First, let’s get this out there right now: Microsoft Windows is the most robust computer operating system in the world today. That’s been the case since the introduction of Windows 3.1. As a Mac user, I can tell you that OS X is a beautiful OS, but doesn’t have nearly the capability of Windows. And no single version of Unix even comes close to OS X, out of the box.

Windows is the most robust operating system in the world today

Now that I have the fightin’ words out there, let’s get to the point of this article. No doubt you’ve seen proclamations in reviews of Windows 7 betas and release candidates over the past 10 months that "Win 7 is what Vista should have been." I’m certainly not going to argue that point. But let’s look at what Vista is, and what it isn’t: Vista is an outstanding OS, and the best current version of Windows, in every respect, if you have the hardware to run it properly. Unfortunately, that’s where Microsoft dropped the ball with Vista: The so-called "minimum" hardware requirements were, in actual practice, well below minimum.

When I installed Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit, I also upgraded my computer: Core 2 Quad Intel CPU, 4GB of fast RAM, fast SATA hard drives, on a motherboard built for speed. I also had a pricey nVidia GeForce GTX 285 video card. Unsurprisingly, I had zero operating system problems. That does not mean that the OS didn’t feel sluggish: It did. Performance in WoW was good, but hardly great. On the other hand, I never had to turn down video settings, no matter what boss fight I might be in, and how many particle effects were in play.

So what did Microsoft do to finally garner real praise for a new Windows version?

1. Code optimization, much like what Apple did with OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard. I don’t know if the disk footprint of Win7 is smaller, but the code is tighter. Even running the release candidate in a virtual machine on the iMac, I can tell Win7 is peppier than Vista. I also had the RC installed on my PC before frying the motherboard, and believe me, the speed increase was more than marginal.
2. Improved Start menu: Pop it open, start typing, and immediately see relevant search results (often applications) show up almost immediately. You almost don’t need a launch bar!
3. Aero. As long as you have a video card to support it, the slick transparent video effects are more than eye candy: Peek allows you to hover over a taskbar region, and see the outline of every open window on your desktop, a huge boon to multitaskers. Shake seems like a gimmick at first, but consider: Grab a window’s titlebar with your mouse, give it a shake, and magically minimize all other desktop windows.
4. Speaking of the Taskbar, it has borrowed a bit from OS X’s Dock, and expanded on that (literally): Hover over a taskbar icon, and see all open windows for that application. Then simply click the one you want to work with.
5. Libraries. Okay, it’s not an object-oriented file system; maybe Win12 or OS XV will finally achieve that Nirvana. But Libraries allow you to structure your file system to your preferences, rather than Windows’ arbitrary setup. Sure, you still have Documents, Music, Videos, etc., but now you can create file libraries to incorporate or exclude those folders, or subdivide those main folders in any manner you like. I love Libraries!

I’ve only touched the surface of all the new goodness coming in Windows 7, but I have yet to talk to anyone who has installed the release candidate who hasn’t gushed about how much better Win7 is than any predecessor. While WinXP still has the largest installed userbase of any flavor of any OS in the world today, I fully expect Win7 to kick it to the curb in the next 12 to 18 months. That’s how good this new OS is.

Windows 7 will be available to the general public on October 20. I’ll be installing it on my wife’s computer as well as both Macs. Will you be making the switch?

Friday Five: Top Windows 7 Features is a post from: Kestrel's Aerie

It continues to amaze me how some of the design elements I now take so much for granted, are missing, hidden, or confusing on other blogs. If we assume the intent of a blogger is to share their writing with others, the apparent (although, I’m sure, accidental) pains some take to inhibit that sharing are comical, at best.

I recently updated the Twisted Nether Wiki with a new World of Warcraft blog. One of the items we request (so I don’t have to go hunting for it) is a link to the blog’s RSS feed. This particular blog was on blogspot.com, and the author stated she wasn’t using RSS yet. Of course, I know better: On every Blogger theme, down at the very bottom of the home page, is an RSS link: http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default. Somewhat hidden, true, but if you know where to find it…

Item 1: RSS Feed Link

Sure, almost every blog has one, but not all (by a long shot!) are easy to find. This is quite a simple thing to add to any blog (both wordpress.com and blogspot.com support more than the "bottom of the page" default; it’s quite easy to make it more visible).

