ContentRobot

Over the weekend, WordPress launched version 2.5. We have been playing with a beta copy and have been very impressed. If you check out WordPress.org, you’ll even see new site design that aligns with what the software looks like. According to WordPress (and a bit of commentary by ContentRobot), here are the goodies you can expect:

User Features

Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard — WP determined what’s most important in the dashboard and rearranged it elements to allow you to focus on your blogging efforts. Curious to see if it will be easy to get used to the new “admin” - but it looks great.

Dashboard widgets — These (customizable!) widgets can show you stats about your posts, latest comments, people linking to you, new and popular plugins, and WordPress news.

Multi-file upload with progress bar — Select a whole of folder images or music or videos at once and it’ll show you the progress of each upload.

Search posts and pages — Search now includes pages too, a great boon for those with blog-powered websites.

Tag management — Add, rename, delete, and do whatever else you like to do with tags from inside WordPress without plugins.

Password strength meter — Helps you to pick a strong profile password. A great feature for us lazy password creators!

Concurrent editing protection — For those of you on multi-author blogs, WordPress will lock and prevent you from overwriting changes if others have the same post opened at the same time. This is a mature step for the software.

Few-click plugin upgrades — For some of the latest plugins in their stable, WordPress can download and install an upgrade for you. However, this is still dependent a little bit on your host setup, so let ContentRobot continue to help you with all your of plugins.

Friendlier visual post editor — WordPress claims that the new WYSIWYG, which uses version 3.0 of TinyMCE,  “doesn’t mess with your code anymore.” This could be the best feature of them all.

Built-in galleries — The new shortcode [gallery] will allow you to display all your thumbnails and captions; each can link to a page where people can comment on the individual photos.

Cool Developer Features

Salted passwords — By using the phpass library to stretch and salt all passwords stored in the database, it makes brute-forcing them impractical.

Secure cookies — Cookies are now encrypted.

Inline documentation — The vast majority of the new code displays inline documentation that explains the functions and documents their arguments.

Shortcode API — Shortcodes are little bracket-delineated strings that can be magically expanded at runtime to something more interesting. They give users a short, easy to type and copy/paste string they can move around their post without worrying about messing up complex HTML or embed codes.

Ready to Upgrade?

Upgrading is similar to versions past, but of course you have to worry about plugins that have been left behind. We’ll be letting the bugs shake out and then offering an upgrade path to existing and new clients alike.

The biggest complaint we have about blogging is comment spam.

Have you ever seen what “people” attempt to get posted on to your blog? Going through our spam folder today, we see links and listings that include the following “topics”:

• Porn - from lesbian to teen to sex tapes of your “favorite” female celebrities
• Sex drugs - Cialis to Viagra (and all their related “misspellings”)
• Gambling - casinos and online blackjack
• Are you “man” enough? - now you “can” meet all those gorgeous women who are ignoring you!
• Even those seemingly innocuous “hi” and “great site” comments can lead you down a scary path, should you choose to click on them

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In our last post we griped about the things that we don’t like about WordPress. But we recommend it to all our clients, and here’s why:

• It’s easy to install (both the software and a variety of plugins take mere minutes)
• Customization is limitless (from design to plugins and widgets and programming) you can do most anything you want with WordPress)
• It’s built to make your blog - or blog-powered website - to be search engine friendly (with nice, long and readable URLs, plug-in magic, pinging, and good writing you can get fairly easily indexed on Google and the like with little effort on your part)
• Has good content management (while writing your posts, you can draft, autosave, and postdate, and easily manage comments and spam)
• Worldwide support (the smart and creative development community has helped us out plenty of times - thank you!)

Tell us what you love about WordPress and why you use it to blog!

We consider ourselves WordPress experts, yet we still run into issues that make it an imperfect platform. They include:

• No decent tool to manage images … and it’s still to hard to insert images consistently and easily.
• The WYSIWYG, which is built upon TinyMCE, still likes to generate bad code or even known to mess up code done in the Code Tab … darn those curly quotes!
• The dashboard is still pretty ugly … and we were always surprised that Automattic never included new themes with any new releases.
• Plugin authors that offer no help … sketchy documentation on their plugin pages and no responses to requests for help drives us nuts. We do want to say tho, the majority of plugin authors are great and really make WordPress what it is!
• The snarky responses on the WordPress forums … we feel bad for those (often newbies) who are just seeking a bit of guidance - we all have to start somewhere.

What we do love about WordPress? Find out here.

What about WordPress makes you crazy? What would you improve?

