ContentRobot

Chris Garrett, one of our favorite bloggers from across the pond, posted a story today about why WordPress is gaining a foothold in the business community.

Here are some of the highlights of this article:

• … The growing use of WordPress as a platform rather than as a blog. Many people are now looking to WordPress as a CMS or as a framework. (He note that even The Number 10 Downing Street new website is going to be 100% WordPress.)
• Companies are looking for a lower cost tactical solution. Rather than a long, drawn out, expensive project, they want something quick, nimble, efficient and effective. They know with a WordPress site they can be up and running, fast, and making sales in weeks rather than months.
• The charge is being led by sales and marketing functions, consciously avoiding official channels and especially the IT dept
• They are looking for “right now” solutions, but as most of us have seen, quick fixes tend to stick around, especially when the solution is found to be proven and beats other more complicated ones.
• WordPress isn’t just being used because it is cheap, it is growing in favor because it works.

With a few weeks of a-listers expressing their disillusionment with blogging, this is a refreshing piece. Like Chris, ContentRobot happily has not seen any downturn of interest for our WordPress expertise, even with the horrible economy. The business community will take over the next wave of blogging - hurray to that!

WordPress announced that version 2.6 - codenamed Tyner - is now available for download today!

What’s hot in 2.6?

• Taking auto-save to the next level and view who made what changes when to any post or page through a super-easy interface, much like Wikipedia or a version control system.
• Now see the differences between two versions posts.
• “Press This” allows you to extract the embed code for videos and pictures
• Google Gears speeds up blogging by caching or keeping a copy of commonly-used Javascript and CSS files on your computer. Just install Gears for Firefox or Internet Explorer (support for Safari and Opera pending). WordPress works just fine without it, you just get a little extra juice when you have it installed.
• Theme previewing allows you to test driving themes before making a switch over publicly

Some minor updates we also like:

• Image captions
• Bulk management of plugins
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG
• Customizable default avatars.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• Toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs and the upgrade from the 2.5 should be painless.

ContentRobot has been testing a beta for sometime and we’ll be offering it to our clients ASAP!

The WordPress team is launching its WordPress for iPhone application sometime soon, in conjunction with Apple’s iTunes App store.

Features include:

• Support for multiple blogs
• Creating and editing posts
• Uploading photos from your library or the camera
• Privacy settings

Now you can manage your WordPress blog wherever you are. Click on the image above to see the screenshots or see a screencast of this very cool app.

ContentRobot can’t wait! We think it will be a great companion to our very own iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme! We also want to shout out to CatsWhoCode who wrote this very helpful post on how to easily customize our plugin!

Enjoy the day WordPress and Apple fans!

WP Candy has announced that July 1st is Unofficial International WordPress Day, and we wanted to celebrate the existence of WordPress along with them!

Why Do We Use It?

The flexibility of the WordPress software and the ability to extend it is the best. WordPress has the best community of developers out there who are ready to help you at any time. Our clients love it because for the first time in their business, they can touch content that they never could before.

How WordPress Has Helped Our Business

ContentRobot is here because of WordPress! We enjoy being blog developers and integrators and can’t think of anything more fun to do! We have specialized on WordPress technology and haven’t regretted this core decision for a second.

Thank You Automattic!

We have had the pleasure of meeting Matt Mullenweg and some of the Automattic team last fall at BlogWorld Expo. We are impressed with this team and have enjoyed the evolution of all their software properties.

Happy International WordPress Day, everyone!

ContentRobot loves the Firefox browser!

We often tell our clients to use it because it is error-free, speedy, and little things like the spell-checking helps immensely when blogging.

Firefox 3 Download Day

Firefox is in the middle of its download day and they want your help to set the record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. Go get Firefox 3 by June 18, 2008 @ 2:16 p.m. EDT and be included in the count.

Do you use an external blog services? We often encourage our clients to add some to their blogging toolkit (for example, Feedburner for RSS tools, Feedblitz for blog-driven newsletters), but we hadn’t considered outsourcing your comments.

We have been reading the debate regarding third party commenting apps, such as IntenseDebate, Disqus, and CoComment. They each attempt to bridge your blog with a full-service commenting solution that is managed (and promoted) by them.

As the Weblog Tools Collection team asked:

Who really owns that comment? You or the blogger? Or should there be shared ownership between the two? … Do you care who “owns” your comments? … Do you feel the need to edit comments (beyond misspellings and typos)?

They also suggested that:

Blogs should consider developing a publicly accessible commenting policy. This policy should clearly explain what you as the blog author will do with comments posted on your site, who retains ownership of those comments and explain circumstances which would require you to edit an end user’s comment.

We haven’t recommended any commenting tools to our clients. We are hesitant because your comments would reside outside your blog and you are now dependent upon that service to be up and running (or even in business). We agree that WordPress commenting can be improved, but we are reticent to give up the control of them, despite the community-building advantages that each service claims to provide.

Do you use them or would you take advantage of them?

Do you have a hobby that you just have to share with others? ContentRobot would encourage you to get blogging!

Whether you are excited about knitting, gardening, or playing with model trains, we think you should create yourself a “hobby blog!”

As WordPress experts, ContentRobot says click over to WordPress.com and we promise can be blogging in mere minutes upon signup.

ContentRobot’s Hobby Blog

One member of the ContentRobot team has developed her own hobby blog on WordPress.com. The Diamondbacks Rock Blog allows Karen to write about her daughter’s little league team. In a few hours, the blog provided information about the team and the league, and offered an easy way to keep the parents informed about any changes in schedule, upload photos (and videos soon), and publish game-day reports.  Go check it out:  http://dbacksrock.wordpress.com

Why Choose WordPress.com for Your Hobby Blog?