Your RSS link should be at or near the top of your blog

Your RSS link should be near the top of your blog, definitely "above the fold" (that’s newspaper-speak for the part of your page a viewer sees when it first loads). My very strong recommendation is to place it no lower than immediately below the title of your blog or navigation bar, whichever is lower; in other words, at the very top of one of your sidebars. For example, my nav bar is immediately below my site banner, and my RSS feed links (for both RSS reader and email) are immediately below that. Some themes position the RSS button at the very top of the page; others, as part of the navigation bar. In fact, that’s the default position for Thesis.

You’ll note my RSS links are stylized to fit within the overall color and design of my blog, but that is by no means essential. In fact, sometimes I wonder if they blend in too well! The ubiquitous orange RSS symbol is now a web standard, and there’s not a thing wrong with it. But I’m sure you’ve seen all manner of stylizing, as well. One of my favorites is at Pike’s Aspect of the Hare, and is pictured to the right. If you know hers is primarily a blog devoted to Hunters in World of Warcraft, and if you know also that WoW Hunters use "traps" quite a bit, the awesomeness of the visual pun really hits home.

Want something unique for your blog? A quick search across the ‘net will reveal thousands of possibilities. The most important thing is to be sure you have that link. Oh, and while we’re at it: Be sure all RSS links point to the same place! I’ve found a lot of blogs with links to FeedBurner, but the blogger never redirected the default link. That generally takes a very small tweak to one of your theme files (index.php, footer.php, or header.php), but will ensure, if you’re using FeedBurner, you see a more accurate number of subscribers.

Item 2: Contact Link

Something that is harder to find on many blogs (because it flat-out isn’t there!) is an email link to the blogger, or a link to a contact page. Why is this important? A few days ago, I was visiting a friend’s blog and noticed she had two fairly prominent RSS links, one right above the other. On a hunch (because one was clearly a FeedBurner link, and the other looked like a theme default), I moused over both. Yep, two different links. It’s really not a huge deal: FeedBurner aggregates all feeds from a site pretty effectively. But stylistically, it’s probably something most of us would want to correct. After all, not all of our readers (in fact, probably not all bloggers) might know that either link will provide an equally robust RSS feed.

There will be times when a reader will want to interact with you…give them a contact point!

It was a pretty simple task to find the blogger’s contact page, fill in the short form and give her a head’s up. But there have been other times, when a more serious coding error was evident, that I couldn’t do that, and had to resort to commenting on a blog post to alert a blogger to an issue.

There will be times–perhaps not many, but at least a few–when a reader will want to interact with you outside the comments section of your posts. Give them that outlet! It can be an email link, a graphic that shows your email address (thereby reducing the chance for spam), or, as I have done, a contact form.

Item 3: Tell Your Readers About You

An "About" page tells readers why you are qualified to write about your subject.

There are a lot of people who are very reluctant to share personal information with strangers, whether over the Internet or otherwise. I certainly appreciate that. Your "About" page doesn’t need to be an autobiography. But it should describe you to the extent that it establishes your bona fides: Why are you qualified to talk about whatever it is you’re going to discuss on your blog?

Now don’t get hung up on the "qualifications" idea: A simple desire to write is plenty of qualification for many. But if you’re going to blog about how to play a holy priest in World of Warcraft, a static statement of your experience and other relevant factors isn’t too much to ask.

Many bloggers do this with a simple text widget in a sidebar, with a couple of sentences about who they are or why they’re blogging. Others (the minority, to be sure) provide a life story, résumé, and curriculum vitae! My own "About" page describes my gaming background, as well as some details of my academic and personal careers, concluding with a bit more personal information. I’m not concerned about "Internet stalkers" but I’m also not going to put my cellphone number out there (or my street address).

Share what you’re comfortable with, but try to put something out there to help your readers get to know you better.

Item 4: Provide a Search Box

This is a default in just about every blogging theme, regardless of platform.¹ Believe me, there will come a time when a reader–or you, yourself–will want to find something in your blog.

Give your readers tools to explore more of your blog!

