Lorelle’s Using WordPress Categories To Style Posts has some very useful info on setting CSS classes depending on the category in which an article is posted.
Blogware has very deep support for per-category stylesheets, and even complete per-category templating, but WordPress doesn’t seem to have as much depth in this area. Anyone know of a plugin which makes it easier to do per-category styles?
Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Jobs:
I am proud to announce the beta version of WordPress Jobs.
The site is intended to be used as the primary location for employers looking for professional WordPress help to post their needs and for WordPress professionals to find, apply for and obtain jobs in WordPress. We have focussed on aesthetics, ease of use and consolidation of resources in developing WordPress Jobs. Feeds are available for every job category to make it easy for job seekers to find and apply for the right jobs as quickly as possible. We will also advertise jobs from WordPress Jobs on weblogtoolscollection to increase exposure.
Check out WordPress Jobs if you’ve got some WP skills and are looking to put them to work!
Now that PressHarbor is getting off the ground, we’re getting a lot of inquiries about design shops or designers for WordPress themes – where are the good ones? Just received another email:
Can you suggest a very cost-effective, but a good design shop – an individual is preferred – to make some customizations to our site?
How about it – anyone know of a good designer/small shop that can create beautiful WordPress themes but won’t break the bank of the small businesses and individuals who need their services?
Please post your recommendations in the comments or trackback a blog post on the custom WordPress theme designers you recommend.
If you’re reading this post, then you know that 2 things are now true:
The second point is the most exciting. We’ve been working on building a new platform for WordPress blog hosting that offers:
PressHarbor will also offer such features as Pro-blogger level Akismet spam protection included, which would normally cost $55/year if you purchased your own Akismet pro-blogger key. We’ve also been able to solve some key migration issues for our BlogHarbor and other Blogware users who want to move to WordPress, such as preservation and redirection of your current links to preserve and enhance your Google ranking, not to mention making the transition easier as your readers’ bookmarks will continue to function, redirecting them seamlessly to the new location of your pages. A lot of what we’ve learned will help us migrate any user from other blog platforms to our PressHarbor WordPress service, including and especially Typepad and MovableType bloggers.
So I am the guinea pig – somebody had to go first. And I do have to say, the transition was quite smooth… All of the original articles, comments, and trackbacks were migrated, and their URLs redirect cleanly to the new URLs with the right codes to let Google know that the new location is permanent…
Looking good so far here on July 1. PressHarbor is getting set to sail.
I hadn’t seen this before but it looks like a nice guide for the legal layman: EFF’s Legal Guide for Bloggers. Here are some links from the site:
The Overview of Legal Liability Issues FAQ briefly addresses some common legal issues that affect you as a publisher, especially situations where you may face legal claims or threats based on the information you published on your blog.
The Bloggers’ FAQ on Intellectual Property addresses issues that arise when you publish material created by others on your blog.
The Bloggers’ FAQ on Online Defamation Law provides an overview of defamation (libel) law, including a discussion of the constitutional and statutory privileges that may protect you.
The Bloggers’ FAQ on Section 230 Protections discusses a powerful federal law that gives you, as a web host, protection against legal claims arising from hosting information written by third parties.
The Bloggers’ FAQ on Privacy addresses the legal issues surrounding the privacy rights of people you blog about.
Check it out, lots of useful info there…
Joined a very nice group Saturday night for a meetup arranged by Problogger Darren Rowse.
Lots of cool folks, pics on Flickr, Darren’s recap is here.
BlogSecurity, “a site dedicated to providing useful and critical security information for the blog community”, noted the following today:
BlogSecurity incrementally harvested the WordPress software version from 50 blogs; the results were frightening to say the least.
The following statement was taken from WordPress: None of these [WordPress Versions] are safe to use, except the latest in the 2.0 or 2.1 series, which are both actively maintained.
Pretty powerful stuff. Sounds to me like what is needed is a WordPress hosting service which will help you to keep your WordPress install up-to-date automatically… To ensure your WordPress security by making sure you are always running the latest version and are the 1 and not one of the 49.
Yes, that service will be coming soon… 😉
Yes, I have been hibernating. Working on a couple of new projects and have ignored my blog…
Dusting it off today to make sure you know about my good friend Peter Ejtel’s new startup. Yesterday, SharedReviews.com was made public. From their press release:
Beginning early next month, the site will accept reviews from signed up contributors on any retail product, ranging from baby cribs to cell phones and everything in between. Individuals can visit SharedReviews.com now and sign up to participate in the site’s beta contributor release, earning direct cash incentives for the experiences that they submit.
Their site sums it up as “You share your review, we share our revenue.”
Cheers to Peter and Frank and the rest of their team! Best wishes for a great success!
Surely this will be posted to every blog in the world in a matter of days, but I just couldn’t resist…
From CNN’s Man relives college life with beer-tossing fridge:
An engineering graduate has built a contraption to help remind him of campus life: a refrigerator that can toss a can of beer to his couch with the click of a remote control.
It took the 22-year-old Cornwell about 150 hours and $400 in parts to modify a minifridge common to many college dorm rooms into the beer-tossing machine, which can launch 10 cans of beer from its magazine before needing a reload.
Video found at Deadspin:
The Baltimore Sun has a fascinating article this morning (link) in the fact that women are increasingly finding tha using the Internet is a more efficient use of their precious time than watching morning shows on TV… Should come as no surprise but the change seems quantifiable now:
When her children were young, Jenny Lauck flipped on Today or Good Morning America as she brewed her morning coffee and tended her babies.
But several years ago, the 34-year-old mother of three stopped watching the morning shows. After getting TiVo, she had no patience to sit through multiple commercial breaks during a live newscast. On top of that, the segments seemed frivolous.
