We have just finished upgrading TechnologyEvangelist.com to WordPress. With this upgrade comes a slew of new features including:

1 - You can now register to the site for your comments. In the upper right area you’ll see a ‘membership’ box. Register there and we’ll remember your info for comments as well as allow us to promote users to authors easily. It’s so community like.

2 - Video and audio comments. Being that we’re pretty heavy on the video here we thought it would be nice if everyone could post a video or audio reply to an article. Under the comments section of every post you’ll see a ‘ Add Webcam’ and ‘Add Audio-Only’ comment. Click on the appropriate box and a flash video recorder will pop up. Record away!

3 - Search no longer sucks.

4 - The site is now dymanic so everything should work a wee bit better. We’re adding WP-Cache to the site to help speed it up further.

5 - We’re working on adding a slew of new plugins that were not available to us under the MovableType platform. Over the coming weeks we’ll have some even cooler things happening, so stop by often and remember to leave your feedback. We love to hear what you think!

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Steve Rubel Twittered last night saying:

Checking out blognation. Like it but wish I could subscribe to individual bloggers. http://us.blognation.com/ 

He raises a great point. It can be annoying on multi-author blogs to have to read everything when you’re only interested in the perspectives of some of the authors. On Technology Evangelist, we address with with individual author feeds on each author page.However, another way to achieve this is to use Yahoo Pipes to filter a blog feed by author. As an example, i created an Yahoo Pipes feed filter for Blognation that creates a filter for the author of your choice. I arbitrarily chose Marc Orchant as the default author, so clicking the Run button will filter the feed for Mr. Orchant unless you switch out the name with other authors.Giving people control over what they consume is going to happen whether you enable it or not. Clearly, few people are filtering RSS feeds on Yahoo Pipes today, but stuff like this is going to happen.

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I planned a meeting at a restaurant in Minneapolis called Buster’s on 28th the other day based on the fact that they have WiFi. However, I forgot to take power into consideration.

After scoping the place out, I couldn’t find an outlet in any of the booths, tables, or at the bar. Luckily, one of the waiters pointed out this outlet above the back corner booth near a TV:

I almost killed myself while plugging in, but once that was done, I was in business.

I’d love to see restaurants get to the point where there is an outlet within reach from every booth. That would be ideal for my eating and computing lifestyle. Of course, I wouldn’t expect every restaurant to honor such a request. But, for places interested in serving the geek crowd, WiFi without power comes up a bit short.

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Seth Godin think search engines still have a lot to room to grow when it comes to comparison type searches:

Seth’s Blog: The haystack

But they’re terrible at connections, at rankings, at horizontal results. They can’t help me find the 25 most important up and coming artists in the United States. They can’t help me find six products that are viable alternatives to something that was just discontinued. They can’t help me rank the service of four accounting firms.

He raises a good point. I get the impression that he expects Google to understand that a product-specific search for a product that’s discontinued should generate links to alternative products.

This is something Amazon does today. I’m sure comparison shopping sites handle it as well.

One area where it’s poorly done today is real estate, where most real estate sites today remove listings once sold rather than pointing people to related properties that are still on the market.

Using search engines, a person could run queries that generate relevant results as well. Try coming up with comparative phrases that may be mentioned on product review sites or blogs to generate appropriate search results. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

“better than”
“replaces the”
“great alternative”

Terms like that - especially when used in quotes - do a great job filtering search results down to sites with opinions on products. Give it a try.

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Anne Zelenka over at Web Worker Daily raises some interesting points about how the web would change if everyone installed ad blocking software in their browsers. Here analysis looks at how this would effect content publishers and consumers of published content:

Ad Blocking: A Market or a Moral Issue?

On the other hand, if so many people find ads annoying rather than helpful, maybe we won’t be worse off with less advertising and different online business models. More direct payment mechanisms like subscription fees or per-article micropayments might become common. And those who make their work freely available anyway on the theory that attention is a form of currency will continue to make it freely available.

She raises some great points. If publishers couldn’t rely on advertising to pay the bills, surely things like subscriptions would grow. And an increase in pay per post advertising would probably happen too.

But let’s take a look at a different angle here. What about companies who aren’t in the online media business? What if your company uses the web to advertise a service or product where the transactions really happen offline? If ad blocking gained a ton of traction, would you be able to get your message in front of prospective customers?

I imagine this comes down to how dependent your business in on online advertising. But the point here is to take a step back and figure out how you can become less dependent on online ads to drive traffic to your website where you can share your message with prospects.

How would you do it? Here are a few ideas to get things started:

1. Create remarkable products or services. People will share your company’s story on your behalf for free if you’ve delivered for them.

2. PR: Create stories around your product that make for interesting news. Bloggers and online news sites are always looking for something interesting to write about. Feed them interesting stuff to write about, but don’t waste their time with stories only a CEO could love.

3. SEO: Rank high for search terms prospective customers are typing into search engines.

What else would you include on this list?

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Erica M from Minneapolis Metroblogging raises an interesting point about the stupidity of offering social bookmarking options for readers on sites where bookmarked content will soon be hidden behind paid archives:

Not-So-Permalinks

Can somebody explain to me the point of having that “save to del.icio.us” option (and Digg, and Reddit, and Newsvine, and Google Bookmarks, and really any bookmarking tool) on Strib and PiPress articles if the articles are only available for a couple of weeks?

Related to this, I consciously seek out news sources that don’t hide their archives from readers when picking sources for blog posts. I do this because linking to paid content sources - or sources requiring registration - is insulting to my future readers. People will continue to stumble upon articles I’ve written months or years go, and should be able to have the same experience with that article as someone reading it on the day it’s published.