For WordPress, there are plenty of search addons, but I’m pretty happy with the default function built in to the platform. Most addons do more in-depth indexing, so searches may be faster and results more robust. If you find your default isn’t meeting your needs, it’s a pretty easy task to implement a better solution.

The key is, give your readers the tools they need to explore more of your blog…and that is a perfect seque into:

Item 5: Organize Your Archives

I will be the first to admit, I am pretty bad at providing internal links in my articles. In fact, let’s be honest: I suck at it. Complete and epic failure: that’s me. However, I have provided you several ways to find stuff. First, of course, is the (currently MIA) search box. I also have a sitemap listed in the navigation bar. I have a calendar, to show you on what days I published stuff. I use categories (and fortunately for all of us, a lot fewer than I used to have!) for every article and tags for most articles.

I also have a tag cloud (which isn’t as comprehensive as I’d like, but there were aesthetic considerations at play in that area). But most importantly, I have a couple of handy drop-down boxes in the first sidebar. The first organizes all my posts by month, so if you know what you’re looking for was earlier this month, you can pull up a listing of everything I wrote in September. The second lists items by category, which is okay unless you’re looking for a generic WoW article or one on blogging. Hey…I never said it was perfect!

The point is, if you want to find something here that isn’t necessarily on the front page, I’ve given you a lot of tools to do that. Do the same for your readers, and they will love you for it!

So there are my five "must-haves" for blog design. Are there any you find fault with? What did I leave out that you believe is critical to a successful blog? Share your thoughts with us in the comments!

Friday Five: “Must-Have” Blog Design Elements is a post from: Kestrel's Aerie

It’s vs. Its

Probably the number one boo-boo people make, and if you’re like me, it really is a typo when you misuse one or the other.

First, I’ll tell you why people make errors with it’s/its. In English, possessives are generally indicated by following a noun with an apostrophe and an s: the book’s title, the mayor’s speech, Susie’s ponytail. What most people don’t consciously realize is most pronouns¹ do not follow that possessive convention: his, hers, ours, theirs, yours.

Guess what? "It" is also a pronoun, and just like those listed above, its possessive form does not have an apostrophe. (See what I did there, again?) Its characteristics include a citrusy odor and a bitter taste.

The construction it’s is a contraction of it is: It’s easy to understand how people can misuse the possessive. But it boggles that people misuse the contraction: Its truly a mystery. I mean, I had to backspace over the apostrophe the first time I typed that sentence!

Still, the mistakes are made, and I promised to give you a solution to avoid those mistakes: Never use the contracted form of "it is." If you follow that simple rule, all you have to remember is not to use an apostrophe in "its."

Inspiration: @maziltovfrom Krumpit and @Arrensfrom Through the Eyes of Death

Let’s vs. Lets

This one is similar to the preceding discussion: The contracted form of "let us" is let’s. A synonym for "allows" or "permits" (Note: No apostrophes allowed or permitted!) is lets. Once again, if you eschew the contraction and never type the apostrophe, you’ll be perfect! But how often do we see Haste let’s you cast faster or Lets run Heroic VH?

Now I’ll be the first to admit, typing out "Let us run Heroic VH" will cause your friends and guildmates to slowly edge away from you. But if you say to yourself, "Let us run H VH," you should recognize you want the contraction, complete with apostrophe! 

Notwithstanding the above, there are definitely times when you’ll want to use "let us." Need an example? Take another look at the second sentence of this article. I’ll bet you didn’t even notice, did you?

Peaked/Peeked/Piqued

The only way to avoid misusing these homonyms is to know what each one means.²

• peak: (transitive verb) to cause to come to a peak, point, or maximum
• peek: (intransitive verb) 1 a: to look furtively b : to peer through a crack or hole or from a place of concealment —often used with in or out; 2 : to take a brief look
• pique: (transitive verb) to excite or arouse especially by a provocation, challenge, or rebuff

The most common (or at least the most glaring) misuse is to substitute peak (and less frequently, peek) for pique. A correct use would be: She piqued my curiosity. My interest was piqued. However: My interest peaked when the discussion came to money.

The way I help myself to remember is that if my interest or curiosity is heightened or raised, both of those have an "i" in them, as does "pique." But if my interest is maxxed, there is no "i" but there is an "a" as in "peak."

