EDIT: I was extremely remiss in failing to credit this article at Gingerwench.com, where ComLuv for Intense Debate was tested and refined. Seeing ID at work, together with CommentLuv, and seeing how seamlessly they worked together was a further impetus to install ID here at the Aerie. Thanks, Ginger, and again, my apologies for the oversight!

Another benefit of Intense Debate is the ability to register with ID (even if you aren’t a blogger) and follow other commenters you enjoy, regardless of where they comment. For bloggers, we can moderate (if necessary) and reply to comments directly from email: No need to log into the WordPress dashboard!

Obviously, I’m excited about the possibilities ID presents, not only for the Aerie, but for enhancing the community aspect of the blogoverse. But I’m also interested in your perceptions: Is ID too intrusive? What about the comment rating system? (I’m not a huge fan, to be honest.) Any other thoughts about Intense Debate?

Intense Debate Now Active! is a post from: Kestrel's Aerie

 

Last week, as you may recall (the link is there in case you don’t), I showcased a handful of addons intended to enhance your interaction with your audience. This week, I want to talk about five more WordPress (WP) plugins I can’t blog without.

Bad Behavior 2.0.28
» Michael Hampton (url)
Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site. Bad Behavior catches between 600 and 700 spam attacks against my site every week. Together with Akismet (provided with every WP installation), there are probably between 1000 and 1500 spam threats each week. I have to manually delete perhaps one a day from the live comments, and between 10 and 20 from my spam box each week. Those numbers should give you an appreciation for how much work I don’t have to do to keep the Aerie spam-free. The result: I don’t need any pre-publication moderation of comments, whether you’re a first time visitor, or have been coming here for two years!

 One Click Plugin Updater 2.4.13
» Janis Elsts (url)
Upgrade plugins with a single click, install new plugins or themes from an URL or by uploading a file, see which plugins have update notifications enabled, control how often WordPress checks for updates, and more. WordPress has included a lot of the functionality of this plugin in recent updates; however, this add-on is, for me, still a bit more elegant, especially for installing new plugins directly from a hosting website.

Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu 3.3.1
» Ozh (url)
All admin links available in a neat horizontal drop down menu. Saves lots of screen real estate! Again, recent versions of WordPress have vastly improved the administration user interface, but I find Ozh’ programs (this one, and the Better Plugin Page listed below) provide enhanced ease-of-use, and they simply look better!

Ozh’ Better Plugin Page 1.4.2
» Ozh (url)
Adds a little sliding plugin list and buttons to toggle display of Active/Inactive/Out-of-date plugins to the “Manage Plugins” page. When I think of "at-a-glance" functionality, this plugin has it, and that’s why I continue to use it, despite the improvements to WordPress’ provided plugin monitor.

 WordPress Automatic Upgrade 1.2.5
» Keith Dsouza (url)
WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions. Want to induce a panic attack in a blogger really quickly? Simply leave out a step in the WordPress upgrade/update process…such as backing up the database, or layout (theme) files…then have the upgrade itself choke. Or, you can use this plugin, and as long as you can read simple instructions ("Click Here"), you can blithely upgrade WP in about 5 minutes, instead of taking 5 minutes for each step, checking and double-checking that you are proceeding in the proper order and haven’t skipped anything. While others are still sweating bullets, you can be Tweeting about how you just finished, or you can even write another article for your blog!

 Tomorrow: Remains of the Week

Once again on Saturday, I’ll share with you the cool stuff I found and shared with my Google Reader followers throughout this past week. In the meantime, I’d love to see in the comments the WordPress tools you can’t live without, as well as any suggestions you might have for future Fridays.

Friday Five: Absolutely Must-Have WordPress Addons is a post from: Kestrel's Aerie

 

One of the smaller changes I’ve made was prompted by this article at MattFlies.com. Matt showed how to style the CommentLuv box (see last week’s Friday Five to see what I’m talking about) to make it a bit more attractive. Although I didn’t quite follow how Matt said to apply his code, I was able to add it to the CommentLuv .css file in /wp-content/plugins/commentluv/style/cl_style.css.

If the thought of modifying a plugin file frightens you, it shouldn’t. First, get FileZilla, a multi-platform (Linux, OS X, Windows), open-source file transfer program.¹ When you set it up, identify a text editor to call from FZ. For OS X, I use the free Text Wrangler; for Windows, I recommend the open source Notepad++.

NOTE: Before you change anything, copy the file to be modified to your computer in case something blows up and you need to revert!

