WordPress.com has activated a feature without warning that has many up in arms of protest, making it one of the least welcoming additions to WordPress.com. Since the beginning of WordPress.com, one of the most requested features has been the ability to showcase related posts from our own blogs. WordPress.com has activated this ability, but the links link to WordPress.com blogs, not our own. This is bad for many reasons, which I’m sure you’ve already thought of. No control. Implied recommendation or endorsement. Inappro... lire la suite
WordPress.com has activated a feature without warning that has many up in arms of protest, making it one of the least welcoming additions to WordPress.com. Since the beginning of WordPress.com, one of the most requested features has been the ability to showcase related posts from our own blogs. WordPress.com has activated this ability, but the links link to WordPress.com blogs, not our own. This is bad for many reasons, which I’m sure you’ve already thought of. No control. Implied recommendation or endorsement. Inappropriate links. And a lot of confusion for our readers who believe we choose these links or that they will lead to links on our blog related to what we blog about. I’m sure I missed some other bad reasons for not liking this new feature. It’s important that we link to other bloggers, especially others within the WordPress.com community to support and encourage them. It’s wrong to do so without some control. You can read the announcement, Possibly Related Posts, on the WordPress.com blog. My apologies to those who have been led astray by these links in my own blog posts. Thank you to everyone who brought this to my attention, worried something was wrong. I even had a couple people warn me that my blog had been hacked as the links were definitely inappropriate. Thank you for worrying and watching out for me and my blog. In the next few days we’ll have an update that allows you to block specific blogs from showing up, and eventually that setting will also apply to the tag surfer, blog surfer, and top blogs so when you block a blog you should never see it again. With 3 million blogs - albeit less than a million active - I don’t have enough life to block all the blogs that show up as “possibles” in every list on every blog post. I cannot imagine the implementation of such a process. I’d rather choose who I link to than have to exclude them. Among the links on my blog posts here that I tested before turning off the feature, the average was 2 in seven links per post having a vague relationship to my content. The majority of the links went to non-English blogs, blogs no longer updated (since 2006 in several cases), and totally unrelated content, such as an article about a WordPress Plugin for creating, among other things, related posts, linking to A Third of Patients On Transplant List Are Not Eligible from the Washington Post. I just learned that the Washington Post has blogs on WordPress.com, but what transplants have to do with WordPress...well, it’s anyone’s guess. Either way, 28 percent average “success” rate isn’t good enough for me. Nor is adding to my workload. To Turn Off Related Posts on WordPress.com To turn off the new related post feature on WordPress.com blogs: Have Your Say on the New Possibly Related Posts Feature If you are not a fan of the implementation of this related posts feature, let your voice be heard. Many are reporting links to inappropriate blogs and content, and some worry about where these links are sending their readers. You can comment on the following WordPress.com Forums discussions: · I DON’T WANT POSSIBLY RELATED LINKS ON MY POSTS · Possibly related Posts · Possibly Related Posts and trolls/attacks Create Your Own Related Posts Feature on WordPress.com Blogs I share how I manually create my related posts at the bottom of my blog posts in Which WordPress Plugins Does Lorelle on WordPress Use?, Adding a Signature To Personalize Your Blog Post, and WordPress.com Blog Bling: Signatures and Writing Code. Site Search Tags: wordpress news, wordpress.com news, wordpress.com, wordpressdotcom, wordpresscom, possibly related, related posts, feature, possibly related posts, related posts feature
The interesting twist to this involves WordPress.com. Those wishing to enter their submission for consideration as a guest blog post are requested to register for a WordPress.com account and including the registration email address in your submission by email. When he gives permission to those with the rare privilege of guest blogging on his blog, they will be given access to his new WordPress.com blog. Submitted articles will be saved in Draft mode and he will review them, then copy them over to Problogger for final publishing. This is an interesting use of WordPress.com as a submission center. I’m not sure what will actually be on the proposed WordPress.com blog, but it’s novel way of filtering through content within a familiar interface while controlling access to your main blog. For those unfamiliar with the WordPress interface, I recommend reading the guide: What Do I Do With My New Wordpress.com Blog? Site Search Tags: guest blogging, problogger, darren rowse, wordpress.com, wordpressdotcom, wordpresscom, wordpress news