Finally, to remember the proper use of peek, think of the pair of e’s as a pair of eyes.

Inspiration: @stoppableforcefrom Stoppable Force

Definitely 

How many times have you seen (or typed) "definately"? Way too many, right? Keep this in mind: There is definitely no "a" in "definitely"! (There is no "a" in definite, either!)

To/Too

I almost hate to address this one: For the most part, I think people simply mistype "to" and hit the "o" key twice. I know I’m guilty of that occasionally. But just in case you truly do have difficulty knowing which one to use, here’s a simple mnemonic to apply.

"Too" is an adverb meaning "also" while "to" is a preposition. So if you mean "also," you want to also add an "o" at the end of "to." 

End of Today’s Lesson

I know I could come up with a lot more common typos, but I’m limiting myself to five in this article. And besides typos, there are plenty of other word pairs that give writers fits. For example, that/which, than/then (which a couple people commented on the earlier article), horde/alliance. What are some you’d like to see me address in a later post? Let me know in the comments!

Friday Five: Typos and How To Avoid Them is a post from: Kestrel's Aerie

I could make a whole bunch more caveats, but that’s not why you’re here. Instead, I want to submit the following as blogs you should include in your regular WoW reading, regardless of class or spec. Some of these are worth adding even if you don’t play WoW.

1. The Pink Pigtail Inn. Larísa provides some of the most cogent, insightful commentary you can find anywhere about the world of World of Warcraft. Her co-contributor, Elnia, is every bit as well-spoken. Between the two of them, you will be intrigued, challenged, and inspired. RSS.
2. Too Many Annas. Do you have even the slightest interest in WoW roleplaying? No? That’s okay, you should still read Anna, because she’s about a lot more than RP. If nothing else, she is the most ladylike ranter I know. But as a jumping off point for all things RP, you won’t find better. I don’t RP at all, but I still cling to every word she writes. RSS.
3. World of Snarkcraft. Jov and Seri provide what is ostensibly a healer blog, but as they are one of them is co-GMs of their guild, you’ll certainly get that perspective as well. Their snarkiness (which, to me, seems rather toned down of late) provides just the right amount of spice and humor. Generally they each post once a week, generally on a Tuesday-Thursday schedule, which is almost, but not quite enough. RSS.
4. I Like Bubbles. Another healer blog, of sorts. Amber is the best (and funniest) ranter in WoW. But more often than not, she’s 100 percent spot on with her rants. Besides healing with bubbles and lasers, I love her just for the tagline on her site: "Letting noobs like Arrens die since 2005." That’s @Arrensof course. Amber’s also an officer in her guild, so there are quite often some pretty interesting insights into guild management. But for me, it’s just one laugh after another. RSS.
5. Aspect of the Hare. Yes, a hunter blog. Specifically, a BM hunter. So? You read BRK, didn’t you? Now, Pike isn’t BRK, and doesn’t pretend to be. But her writing is every bit as compelling and even, at times, more nerdy. Or more geeky. You pick. If you do play a hunter, then I submit there is no better place to read about the nuances of the BM spec for 99 percent of us. (The other one percent don’t read blogs anyway.) As an added treat, there’s the occasional bit of well-done fanfic. RSS.

Friday Five: WoW Blogs You MUST Read is a post from: Kestrel's Aerie

1. Lifehacker (RSS)

 @Lifehacker

The tagline at Lifehacker is "Tips and downloads for getting things done," which is probably the most cogent and descriptive summary for this site. Want to convert an old table into a chalkboard table? Need the straight dope on how to prepare your Mac for Snow Leopard? Looking for the latest tips on how to optimize Firefox? Go no further than Lifehacker. Every day, there are a dozen or more clear, concise articles on how to make your life easier, whether for Mac OS X, Window, Linux, downloads, or do-it-yourself (DIY) projects.

2. Smarterware (RSS)

 @Smarterware

Smarterware is the brainchild of Gina Trapani @Ginatrapani, one of the founding editors of Lifehacker. In her words, Smarterware is a place where she "takes notes on using your head (and great software) to get better at work and life." Gina is a Mac maven, a Google guru and Firefox fan (Better Gmail, BetterGReader), and all-around Very Smart Person.

