akismet is a plugin that checks incoming comments on your blog against their online web service to prevent spammers from posting on your site. The Akismet plugin comes installed when you download the latest version of WordPress.

CForms

CForms is a convenient package that allows you to insert a contact form into your blog posts, pages, and sidebars. You can see it in action on our contact us page. The entire plugin comes with many configuration options and allows you to build forms on many pages, including multiple forms on the same page. Powered by AJAX, it is also convenient and easy to use for visitors of your website.

Executable PHP Widget

Like the plain text widget that comes pre-installed with the Sidebar Widgets plugin, the Executable PHP Widget allows you to write your own custom PHP code and load it into your sidebar with ease. Currently, this plugin is used to show the “Top Commentators” and “Article Tag Cloud” widgets on our green and black sidebars respectively.

Feedburner Feed Replacement

Do you want FeedBurner to handle your RSS feeds on your blog? If you do, then using the Feedburner Feed Replacement plugin is the easiest way to accomplish that goal. This plugin will direct all of your feed traffic through your feedburner feed, which allows you to use their powerful tools for tracking and monitoring your feed subscriptions. Highly recommended for anyone who intends to publish to their blog regularly and build up a readership.

Google Analytics

The Google Analytics plugin is very simple, but allows you to easily incorporate Google Analytics tracking code onto every page of your blog. If you aren’t using Google Analytics, you are really missing out on one of the most powerful ways to get feedback on how your site is doing and which content is working and which is not.

Google Sitemaps

The simplest way to generate a sitemap of your content, is to use the Google Sitemap Generator plugin. For most sites, it is not always easy for Google to siphon through your content and find every single post you’ve ever made. It is much easier for you to tell Google what posts to look for. This plugin makes that job as easy as 1,2, activate…

Gregarious

Gregarious is the self proclaimed “ultimate social bookmarking plugin” and to be honest, that may not be an exaggeration. Gregarious allows your users to quickly and easily submit your posts to more than a dozen Social Bookmarking websites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. It also integrates features such as embedded Reddit and Digg buttons to make it easier for users to “Digg This” or “Reddit” your posts. You can see this plugin in action at the bottom of this post with the “Digg This” link and the “Share This” link.

MyBlogLog Widget

Ever since Yahoo bought out MyBlogLog, it seems like every site is tracking its user community via their system. The MyBlogLog Widget allows you to add a list of recent visitors to your blog. It’s an interesting addition to any site and allows you to see who has dropped by. You can see this plugin in action at the bottom of the green sidebar on our site under the heading “Recent Readers”.

Related Posts

One of the best ways to keep a new reader interested in your site on a first time visit is to easily make available a list of posts they might be interested in reading, besides the one that brought them to you. One way to do this is to use the Related Posts plugin, which compiles a list of posts similar to the one being read, and displays to the reader. We are currently using this plugin at the bottom of our posts (like at the bottom of this post) under the heading “Related Articles.”

Search Everything

One thing I’ve always disliked about WordPress sites is the lacking search functionality. Sure, it’s decent for searching posts on occasion, but searching comments or attachments is out of the question. The Search Everything plugin alleviates these issues and adds many more features as well. The plugin completely overrides the default search, so for users already familiar with your site, your search will not change at all (well except for in quality of results).

Show Top Commentators

While right now we really have no commentators, I hope that will change very soon. The Show Top Commentators plugin allowed me to embed a widget into our sidebar that shows the users who have contributed the most to our site over the last few weeks. Each user who does contribute and makes it into our top 10 (without spamming of course) is rewarded with a link on our main page to their own site.

Sidebar Widgets

This is hands down the most useful plugin we currently have installed. Sidebar Widgets transformed both our green and black sidebars into a plug and play resource that is as easy to modify and update as dragging and dropping new items. Where as with standard WordPress, you are responsible for hand implementing new additions to your sidebars, with Sidebar Widgets you can take many widgets developed by hundreds of other people and incorporate them into your site with ease. A must have for anyone who is serious about incorporating many tools and being able to maintain them with any reasonable expectation.

Subscribe to Comments

The Subscribe to Comments plugin is simple in idea but powerful in usability. If a user makes a comment on our site, they can check a small box that says “Notify me of follow-up comments via e-mail.” This allows users to easily keep track of conversations and continue responding without having to worry about constantly checking our site. Of course, they could also subscribe to the comment RSS feed, but I think this option is much more user friendly.

Ultimate Tag Warrior

Ultimate Tag Warrior is, well, the ultimate tool for tagging your posts and providing a tag cloud for article navigation. UTW allows for customization of the tag cloud as well as embedding of the tags within your Technorati and FeedBurner feeds. A very handy plugin that improves the overall accessibility of your articles.

Welcome to Bookmark Bliss

March 4, 2007 | Comments (10) | Filed under: General

BookmarkBliss.com is now living large and in charge as a member of the Blogosphere with today marking our official launch. While new to blogging, Bookmark Bliss has been around since February of 2006 as an online consulting and development business based out of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

The goal of this blog is to provide quality content and information about the world of online business, programming, and web development highlighting what has helped us build our business and commentary that might be useful to our community. We are by no means the authoritative source on these subjects, but we have learned a lot over the last 7 years and we hope that you will find what we have to say insightful or at least worth reading once and a while. Our goal is also selfish in nature as we would love to learn from all of you as well. By building a community of readers, sharing ideas, tips, and tricks, we can all benefit and continue to evolve and grow our individual businesses.

What topics will Bookmark Bliss focus on? web development, web design, software engineering, bioinformatics, advertising, online marketing, link development and backlinking, search engine optimization (SEO), social networking, blogging, domain names and registration, consulting, freelance programming, development tools and tutorials, e-commerce, affiliate marketing, and many more.

So, let this post mark a new era for Bookmark Bliss, one that will continue to expand and grow over the next few months, years, decades. Keep an eye on us, we aren’t going anywhere and we will be updating on an almost daily basis from here on out.

Thanks for stopping by and welcome to the Bookmark Bliss!

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