“Watching morning television for me is the equivalent of reading People magazine in the dentist’s office,” said Lauck, who writes for Web sites from her home in Santa Rosa, Calif. “It seems like a lot of fluff. I feel like I can get information faster and cleaner on the Internet.”
Lauck is not alone in souring on network morning news programs. In particular, this season has seen a significant erosion of the shows’ demographic sweet spot: 25- to 54-year-old women.
Almost 450,000 of these women – coveted by advertisers because of their household purchasing power – have turned off the three broadcast morning programs this season, a decline of 10 percent compared with the same time last year, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of Nielsen Media Research data. Male viewers the same age also fell by 9 percent, but they make up a smaller portion of the audience.
It’s difficult to trace the exact cause of the drop. It comes after two popular morning hosts, Katie Couric and Charles Gibson, left their shows to be evening news anchors. At the same time, the popularity of online news sites and the frantic press of daily life appear to have led many women to forgo morning TV. Women are also turning increasingly to “mommy blogs,” which now number 6,400, according to the blog search engine Technorati, to swap tales about modern motherhood.
Please check out the rest of this article, this really shows the impact that access to community and content is having on our lifestyles.
If anyone out there had any doubt about the utility of OpenID, there are now 63 million AOL/AIM OpenIDs.
63 million AOL/AIM users can now login to your application using OpenID if you support it…
63 million…
Kathy Sierra answers the question: How can I get our employees to be passionate about the company? Wrong question, she says.
The company should behave just like a good user interface — support people in doing what they’re trying to do, and stay the hell out of their way. Applying the employer-as-UI model, the best company is one in which the employees are so engaged in their work that the company fades into the background.
…
Finally, if you really want your employees to be passionate about the company, take lessons from UI and Usability: let people do what they want and need to do, and get the hell out of their way. Unfortunately, too many of our employers are like really bad software–frustrating us at every turn, behaving inconsistently, not giving us a way to learn new things and develop new, cool capabilities, etc.
She offers this 4 question test to see if you have passion for your work:
A must read.
Rick Ralston of Real Metrics dropped me a line the other day:
We’re thinking of adding a new category to our RealMetrics website for Blogging software. It would be similar to our shared web hosting category at http://www.realmetrics.com/a/shared-hosting. Any thoughts or ideas would be appreciated.
Interesting question. It’s a lot easier to compare the performance of 2 standard web hosts, since you can create a reference page, upload it to each host, and sample the performance of identical pages at different hosts. But for managed blogging, such as BlogHarbor or Typepad or Blogger or WordPress.com or Squarespace, it’s simply not possible to create identical pages. Measuring the performance of an image download or a file download doesn’t measure the true performance of the system. Managed blogging platforms typically generate pages out of a database, so while it’s not possible to create identical pages it’s important to create similar pages on each platform so you can make a valid comparison about the performance of each platform.
Here’s my reply to Rick:
Here’s what I’ve come up with… Most of the things you are measuring with shared hosting apply to blog hosting… The only thing that’s going to be an issue is measuring performance. Why? In measuring standard web hosting, you can measure apples to apples because you are able to upload a standard page or site containing the same number and size of objects to each host. So you are able to compare the retrieval of -identical- 100K of html page and 250K of image downloads for example…
With blog hosting, at least managed blog hosting, you won’t be able to upload a standard page to measure. Well you could, but you really want to measure the speed of let’s say the home page of a blog rather than some static files. Since blogs are typically database driven applications, the real key here is that although you won’t be able to measure oranges to oranges since each blog application will generate a slightly different page, you still want to at least measure oranges to tangerines (OK, I have stretched this analogy way too thin!)…
By that I mean that you’ll want to make sure that each blog contains a set number of identical posts. Create 10 posts of varying length, some with images and some without, and post them to each blog platform. Use the default template supplied with the blogging platform. Take a look at 4 or 5 platforms and see what the page weight comes out to be for a blog containing 5 identical posts and whatever is on the default template. I suspect they will all differ by less than 10%, and if not then I think it should not be of much of a concern but the page weight should be listed in your results so your visitors can take that into consideration…
Anyone out there have any thoughts for metrics to measure performance of managed blogging services?
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I am:
The chief instigator of the “cyberpunk” wave of the 1980s, his razzle-dazzle futuristic intrigues were, for a while, the most imitated work in science fiction. |
Don Norman has a great article titled Simplicity Is Highly Overrated where he talks about how customers aren’t really looking for products to be simpler, they really are looking for more features. He notes
…people are not willing to pay for a system that looks simpler because it looks less capable… I am not advocating bad design. I am simply pointing out a fact of life: purchasers, on the whole, prefer more powerful devices to less powerful ones. They equate the apparent simplicity of the controls with lack of power: coplexity with power. This doesn’t mean everyone. it does mean the majority, however, and this is who the marketing specialists of a company target. Quite apporpriately, in my opinion.
Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software picked up on Don’s article and wrote in Simplicity:
I think it is a misattribution to say, for example, that the iPod is successful because it lacks features. If you start to believe that, you’ll believe, among other things, that you should take out features to increase your product’s success. With six years of experience running my own software company I can tell you that nothing we have ever done at Fog Creek has increased our revenue more than releasing a new version with more features. Nothing. The flow to our bottom line from new versions with new features is absolutely undeniable. It’s like gravity. When we tried Google ads, when we implemented various affiliate schemes, or when an article about FogBugz appears in the press, we could barely see the effect on the bottom line. When a new version comes out with new features, we see a sudden, undeniable, substantial, and permanent increase in revenue.
Both of these articles are required reading…