My idea for a cool WordPress Plugin: tracking comments on external blogs

Posted on March 9th, 2008 by Richard Catto 3,224 views

The Scenario

You come across a blogger that you enjoy reading. It’s easy to read their posts and follow all their comments on their blog, simply by browsing around their blog or subscribing to their posts and comments feeds.

However if you want to follow (stalk) their comments on other blogs, it is not so easy. In fact even remembering where all you last commented yourself is not easy to keep track of.

Many of my favourite blogs have now installed a “subscribe to comments” plugin (some at my suggestion) which emails me whenever a subscribed to thread gets a new comment. This is a huge help to me and it has resulted in a lot more comments being made on blogs which have this plugin installed.

Now I wish to propose a new comment tracking plugin: the ability for all my comments on external blogs to be listed on my own blog so that my readers (and I) can easily follow my activities around the blogosphere.

Architecture

As I comment on another blog, I want that blog to send an external comment pingback to the url I supplied. The external comment pingback should include the following information:

• comment author (the name I supplied)
• comment author email address (the email address I supplied)
• my url (the url I supplied)
• their url (the url of the blog post I commented on)
• comment title (WordPress currently does not support comment titles)
• full text of the comment I made

My blog should receive this into an external comment moderation queue and, depending on what options I have selected, be either held privately for my eyes only or be published for all to see. Each individual external comment could be either deleted from the queue, marked private so that only I can see it or published for everyone to view. Editing should not be an option for obvious reasons.

I should be able to publish my list of external comments on a sidebar widget, in a page, in a post or in an RSS feed.

The above situation would require a plugin to be installed on both my blogs and all the external blogs that I comment on.

Effects of this proposed plugin on the blogosphere

I think the benefit of this plugin would be that all the blogs I comment on would receive additional readers and comments because it would enable my readers to easily hop on over to see what I (and others) had said on the blog post I had commented on.

I feel I have addressed the potential objection that some would raise around privacy issues by giving the blog owner the ability to decide which external comments to publish.

Non-WordPress blogs

Any blog platform should be able to write a plugin to dovetail with this external comment pingback protocol by inspecting the WordPress plugin open source code.

It would be desireable that as many blog platforms as possible implement this ability so that it was universal no matter what kind of external blog I leave a comment on.

Implementation

I’ve never written a WordPress plugin before, so I don’t know how to do this right now. I would have to find out. I know that many technical people read my blog, and if you would like to write this plugin, I would be happy to work with you on this project.

Tags: external comment pingback, Plugin
Filed under Plugin | 5 Comments »

Yahoo’s brand new WordPress plugin is being shown the finger by bloggers

Posted on December 16th, 2007 by Richard Catto 3,265 views

Yahoo very recently announced the beta release of their new Yahoo shortcuts plugin for WordPress.

This I got to know of via shoemoney’s rather scathing review of it and of various WordPress personalities.

Jeremy Shoemaker’s blog is a joy to read because he isn’t a suckass uptight wannabe pseudo intellectual blogger who spends 90% of his day kissing the asses of his online buddies and the other 10% trying to sound all intellectual by using obscure words that have most people either reaching for a dictionary or clicking the back button.. This I see too much of in the South African Blogosphere. Pretentiousness. It’s a creeping disease amongst the weak and spineless. Don’t go there. Be yourself. Be normal. FFS!

The Shoemoney blog was listed by Adii as a must read for Web 2.0 professionals, whatever the hell that is. I’m just an ordinary blogger. Web 2.0 is just yet another meaningless buzzword, although not the worst. The most pretentious and most inane phrase I’ve heard in connection with bloggers is "New Media Evangelist".

What the fuck is a new media evangelist!? Do these people go around knocking on doors asking if they can pray with you for your web shite, that it may be saved?

"Let WordPress In! Let Him In! Oh Mighty Laawd, let WordPress In!"

I think I’ll take a hot cup of cocoa with a gaggle of Mormons anyday over that bullshit.

Now cunning Yahoo has dumped this oh so impressive plugin on the WordPress blogging community obviously with the hope of getting rave reviews and… the reverse has happened.

Why?