For articles that really interest me on sites known to bury their archives, I’ve found myself switching from bookmarking articles that interest me to PDFing the articles and storing them locally.

Another option would be to copy/paste the article into a Google Doc.

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We’re in the process of applying a bunch of updates to the TechnologyEvangelist.com blogging platform, Movable Type. During this time the site may do some pretty wacky and odd stuff as we get our plugins, themes and general code working again.We’ve already completed the MT4 upgrade, now it’s just a matter of tweaking themes and fixing those darned trolls to try and optimize site speed, mobile access, iPhone access, etc.If you run in to any problems or have suggestions for us, please drop me a line at benjaminhigginbotham@technologyevangelist.com.Thank you for your patience.

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While taking the time to research and write posts is probably the biggest time sucker for most bloggers, moderating comments can be a close competitor.

One of the real keys to running a professional and respectable blog is to find a way to generate a congenial conversation in post comments. This post looks at ways to do this with Wordpress.

The screenshot below lists three checkboxes within the admin section of a Wordpress blog that help control how comments are published. The combination of checkboxes is what I’ve come to prefer for Wordpress blogs I’ve run. I’ll walk you through each box below:

“An administrator must always approve the comment” - I’m not a fan of this because it creates more work for me. I don’t want to have to log into the admin section of my blog to approve comments from friends or colleagues of mine. I trust them and I’m confident that they’re not going to say anything that’s overly offensive about me or my fellow readers. Why create more work?

“Comment author must fill out name and e-mail” - It’s nice to know who’s dropping comments. This choice doesn’t guarantee that the person is who they say their are, or that their email is their real email, but forcing something for this field makes the third option choice work better.

“Comment author must have a previously approved comment” - So, you’ve decided you won’t want to approve every comment on the site. How does Wordpress know if someone’s commented before? Based on their name and e-mail address. For example, assume you have a regular reader who’s normally friendly but decides they want to go off on a fellow reader anonymously. While their comments are normally automatically approved, they’ll suddenly fall back into moderation mode for their rant, allowing you to moderate that on both your and their behalf.

The one frustrating thing about this setup is the lack of immediate posting for first-time commenters. They would have a better experience if they were able to see their comment go live immediately. Future posts in this Blogging Tips series will look at ways to make up for this.

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Using consistent naming conventions isn’t always easy. Especially when you’re creating functionality that’s new in the marketplace.

One example of this comes from Google, who seems to be trying to figure out the best way to explain hiding files within their applications.

Within Gmail, they’ve used the term “Archive” for this functionality:

For those of you not familiar with the archive feature, clicking to archive a message in your inbox moves it out of the inbox but doesn’t delete it. It’s still immediately retrievable through search. It’s a great way to file away emails that you’ve processed after reading or responding. You’ll stop wasting time scanning emails you’ve already dealt with.

Google Docs is another application using this functionality. I use Google Docs to draft a lot of the posts for Technology Evangelist. Once posted, I have little use for my draft, but don’t necessarily want to throw it away. Yet I shouldn’t have to clutter up my online folders with old drafts.

Archiving old documents solves this problem.

Strangely, Google has changed the term they use for this functionality within Google Docs from “Archive” to “Hide”:

Which term do you think best describes this functionality?

Will Google standardize on hide?

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Once you’re up and rolling with a few blog posts, you may wonder if anyone’s
reading your. For page views and visitors, there are plenty of stats programs to
choose from from those provided by your web host to 3rd party stats programs.
However, one area where there really is only one choice is for web feed
management. If you’re interested in tracking how many people have subscribe to
your site’s RSS feed you’ll need to burn it through
FeedBurner.




What the does that mean? It basically means you tell FeedBurner the location
(URL) of your blog’s RSS feed so FeedBurner can subscribe to it. FeedBurner then
provides you with a new URL for your feed and you point your visitors to the
FeedBurner version of your feed for subscriptions.



Example: www.yourdomain.com/feed becomes feeds.feedburner.com/yourdomain



FeedBurner will provide reporting to you beyond what you’ll likely be able to
track by yourself. This includes subscription levels, click throughs from RSS
readers to your site, errors your feed may have, and other fun stuff.



One of the nice things about this is you end up with only one subscriber,
FeedBurner, hitting your site directly to check for new posts. Everyone else is
hitting FeedBurner. This makes a difference if your feed becomes popular. For
example, imagine having hundreds of thousands of subscribers hitting your site
every 30 minutes to check for new posts. That kind of traffic can be a pain to
deal with. To put this in perspective, the feed for Technology Evangelist gets
hit around 4 times a minute.



Another nice thing about FeedBurner is their ad network. Once your feed reaches
an undisclosed number of subscribers (cough - 500ish - cough), your site may be
accepted into the FeedBurner ad network. FeedBurner will give you the option of
selling ads on your behalf, thus putting money in your pocket with no work on
your part.



It’s worth noting that some people have had reservations about pointing their
subscribers to an external URL for RSS subscriptions. If this is something that
bothers you, set up a CNAME entry in your DNS records pointing the URL of your
choice from your domain to your FeedBurner URL. For example, you could turn
feeds.yourdomain.com into your site’s feed URL, assuming you have control over
your domain’s DNS records (this isn’t the case for blogs hosted with Blogger,
Typepad, Wordpress.com and other hosted solutions unless you’ve mapped a domain
to their servers).

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