Wizard's Blog

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Since IntenseDebate was bought by Automattic (makers of WordPress), they’ve been in private beta upgrading their infrastructure.

A couple days ago they came out of private beta with a new WordPress plugin.

The new plugin seems to overlap a lot with the features of the Disqus v2 plugin:

• Comment sync – comments are stored in WordPress as well as the external service so you don’t lose them if you stop using IntenseDebate
• Search Engine Optimization – comments are served by PHP same as the rest of your blog rather than added dynamically using JavaScript.  This means that they can be indexed by search engines same as the rest of your site
• Comment threading – puts replies to comments in a logical tree structure rather than a long list
• Comment voting and reputation – helps you identify good comments and commenters
• Comment moderation by email – lets you reply to and moderate comments from anywhere you have email access
• Trackbacks and Pingbacks are handled

Where the IntenseDebate plugin seems to exceed the Disqus one is in better integration with the WordPress admin page and widgets.

I’ve been using the Disqus v2 plugin since it was released so at the moment I don’t think I’ll be switching to IntenseDebate, but due to their newfound close relationship with WordPress they may provide better features and integration, in which case I’ll reconsider. 

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Image via CrunchBase

I’ve been using the PingPressFM plugin for WordPress for a while now, and while it’s fine at forwarding new post notifications to Ping.fm, it seems to be hard coded to use S3NT for URL shortening.

I like Cligs – it’s like TinyURL but it has some nice extra features like statistics.

With the new WordPress-to-Twitter Plugin, new post notifications get sent to Twitter (not Ping.fm), but on the upside it uses Cligs.

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Pingdom logo

I found out about a website called Pingdom from a blog post about WordPress optimization.  It was a pretty good post actually, because it also pointed me to the WP-DBManager plugin which lets you optimize and backup MySQL (and is very cool). 

Anyway, in the context of the post what got me interested in Pingdom was the website report that shows the load time of all the components of the page.  You can see the report for the main page of my blog here.

It has a quick website information display summary:

Pingdom website information

And a graph of load time that shows how each component (picture, css etc.) contributed to the total load time of the page:

Pingdom website graph

Although this is very cool, the website test tool doesn’t seem to be the main point of Pingdom – it’s website monitoring.  I’m currently having some issues with my Easily web hosting, so I’ve signed up for the 30 day trial of Pingdom.  I don’t know whether I’ll end up signing up for it – it’s useful but in the current economic client I’m trying to save money.

Basically Pingdom has servers all over the world, and you can set it up so that they ping your website.  You get graphs of response time and uptime, and it notifies you if your site goes down.

Pingdom response time report

You can see how frequently my hosting has been going down recently in the uptime report:

Pingdom uptime report

I’ve made the report public so you can see it here.

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Today I saw an announcement that a WordPress plugin called Outbrain had added support for Disqus, so the two plugins can automatically cooperate if they’re both installed.

I’ve installed it and so far it seems pretty cool - Outbrain lets visitors to my blog rate my posts, we’ll see whether any visitors make use of it and what they think.  It also gives stats on the ratings.

I did have some problems installing it – you get a claim code from their website and enter it into the plugin.  This proves that you own your blog and lets you begin using the plugin.  My claim process kept timing out and then suddenly it worked – it may have been a server-side problem, or because I initially just used my domain name instead of the path to my blog.

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When you write a blog post it’s nice to be able to publicize it a bit to increase its chances of being read.

One easy way of doing this is to post a link to your blog entry on social networking sites like Twitter.

The cross-posting process could be easier because it’s still a lot of effort to post to multiple social networking sites for every blog post.

Ping.fm simplifies this (because that’s its whole purpose), but it still requires you to remember to use ping.fm each time you write a blog post.

The PingPressFM plugin for WordPress solves this problem by automatically sending your blog post to ping.fm.  You set up triggers to use – for example you can have ping.fm forward the whole blog post to a blogging service like Tumblr, send an extract to a microblogging service like Twitter or set your status on a service like Facebook.

In the first post that I used PingPressFM with, I used the trigger that forwards the whole blog post.  The problem with this is that since v2.6, WordPress has added captions to images, and they use a non-HTML tag.  Neither PingPressFM, ping.fm nor the end recipient service seem to be able to strip or correctly process this tag.  So your blog post in the recipient service ends up with tag garbage in it.  I’ve reported the problem to PingPressFM support, ping.fm support and WordPress support, but so far there’s been no resolution.

In the second post that I used PingPressFM with, I used the trigger that sends an extract to microblogging services – that seemed to work fine.

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I’ve been using Amazon S3 for a while – I originally signed up in order to use JungleDisk, which uses S3 as its storage back end.

I only have good things to say about the service – you get unlimited storage, the pricing scheme is very reasonable and it has ridiculously good uptime.

I recently found the Amazon S3 plugin for WordPress, and tried it out for the first time in my last post.

The plugin has two ways for you to upload files.  There’s a button which just uploads the file and puts it directly into your post.  Intead of that, you can use the classic WordPress Add Image etc. buttons which have been modified by the plugin to store the files on S3 instead of your server.

I prefer using the classic buttons, because WordPress creates thumbnails for them and you can set a caption.

So far it seems to work perfectly and I’m considering going back through all my old posts and moving the media to S3.

One of the really cool things you can do with Amazon S3 (and you can take advantage of with the plugin) is use a CNAME DNS entry to use a subdomain to point to your S3 bucket.  This means that links to the uploaded files will be accessible using http://my.bucketname.com/ instead of http://bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com/.  Setting it up is a bit technical, but there are instructions.

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Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

I was a bit worried about how long it takes some of the pages on here to load, so I’ve added the WP Super Cache WordPress plugin.

It’s a bit of a pain to install because you need to get .htaccess and permissions all right, but once it’s up and running it takes care of everything else.

I was a bit worried that the static cached versions of the pages might have some problems with dynamic content, but so far I haven’t noticed anything breaking.

I haven’t had it long enough to be able to measure what difference it makes.  It’s not like I have a lot of traffic, but the last thing I want to do is scare people off with a slow site.

One of the things I was concerned about was that if my site loads slowly it could negatively affect how I’m crawled by the Googlebot.  Again, I won’t know how much of an improvement the caching has made for a while.

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I’ve just added the Breadcrumb NavXT WordPress plugin to the blog – you can see the breadcrumbs just below the header at the top of all the pages.

Breadcrumbs are a representation of where a page is in the site hierarchy.  Each level of the hierarchy has a link – this lets visitors easily see where on the site the current page is, and helps them navigate around.

The plugin was a little tricky to set up – once you upload it to your FTP, two plugins show up in the WordPress admin screen.  One of them just puts the breadcrumbs on the pages, and the other one also enables the admin interface that lets you set the plugin up.  I can’t think of why you wouldn’t want the admin screen, because without it the plugin won’t work and you won’t know why.  Then when you get the admin screen there are loads of options and there’s no explanation of what they all do.

Anyway, once the plugin was set up it works really well and looks pretty good.

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Disqus logo

The Disqus blog comments service just had a major update to 2.0 – the new features are:

• New WordPress plugin featuring
  • Comments indexable by search engines
  • Import/export comments
  • Comments synchronized between WordPress and Disqus
  • Moderate comments from WordPress admin pages
• Faster – improved back end and retooled UI
• Comment blogs

Anyway, I’ve just updated the blog to use Disqus instead of the built-in WordPress comments system.  So far it seems pretty good, though I’ve only arrived at that opinion by looking at the old WordPress comments that I imported into Disqus.

Let me know what you think in the comments (did you see what I did there?)

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