Because they’re pulling moves, and their ulterior motives are so blatant, that it has led to many bloggers taking offence. So far, most of them seem to be American bloggers. I just bet the many obsequious South African bloggers are already laying out their prayer mats so they can get down on their knees to kiss Yahoo butt come Tuesday.

Yahoo enlisted one of WordPress’ famous developers, Alex King, to write their Yahoo shortcuts plugin. He has done a pretty good job for Yahoo. I’ve installed the beta release on this blog, and I’ve used it to add pictures to many of my blog posts, including many older posts in my archives.

That is the one feature that HAS received the thumbs up from most bloggers. The plugin does an excellent job of integrating flickr into WordPress so that one can find a suitable image which is hosted on flickr, and insert it into your blog post without much fuss at all.

It is what the rest of the plugin does that is not so kosher. Yahoo analyses your post for keywords and then automatically links them to various Yahoo resources, many of which appear to be commercial in nature, WITHOUT REMUNERATING THE BLOGGER.

They’re offering a T-shirt to anyone who installs the plugin. And you have to be resident in the United States. They must be insane. Yahoo’s plugin effectively inserts text link adverts into the blog post without paying the blogger. Sure, you can remove them, but what the fuck was Yahoo thinking?

Yahoo must own an enormous pair of BRASS BALLS to risk offending bloggers like this. They’re already down in the search game – I mean, I like NEVER use Yahoo to search for anything. Yahoo is so stupid. What is it that most bloggers want most of all?

MONEY from their blogs.

Google understood this and gave bloggers Google adsense adverts. It has not been smooth sailing for them. Google has alienated many bloggers with their harsh policies around alleged click fraud. So there is an opportunity for someone to step in and save the day for bloggers by giving them a cool new blog toy that helps them make some money from their writing.

Instead Yahoo has come in and low-balled bloggers with their "free plugin" and offer of a T-shirt, but no money.

SHOW US THE GODDAMNED MONEY, YAHOO!

Or go home.

Don’t try and take advantage of us. Show some respect for bloggers. We put in a heck of a lot of hard work, spilling our sweat and blood and tears into our writing, and many of us would like to get something tangible back from that.

So, still no white knight for bloggers has appeared on the horizon. But surely, some day one will come for us? Surely?

Tags: Alex King, monetize blogs, Plugin, WordPress, yahoo
Filed under Plugin, yahoo | 2 Comments »

Whose the DADDY of social networking sites?

Posted on September 26th, 2007 by Richard Catto 4,535 views

It’s not Digg, neither reddit, nuh uh del.icio.us, nor muti, amatomu is not-the-mama, afrigator who?

It’s StumbleUpon!

If you want traffic, get onboard StumbleUpon today!

I discovered this yesterday when I installed Alex King’s beautiful WordPress plugin called Share This. It’s a thing of total beauty. Customising it with your favourite social site is child’s play. I added Muti to it in under 5 minutes, including the little muti thumbnail graphic.

Ironically, the first site I shared one of my posts with was StumbleUpon which produced a very healthy flow of traffic. Seeing that, I was encouraged to stumble more of my posts, and I experienced a sudden rush of people from all over the world. A heady experience when that happens.

Share This doesn’t spread a whole row of tiny little graphics across your web site (that no-one can decypher), instead it places a simple green distinctive Share This icon to left of the words. Clicking on it, brings up a window which allows your visitors to share your posts with all the social sites you have installed, as well as send your post to friends via email.

Alex King is working to integrate his amazing plugin with ShareThis.com who offer a very useful service. It integrates with facebook, so I was able to share a site with a friend directly onto her facebook wall. I think it would be better, though, if it went to her facebook email.

Okay, so now I have to thank Candy Tothill for introducing me to StumbleUpon. Thank you, Candy! She is a published South African author and she is also an avid blogger – insidecandy.blogspot.com.

Tags: afrigator, Alex King, amatomu, Candy Tothill, del.icio.us, Digg, Inside Candy, muti, Plugin, reddit, Share This, StumbleUpon, Web traffic, WordPress
Filed under StumbleUpon, Web traffic | 6 Comments »