In looking for an alternative to Feedblitz, who during the summer was undergoing some massive changes and growing pains, we stumbled upon Zookoda.

This newsletter service seemed to offer everything we wanted …

• Adding it to your blog was easy
• You could customize the newsletter’s design to match your blog without additional fees
• The content was automated from your newsfeed
• Sending broadcasts were fairly intuitive; and scheduling them to send when you wanted was a nice feature
• It was free

So, we signed up a client and what started like a dream, slowly evolved into a nightmare. The feeds wouldn’t refresh, stories would be re-sent if we didn’t manually delete them, and emails to tech support went unnoticed. Then came November, a blank newsletter was sent, the recurring schedule was deleted, and any broadcasts would not be delivered.

While we were willing to put up with some of the quirks of Zookoda, we had hoped to overcome some of the obstacles that we were continually running into. When we went to BlogWorld last month, we were happy to see that the newly-named IZEA (formerly Pay-Per-Post) had a booth at the show. We wanted to find out what they had in mind for the seemingly unsupported service. Unfortunately, no one was there to talk to “tech” to us - oh, the red flags were waving.

During all this, a client who trusted our judgment was now (rightfully) upset. We scrambled to keep up with the issues, but we finally ran out of answers for Zookoda. We performed a fairly simple conversion to Feedblitz for them today - fingers crossed that their newsletter woes are behind them.

Then, we read today’s Problogger’s post on Zookoda and why he doesn’t recommend them anymore. In serendipitous solidarity, ContentRobot doesn’t recommend them either.

Are you looking to send newsletters from your blog? We suggest Feedblitz. Thanks for being responsive and reliable - everything we really want!

By their very nature, blogs are the building blocks of Web 2.0. For those of you who don’t know, the term Web 2.0 was coined by Tim O’Reilly back in 2003, and is defined by wikipedia as:

… a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which facilitate collaboration and sharing between users.

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Do you use Feedburner to manage your blog’s feeds? ContentRobot loves Feedburner and has often recommended their fine service. See our earlier posts here and here.

We are even happier to do so now because this Tuesday, they made two Pro features free: MyBrand and Stats PRO. Those who had been paying for these services won’t be charged after June 2007.
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Looking for a great way to attract those search engines to index and rank your site? Check out these WordPress plugins to help you spread the word about your blog.

Google XML Sitemaps
This nifty little plugin will allow you to index your blog to create a sitemaps.org-compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog - most importantly, this sitemap is supported by Google, MSN Search and Yahoo!. While it doesn’t create a physical sitemap page, it traverses your blog’s content and automatically builds an XML report that search engines can easily digest. Our only complaint? It slooooows the site’s administration down when saving posts, due the sitemap being rebuilt.
>> Read more about Google XML Sitemaps
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Late last year, ContentRobot lamented that using Microsoft Word to craft blog posts was asking for trouble.

One of the bigger issues we had was wacky formatting of certain characters (including curly quotes that display as typos or mistakes in many RSS readers).

To combat some of this silliness for our WordPress clients, we installed Unfancy Quote by Semiologic. In a nutshell, it would remove any styling to the following:

• double quotes … “this is a quote”
• single quotes .. ‘just one hash, please’
• apostrophes … like the possessive: ContentRobot’s

And, bingo, newsreaders were now a lot happier and displayed clean feeds. Everyone looked much more professional.

Enter WordPress 2.1 and its revamped WYSIWYG editor. You can now take advantage of some “hidden buttons” that allow you to easily cut and paste from Word. The new buttons are “Paste as Plain Text” and “Paste from Word.”

That’s great! But why hidden? Oh well, it’s pretty easy to get them to show and use. Click here to see how.

And here’s a WordPress thread for more information about these buttons in the new WYSIWYG.

Want to instantly add interactivity to your blog? Consider adding polls to your site. And here are more 5 good reasons …

1. They encourage discussion and can spark new ideas and content.
2. The poll’s results can add to your incoming links, bringing up your blog in search engine rankings.
3. A series of polls can offer your readers a sense of ownership, and these loyal viewers will continue to participate over time.
4. Because it’s easier to respond to a poll than provide a comment, it helps to demonstrate that your blog is alive.
5. They can increase blog visits from your RSS feeds because readers have to jump to the site to cast a result or see the current results.

Some Blog Polls
While our favorite tool is MajikWidget, here are other poll add-ins you can include on your site.

• Blog Polls.com
• Vizu
• Free Blog Poll
• Blog Flux Polls
• WP Polls for WordPress

Thanks to a recent Problogger discussion on polls for inspiration for this post.