3. Unclutterer (RSS)

 @UncluttererTips

Do you want to get (more) organized? Do you want to stay organized? If the answer to either of those questions is even a "qualified maybe," then Unclutterer is the blog for you! Whether you need to organize your garage (something I am in the process of doing this week!), clean up your kitchen, or avoid useless unitaskers, this site will give you plenty of tips on how to streamline both your space and your possessions to get more out of what you have.

4. CoolTools (RSS)

CoolTools is just one of the areas of interest of the very prolific Kevin Kelly. Each day, he’ll highlight one "cool tool," using reader submissions. KK’s definition is any "book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true…Items can be either old or new as long as they are wonderful. We only post things we like and ignore the rest." Now how cool is that?

5. Productivity 501 (RSS)

This site is all about increasing your personal productivity. The publishing schedule averages a post each week, so you aren’t going to get overwhelmed by "stuff I need to do NOW!" Instead, the articles are more thought-provoking, although you’ll also find the "how-to" articles as well. One of my favorites was this week’s "Top 5 Worst Productivity Ideas," including, for example, buying (yet more) software to increase your productivity. Think about that for a moment and you’ll see the point.

Wrapping Up

So there you are: Five cool websites to help you become more effective, efficient, and productive. But I want more! What are some of your favorite places for helping you to get things done smarter, faster, better? Share with us in the comments below.

Friday Five: Cool Productivity Sites is a post from: Kestrel's Aerie

All Beers Are Not Alike

Before I discuss my five favorite lagers, we should probably make sure we’re all on the same page, beer-wise.

There are, basically, two types of beer in the world: Ales and lagers.

Ale yeast is the older type of brewing yeast, and ferments at warm temperatures (62-75 degrees Fahrenheit).¹ Ales ferment rapidly–sometimes, in as little as a few days. Once fermentation is complete, the yeasts rise to the top of the brewing vessel and float there in a large mass. So, if you hear a brewer discuss "top-fermenting" he is talking about ale.

Lagers are much younger than ales, dating back only to the mid-1800s, when the lager yeast was discovered in Bavaria. Lagers are often called pilsners (or pilseners); more correctly, though, a pilsner (often shortened to "pils") is a hoppy, golden style of lager. (All pilsners are lagers, but not all lagers are pilsners. Got it?)

Before refrigeration became commonplace, Bavarian brewers fermented their beers in deep, cool caves or tunnels, to prevent exposure to heat. Thus, the lager yeasts evolved to prefer cooler temperatures, generally between 46-56 degrees Fahrenheit. Unlike ales, though, once the fermentation is finished, lagers (the word comes from the German lagerung, meaning "to store") age for weeks or months; that aging process is now known as "lagering."

Incidentally, lager yeasts are "bottom-fermenting," as contrasted with top-fermenting ale yeasts. The way I remember which are top- and which are bottom-fermenting, is to remember that "a" in "ale" is at the top of the alphabet.

By the way–as long as I’m educating you about beer–wine is considerably easier to make than beer. For the most basic wine, you need only crush the grapes and allow the juice to ferment (in fact, they can even crush themselves, if piled high enough!). Beer, however, requires malt (generally from barley, although other grains have been used), hops (aromatic flowers, which provide bitterness in varying degrees), the aforementioned yeast, and, of course, water. (There is no water in wine; well, there shouldn’t be, anyway!) Once you have those ingredients, they need to be carefully combined to produce beer…brewing is as much science as it is art. By contrast, wine-making is pretty much all art.

Common Types of Beer

I daresay there are many more kinds of beer than wine (by the way, I enjoy a glass of wine almost as much as a good beer; I’m not anti-wine!). With wines, you have red, or white, and of those, sparkling, or not. (Yes, that is a bit simplistic, but it’s also generally true.) The differences depend on the grapes used, but that’s about it.

With beers, on the other hand, besides dividing them into lagers and ales, you have pilsners, pale ales, India pale ales (not the same as pale ales by any means), Trappist ale, porter, stout, bock, doppelbock, weissbier, witbier (again, while both translate to "white beer" one is German; the other, Belgian), Belgian dubbel, abbey ales, British bitter, schwarzbier…the list is almost as long as the list of regions where beer is brewed. And certainly, many regions are home to many types of beer.