While WordPress.com has some limitations, it’s a real nice, easy, and free way to get blogging. It has so much to offer in terms of both design and functionality.

Themes

There are currently 67 templates to choose from, and many of them can be customized with a graphical header (with its built-in cropping tool, its quite easy to do) and/or implementing a different color pallet.

Before you pick a theme for your blog, consider the following:

• How many columns do you want (1, 2, or 3)? What elements will they contain?
• Do you need to display a menu? A navigation system is nice when you have supporting pages that fall outside of your blog posts.
• What does your blog’s home page contain? You can choose to display a “static page” or your reverse chronological blog posts.

Because the design is separate from the content, you can change them “on-the-fly” to see what look you ultimately want. With a little thought, your blog can look professional at no cost.

Widgets

Most of the themes are considered widget-ready. This means that you can add functionality, often to the sidebars, without knowing much (if any) programming.

Common widgets that are nice to include are:

• Recent posts (while its nice to have people scroll through your blog, it’s nice to give them a bit of navigation to go directly to the post they are interested in)
• Archives (give them the ability to step through your blog by the last 12 months)
• Category Listing / Topic Cloud (another nice navigation option allows visitors to see posts grouped by category, the topic cloud can give a visual view of what you are writing about)
• RSS feed (allow visitors to subscribe to your blog and receive your content in a news reader)
• Other fun widgets are:
  • Flickr (show off your photos by connecting to your Flickr account)
  • Email subscriptions (let them signup to receive your content via email, great for those who do not understand the power of RSS)
  • Social sharing (allows visitors to submit your post to delicious, digg, etc.)

Advantages of Using WordPress.com

• You get a full version of the software
• You’ll always be on the latest version of the software and related plugins/widgets
• Easy to change your theme
• Free* blogging in minutes

Disadvantages of Using WordPress.com

• * Your site will hang off of the WordPress.com URL unless you pay an additional fee (upgrade for $10/year)
• * Lack of flexibility when it comes to design and some customizations may require you to pay additional fees (upgrade to customize your CSS for $15/year)
• * You only have so much storage, going over your 3GB limit will impose additional fees (extra storage starts at $20/yr for an additional 5 GBs)

While ContentRobot encourages businesses to pursue a custom blog strategy, there are times when available free tools can fit the blogging bill - like using WordPress.com to create a Little League blog!

On this day in 2003, Matt Mullenweg announced that first release of WordPress was available for download. Version 0.7 features included:

• Texturize — So good it’ll make your quotes curl.
• WordPress Links — A link manager with everything you’d expect, from Weblogs.com support to a handy bookmarklet. Manage as many blogrolls as you like, and have complete control over their display.
• XHTML 1.1 — WordPress is complaint with XHTML standards up to 1.1, though by default it sends a 1.0 document type to avoid compatibility issues.
• Highly Intelligent Line Breaks — Occasionally called “nl2br on steroids,” this brand new function adds line breaks except where there is already a block level tag or another line break.
• New Administration Interface — We’ve made it as simple as possible, and no more. Everything has been restructured from the ground up in a fully compliant XHTML/CSS interface.
• Manual Excerpts — This allows you to handcraft summaries of your posts to appear in your RSS feed and other places.
• New Default Templates — Again we’ve streamlined theses with the latest in simple, easy-to-understand standard XHTML and CSS. And not a CSS hack in sight.
• Plus numerous behind the scenes code cleanups, making this release faster and more stable than ever.

Thanks, WordPress - enjoy the party!

Hate seeing trackback spam intermingled with your blog’s comments?

It used to drive us nuts, too.

After some searching, we stumbled upon this great WordPress add-on: Simple Trackback Validation Plugin.

According to the plugin author, it performs simple but very effective tests on all incoming trackbacks to stop trackback spam.

When a trackback is received, this plugin:

1. Checks if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to. This reveals almost every spam trackback (more than 99%) since spammers do usually use bots which are not running on the machine of their customers.
2. Retrieves the web page located at the URL included in the trackback. If the page doesn’t a link to your blog, the trackback is considered to be spam. Since most trackback spammers do not set up custom web pages linking to the blogs they attack, this simple test will quickly reveal illegitimate trackbacks. Also, bloggers can be stopped abusing trackback by sending trackbacks with their blog software or webservices without having a link to the post.

There are several options available, including:

• Enabling logging to get all actions
• Selecting how to treat spam trackbacks (do not save in the database or mark as spam or place into moderation, and more)

It’s a great plugin because it makes for a cleaner, faster, better looking blog. We encourage you go try it today.

PSST! Did you know that up until recently that ContentRobot’s company website had been running atop of *gasp* Drupal? Yes “the WordPress experts” finally converted to this superior platform when we launched our “naked theme” site last month.

While we were hoping to be farther along and show off parts of our new look, we decided to continue to work on the blog-powered website’s underpinnings first. So, we have bitten the bullet and upgraded our site to version 2.5 (and found that the conversion was rather painless).

We are ready to offer upgrades to our clients and feel confident working within the new environment. It does have its foibles, but we are pleased overall with this latest effort from Automattic.

As the weather warms here in the Northern Hemisphere, we hope you are also warming up to WP 2.5. Let us know your experiences so far. We hope our lack of design doesn’t leave you cold - the melt comes soon!