Last week I experimented with LoudTwitter, a tool used to post your Twitter tweets to your blog. I wasn’t sure it would work with a WordPress.com blog, but it does. However, with the number of complaints from readers, it was not welcome on this blog. LoudTwitter publishes your Twitter tweets in a blog post once a day on your blog using XML-RPC. It will work on self-hosted versions of WordPress and WordPress.com blogs. Just sign up your blog and fill in the information, click through the email verification, set the time you want it posted, and it will automatically post that day’s worth of Twitter tweets on your blog. It’s important to bring your Twitter posts into some social media services, and your blog posts and other social media services into Twitter, but I’m not sure if Twitter really belongs in a blog post unless you are very active on Twitter and the content within your tweets is extremely valuable to your readers. Having spent a lot of time digging through Twitter over the past year, I’m still hunting for timeless content. It’s there, but it’s like sifting for diamonds among the dust. · Lack of Category Control: LoudTwitter has no method currently to post the Twitter Tweets to a specific blog post category. It just dumps your Twitter stream direction into a blog post called “Twitter Tweets” in your default post category. This means that if “uncategorized” is your default post category, it is found there. If LoudTwitter had category control, then the content could be put into a category of its own on your blog. You could move that category off your front page and even out of your blog post feed. Those digging for those tidbits of information found within your tweets could still find it, and those wanting to monitor your tweets on your blog could do so. There are better ways to monitor your tweets away from your blog and no one wants to see them as full blown blog posts. Really? · No Editing Capability on Twitter: I work very hard to ensure my blog posts are as clean and neat as any term paper with careful attention to grammar and spelling - even though some slip through. However, Twitterers tend to tweet while walking down the street, talking on the phone, and doing other distracting things like driving which causes a lot of errors. They also abbreviate terms and phrases that might make no sense to the uninitiated. Once a tweet is released on Twitter, you can’t easily take it back and edit it. To then have it re-published on your blog compounds your gaf. # 11:46 Idiot Alert: I recorded video atbwe08 vertical not horizontal. ARGH! How do I flip or rotate digital video? # 14:45 Idiot Alert Off. FOUND IT! How to flip a vertical video back to horizontal. is.gd/31N1 Simple and easy! Whew. Site Search Tags: twitter, tweets, loudtwitter, twitter blog posts, social media, experiment, testing loudtwitter, tweets on your blog, blog tweets, publishing twitter tweets, publishing twitter, microblog, microblogging
It was late and I needed to repeat the use of an image I uploaded a year ago to the Blog Herald. I know WordPress is working on a new image uploader and multimedia management interface, but it can’t come soon enough for me. Clicking through only a few groups of the hundreds of images I’ve uploaded to the blogs is time-consuming and frustrating. This process is so much easier than clicking through the current WordPress image browse feature when you are dealing with hundreds and hundreds of images.
Many people like to see these graphic representatives of their blog next to their comments, or now, with the new addition of avatars and Gravatars to WordPress.com, in their WordPress Administration Dashboard listing of the top posts, My Comments comment follow panel, and on the Comments Panel, as well as within the comments of many WordPress Themes. Adding Gravatars to WordPress and WordPress.com Blogs Then Gravatars support was enabled for all WordPress.com users. Those with a Gravatar attached to their email will see their Gravatar image appearing on all WordPress.com blogs, as soon as they finish enabling all WordPress.com Themes. WordPress.com bloggers can add an avatar image to their blog by going to the Users > Your Profile panel. In a box currently on the left side is where to upload your image. The image should be no bigger than 128 pixels, though 80 pixels square is the standard. The image must withstand “shrinkage” down to 16 pixels, the size that appears on the Administration Panels Dashboard. On most blogs, the comments area features an 80 pixels square image. On the WordPress.com Administration Panels, the image varies from 48 pixels on the My Comments panel, 32 pixels on the Comments Panel, then shrinks down to 16 pixels on the Top Posts list on the Dashboard Panel. On the front page of the WordPress.com site, the avatar images are 128 pixels and 48 pixels for the top blog posts listings. On the Blogs of the Day on WordPress.com site which tracks the most popular blog posts and blogs on WordPress.com, the avatars for the most popular posts are 96 pixels square. As you can see, the image is clear at 128 and 80 pixels, but the image quality drops to nothing as it gets smaller. Only the color is retained. This test makes me reconsider the avatar graphic, don’t you think? Then how often is my avatar going to be in the top 10 blog posts lists and the 16 pixel size used? Hmm? · Blog Branding: Bringing Touchy-feely Relationships to Blogs Site Search Tags: avatar, gravatar, wordpress tips, wordpressdotcom, wordpress.com, wordpresscom, blog brand, blog identity, graphics, images, photographs