Friday Five: My Favorite Lagers

1. Pilsner Urquell. This is considered by many to be the first true pilsner beer; "urquell" means "the source." This is a wonderful Czech beer and in my not-so-humble opinion, the best lager in the world.

2. Harp Irish Lager. The Guinness Group is, rightfully, most well-known for its signature brew, Guinness Stout (an ale). However, in 1960, Guinness began brewing Harp Lager (rebranded in 1997 as Harp Irish Lager), so called for the image of an Irish harp featured on its label (a smaller version of which you can see on Guinness labels as well). ²

3. Longboard Island Lager. From the Big Island of Hawai’i, Longboard is the signature beer of Kona Brewing Company. I discovered this beer on my first visit to Hawai’i in 2005, and it’s been a favorite ever since. Each time I return to the Islands, one of my first stops is to pick up a couple 6-packs of "liquid aloha." And whether on the Big Island or Oahu, I always insist on a visit to the Kona Brewery Brewpub, where the food is as good as the beer!

4. Blue Paddle. Produced by New Belgium Brewing Company, Ft. Collins, Colorado (probably most famous for its Fat Tire Ale, another favorite of mine), Blue Paddle is a very light-tasting pils (which is not the same as a light beer!), and became a favorite of mine from the very first sip. New Belgium began shipping to South Dakota only this May, and it’s a standard purchase for me at my favorite spirits shop.

5. Löwenbräu (Munich). One of two wonderful beers synonymous with Munich and Oktoberfest (the other, of course, is Hofbrau), don’t confuse this with the former offering from the Miller Brewing Company several years ago. When I lived in Germany (1985-88), this wonderful pilsner shared storage space in our basement with Bitburger, the local regional favorite.

I could go on and on about beers in general, and lagers in particular (by all means if you can find either of the other two German beers mentioned immediately above, you will not be disappointed!), but if you enjoy beer, give any of these (or all of them!) a try. Clearly, I’ve opened a veritable cornucopia of beer topics with this article: I’ve no doubt we’ll be talking about ales, IPAs, and all manner of other brews (and wines!) as time goes on.

Enjoy the weekend, and don’t forget to crack open a cold one!

Friday Five: Best Lagers 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

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

What Do I Mean By “Software”?

Well…how about “not hardware”? Okay, too easy. In this case, though, I’m defining software rather broadly: Standalone applications, web-based applications, browser plugins…essentially, code in many forms

Why’d You Pick These, Kes?

The criteria were pretty simple: What has struck my fancy lately, works well, and is relatively simple? In other words, “Hey, this is pretty cool!”

I should add one caveat: The order in which these are listed aren’t necessarily a ranking (in fact, I may simply reorder them alphabetically…we’ll see).

Evernote is a web-based application, also available for Mac, Windows, iPhone and Blackberry. Here’s the description from “What is Evernote?”

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere. Did we mention that it’s free?

Basically, it’s a virtual 3-ring binder, index card system, or whatever other metaphor you choose to use. Find a great recipe you want to be sure you print out later? Copy to Evernote, or simply save the web page there.

Do you have a boilerplate collection of text items you use frequently? I do, for the blogs I add to the Twisted Nether Wiki’s Big List of Blogs. I used to use a Google Notebook for these, but Google is no longer supporting Notebooks directly, and some of the changes to Firefox and Google have made them less useful (e.g., copy/paste is no longer formatted, so I have to re-create links). Enter Evernote, and a “TN Bloglist” Notebook.

Evernote provides a free monthly allowance of 40MB; halfway through the month, I’m at 3 percent of that, so for most people, this should be plenty of storage. However, if you’re a real power user (or a real packrat), a monthly fee of $5 enables a 500MB monthly upload allowance and stronger security via SSL.

You can email just about anything from your computer or phone into an Evernote notebook, and you can even use twitter to add items. Right now, I can’t think of anything more flexible and more comfortable to use for capturing and storing “stuff” that I want to use or look at later.