With cl_style.css open in your editor, find the following:

.cluv {
border:1px solid #fff;
padding: 5px;
display: block;
font-size: 100% !important;
text-transform: none !important;
}

Replace² the five lines between {curly braces} with the following:³

display: block;
padding: 8px;
border: 1px solid #E1E1E0;
background: #CFE9FF;   //This can be any color you want for the background of the CommentLuv citation
text-transform: none;
font-style: normal;
letter-spacing: 0;
-moz-border-radius: 5px;
-webkit-border-radius: 5px;
margin-top: 8px;

The result will give you something that looks like this: 

Note the nicely rounded corners. If you look at the post I linked above, you’ll see the background color fits in nicely with the overall theme, whether it’s in an original or nested comment.

The text output has been modified from the WordPress Settings > CommentLuv page. (The default is "Kestrel’s last blog..Recommended Reading"; if anything, I prefer a true ellipsis (…), and my last blog is my current blog!) You could also change it to something like "Kestrel last blogged about Recommended Reading" but that might make for some strange reading, depending on article titles.

I hope you enjoyed this little diversion into how you can make your blog just a little cooler, but if you have any questions on anything I’ve covered here, please ask! And look for similar articles in the future.

Quick’n'Easy CommentLuv Style Enhancement is a post from: Kestrel's Aerie

 

1. CommentLuv

CommentLuv shows a link to the last post from a (blogging) commenter by parsing the feed at their provided URL. This is probably one of the best and most effective ways to grow your readership (and for your commenters to grow theirs!): Each time you leave a comment on a CommentLuv-enabled site, a link to your latest post appears, encouraging the site owner and other commenters to follow that link back to your site.

Andy Bailey is the very active and involved developer of CommentLuv, and you can follow him @andybaileyon Twitter.

2. FD Footnotes

John Watson is the author of FD Footnotes, which I’ve found to be an extremely easy-to-use footnote add-on. Once installed, no other setup is required.² To add a footnote, you simply type your footnote (including number) inside [square brackets] where you want it to appear. You don’t even have to number them correctly: The plugin automatically parses them in order when you publish, so you can go back and add footnotes as desired, if you think of something you want to annotate later in your composing process.

I tend to go off on tangents occasionally, so I find footnotes the perfect way to include such info, without making my readers break their train of thought just to follow mine.

3. Subscribe to Comments

Most people don’t want to subscribe to the full comments feed from a blog.³ On the other hand, many readers are interested to know if their comments elicited a response from the blogger or other commenters. But how many of us remember to revisit a blog article where we commented, on a regular basis, to see if the conversation is continuing (or even got started in the first place)?

Especially if you use an RSS feed reader for most of your blog reading, even remembering where you commented may be a Herculean task. Enter Subscribe to Comments, by Mark Jaquith. This plugin places a simple checkbox below the comment box to enable email subscription to the selected comment thread. It’s a great way to effectively and easily enable two-way interaction with your audience, and, to me, is every bit as important to my blog as CommentLuv.

4. Top Commentators Widget 

The Top Commentators Widget,⁴ from Lorna Timbah (WebGrrrl.net), is a nice, compact way to recognize those who (other than yourself) contribute the most to making your blog a “happenin’ place.” It may also encourage more comments, but of course, there is always the quantity vs. quality balance to consider.

Configuration options allow you to specify the number of commenters to showcase; whether or not to display number of comments; change the sidebar heading; and change the update frequency, from an hour to a year.

5. Twitter Widget Pro

The final entry in this week’s Friday Five is Twitter Widget Pro, written by Aaron D. Campbell. This plugin is a “widget that properly handles twitter feeds, including @username, #hashtag, and link parsing. It can even display profile images for the users.” It requires PHP5, so be sure you have that enabled from your web host’s control panel.⁵

Among the options for this widget is one to not include replies by you, which, at least in my case, are often non sequiters, at best.

Wrap-Up

So there you have it: five WordPress plugins, each of which can enhance your interaction with your readers. After all, which of us isn’t interested in growing our audience?

If you’re a blogger, what one thing do you do, add-on or otherwise, to encourage your readers to comment or otherwise interact with you, your blog, or other readers?

If you’re just one of my hundreds of loyal readers, which of these tools (if any) do you most appreciate? Which do you think might be less useful than I think it is?⁶

Friday Five: Reader-Friendly WordPress Plugins is a post from: Kestrel's Aerie

 

While troubleshooting my IE problem (see the "IE HELP WANTED!" post above), I happened to look at my WordPress dashboard, and who (or what) had linked to the Aerie recently. Besides Ratshag and Lady Jess was the following: List of 100 CommentLuv WordPress Blogs.

While I know a LOT of WordPress WoW bloggers use Commentluv besides me (CommentLuv is the plugin that puts "So-and-so’s last blog post: " in the Comments), it was kind of neat to see mine as the only WoW blog listed (and I think only 2 or 3 gaming blogs at all).

That said, I probably got more hits from Ratters & Jess than from CommentLuv’s website.

Cool Linkage, I Think: CommentLuv Love is a post from: Kestrel's Aerie