I have been wanting to add threaded comments to the blog so that is possible to reply to a specific comment rather than the whole chain of comments. In the past I had used the Brian’s Threaded Comment’s Plugin. There have been some changed to WordPress with 2.7 and 2.8 and Brian’s plugin has some been updated since 2008. I started to search for another solution but I couldn’t find a plugin that didn’t require me to make changes to the template.
A friend suggested Disqus as a solution. Disqus is a service outside of WordPress that allows people to create a profile which can be used whenever they leave comments on a blog that has Disqus – you don’t have to have a Disqus plugin to leave a comment on a blog with Disqus. Continue Reading »
Twitter offers some widgets to display information on your blog, but the widgets for wordpress blogs are pretty limited. Here are some other tools that I have tried out on this blog and others to help you connect your blog and twitter (by the way you can follow blogtelling on twitter here):
1. TwitterCounter
TwitterCounter offers some widgets that you can add to your sidebar. I believe that TwitterCounter is still in beta but I found it very easy to set up – just enter your twitter name and go.
- a box that displays the number of people following you on twitter
- a box that shows your most recent followers, you can customize the number of people that are displayed and the colors
TwitterCounter also offers a nice page of stats about how many people are following you over time.
2. WP-Twitip-Id Plugin
This is a wordpress plugin that adds an extra field to the comments section where people can leave their twitter ID when they leave a comment. It is pretty easy to install and you can customize how you want the commenters Twitter Id to display next to their comment. I have installed the WP-Twitip-Id plugin on this blog so you can leave you Twitter Id when you leave a comment.
3. TwitterFeed
This is a helpful tool that creates a tweet from your RSS feed. It is a great way to automatically post a tweet when you write a new blog post. TwitterFeed is easy to set up – just enter your RSS feed and your twitter account info and you are good to go. The most difficult part of TwitterFeed is logging in with OpenID – I just set up an account with MyOpenID which made the process much easier. TwitterFeed lets you customize how often your tweets are updated and how many tweets you want to post.
I was also going to include TweetSnap, which displayes your most recent tweet in a pretty image, in this list but I can’t find a quick way to change the size of the image so I don’t think it is as helpful as the others listed above.
Check out these other posts about Twitter tools on Twitip and Quick Online Tips.
Image by Yo Mostro via Flickr
WordPress is very very easy to use and I think it is one of the best blogging platforms out there. Almost everything you can set up yourself and you usually don’t need any help to quickly get a good looking blog up and on the web. But sometimes you want to take things to the next level or sometimes you start messing with code that you aren’t quite sure what are doing. Where do you go for help? Many of my friends call me and I tweak it til it gets fixed. Who do I call for help? Well until recently – I wasn’t sure.
I was really happy to learn about this site WeFixWp.com. I think I learned about this site from Chris Brogan and I am going to hire them to help me fix up the back end and the theme on IheartPGH.com, which has had more than a few hiccups in the past and to help me update the theme. It is time for a blog makeover and I think getting some outside help with that will help improve the whole blog.
When I set up IheartPGH – I didn’t know what a blog was and I wasn’t planning on setting up an ongoing site that would actually get traffic so I found the cheapest web hosting I could find. As the site grew I forgot about the hosting and it finally came to a big bad crash and we were offline for almost a month. the folks at El-chepo- hosting were of no help. I blogged a plea for help and thankfully an old intern came to the rescue and moved everything over to a hosting account at Media Temple. Thus far – Media Temple has been great – no down time and they have 24 hours phone support. Meida Temple also allows you to host multiple urls on 1 hosting account. There are still some kinks on the back end and I have been afraid to upgrade wordpress ever since. So I am turning to the folks at WeFixWP.com to help with the repair/upgrade.
Some more reading about taking your blog to the next levle
While reading the daily update from ChrisBrogan.com today I noticed a new little link at the bottom of the post:
I have spent many an afternoon trying to set up a reblogging feature on WordPress but I have never had much success. Reblogging is publishing post from other blogs on your blog. So I was interested in checking out this little link. The REBLOG link takes you to the website for Zemanta. Zemanta is a tool that suggests related content and pictures to your posts. Zemanta can be used in 2 ways – You can add it as a plugin to WordPress or there is a browser extension you can add to your internet. I am writing this post using Zemanta and so far it is a dream. In one click I was able to link the words “browser extension” to the wikipedia page. Zemanta also suggested about 20 pictures that might be good for this post. With 1 click I was able to add the image of the screenshot above.
Zemanta also suggests some related blog posts, if you would like to read more about Zemanta check out some of these posts below. This is also a great feature because I discovered some blogs I have not seen before.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=4423f463-c12e-4f3a-bcc6-bbe0d231961b)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=c6f917b8-847c-4aaa-af03-680606b73efe)