I just found out about Prism today, but I must say it is pretty cool. Essentially, it allows you to turn a single website into a desktop application. Read more about it at The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

The idea behind Prism is to allow you to have a window with one website in it. The most obvious use is as a desktop application replacement: Gmail, for example, for email and calendar (to replace, say, Outlook), or Meebo, for multi-platform instant messaging (instead of Pidgin, Adium or Digsby, especially if you can’t use those standalone clients in a business environment).

Yes, it does get away from the tabbed browser concept to some extent; on the other hand, if you use Gmail as your exclusive email client, as I do, it makes a lot of sense to be able to run it in a separate window, without all the overhead of a second browser instance.

Seesmic Desktop is a standalone Twitter and Facebook application that works much like TweetDeck. In fact, like TweetDeck, it uses the Adobe Air runtime platform. However, a major difference is that Seesmic not only updates Twitter, but Facebook entries from you and your friends as well.

Like TweetDeck, Seesmic is organized in columns, and you can create individualized lists for people and topics. But the big difference, of course, is that Seesmic also brings in Facebook updates as well as Tweets. For social networking power users (or even folks like me), this is really a very spiffy implementation.

Right now, Seesmic doesn’t have many of the customization options TweetDeck provides, but those are more esthetic than functional. Seesmic also doesn’t display Facebook notifications (Mafia Wars invitations/updates, for example); at least, not that I’ve found.

Personally, the jury’s still out on Seesmic, as I’m still evaluating the utility of Facebook for myself, but for those of you who regularly update or follow both, Seesmic could be a killer app for you.

I found out about Synergy through Gina Trapani ( @ginatrapani) on Lifehacker (a highly recommended website for your feed reader, by the way).

Synergy allows you to use a single keyboard and mouse between two computers: Two Macs, two PCs, or a Mac and a PC. (Yes, it works with Unix boxes too, but check Sourceforge to determine whether your flavor of Unix/Linux is supported.) The two PCs do not have to share the same operating system.

For Windows, Win95, Win98 and WinME are supported, as are all versions of Windows based on WinNT, up to and including Windows 7. Mac OS X 10.2 and higher are supported.

Sourceforge: "The Mac OS X port is incomplete. It does not synchronize the screen saver, only text clipboard data works (i.e. HTML and bitmap data do not work), the cursor won’t hide when not on the screen, and there may be problems with mouse wheel acceleration."

Configuring Synergy is not as intuitive as one might like, at first glance. However, again at Lifehacker, Adam Pash has come to the rescue with a detailed, well-illustrated tutorial for setting up Synergy.

Currently, I’m sharing the Mac keyboard and Logitech (PC) mouse between the iMac and Macbook Pro, both of which are running OS X 10.5.7 Leopard. Moving from one computer to the other is almost perfectly seamless, although there are some tweaks in responsiveness I haven’t tried yet. For my purposes, though, it’s a free and highly effective alternative to a hardware KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) switch.

One thing I have yet to try out is whether I can “Synergize” between a Winows virtual machine on one of the Macs, with the other computer. If anyone’s done so, I’d be interested to hear about it.

For those of you who don’t have two monitors, but do have a desktop and a laptop, this is truly the next best thing.

If you use Gmail, Google Calendar, or Google Reader, you owe it to yourself to check out this outstanding “theme” treatment of these signature Google applications. Especially if you are a fan at all of dark backgrounds, not to mention a very clean layout, Google Redesigned (GR) deserves a chance to win you over.

The program itself is a Firefox extension (so if you’re using IE, Safari, Opera or Chrome, you’re out of luck), which installs easily, and adds a little button in the bottom right corner of the browser. The button can be used to check for design updates, but you can also allow automatic updates.

One thing to keep in mind is that GR is developed independently of the Google apps it skins. Thus, when Google makes changes to the apps, those changes could “break” GR until the designers get caught up; on the other hand, they are pretty responsive to such things, and despite the plethora of updates to Gmail and GReader the past few weeks, GR has not been noticeably compromised.

That’s All for Now

So there you have it…this week’s Friday Five software picks. I hope there’s something here you can use; if so, how about adding to the comments to share your experiences with others.

I’m also open to suggestions for other “Friday Five” topics, although I won’t touch roleplay topics: TooManyAnnas has that covered pretty well.

Friday Five: Software is a post from: Kestrel's Aerie