It bills itself as Digg for bloggers. As opposed to Digg, which covers general topics with an emphasis on technology, BloggerDen is geared toward blogger-specific issues.

• Blogging: Blogging, Writing Tips, Tools, User Interaction, Analytics, Domain Names
• Making Money: Making Money, AdSense, Affiliate Programs, PPC, CPM, E-commerce, Banner Ads
• Marketing: Marketing, Social Networking, Social Bookmarking, Link Building, Paid Services, Directories
• SEO: SEO, Alexa, Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Keywords, Tips & Tricks
• Design: DesignWebsite, Design, Graphics, Software, Tutorials, Inspiration, Photography
• Development: Development, XHTML/CSS, PHP, JavaScript & Ajax, Databases, .NET
• Content Management: Content Management, Blogger, Wordpress, Joomla!, Drupal, Pligg, DotNetNuke
• Offbeat: Offbeat, Technology, Entertainment, Funny, Gaming, Lifestyle, Videos

Unlike Technorati, signup for BloggerDen is dead simple.

All you need to enter is your username, e-mail, and password:

One thing you should do after signing up is upload an avatar image in your profile if one isn’t pulled in based on your e-mail.

Submitting links to BloggerDen

Unlike Digg, it’s OK if you submit your own articles to BloggerDen.

After you submit the URL (which is supposed to be unique in the BloggerDen system):

You then set the tags and add a description:

My comments

Although BloggerDen is a total Digg clone, down to even the header and highlight colors, that’s OK because Digg frowns upon some of the articles that bloggers like to read and share. If they can prevent total spam submissions, I think it’ll be useful.

What do you think?

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2. Showing Excerpts Instead of Full Posts on the Home Page in WordPress
3. Google Chrome Browser Third Place Behind Internet Explorer and Firefox

Whenever I’d go to comment on another site, CommentLuv would say there’s a feed error, and it wouldn’t let display my last blog post in the comment.

I thought it would go away just by fixing the feed, but it didn’t. Here’s how I finally fixed it.

CommentLuv Feed Errors

It seems that whenever you have three problems with your feed, CommentLuv bans you:

Supposedly, this is based on your IP address and website address combination. CommentLuv then wants you to visit their site to unban yourself, but you can’t do that without being a member. I think this is a kind of a way to get people to sign up. Otherwise, CommentLuv could just:

• unban you automatically when you try to comment after your feed is fixed.
• unban you when you visit the unban URL.

If they allow you to use CommentLuv without signing up, there’s no reason you should have to sign up to unban your feed. They say “This is done because constant requests to a faulty or non-existant feed will freeze up the server.” But why would CommentLuv make constant requests to a faulty feed? It only contacts the feed when you go to comment on someone’s website.

Anyway, after you do sign up, you need to visit http://comluv.com/member/unban-url/ to remove the ban.

Removing the CommentLuv ban

At the Unban page, CommentLuv asks you to enter the URL of the site that has the bad feed:

After you fix your feed, enter the URL and click Submit, CommentLuv verifies the RSS feed and unbans you:

Ensuring your feed has been fixed

You should make sure your feed has been fixed before you try to unban it.
You can check if your blog is working with ismyblogworking.com.

Another way is to enter the feed URL in Firefox. It’ll parse and display the feed if it’s OK. It it’s not, it’ll give you an XML error.

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Related posts:

1. Check If Your Blog Is Working with ismyblogworking.com
2. What Is RSS? An Introduction to Feeds and RSS Feed Readers
3. Google Releases Skipfish Automatic Website Security Scanning Tool

Even if you’ve been diligent in setting up your website, there’ll probably be a few things that ismyblogworking.com can tell you. You just enter your site address, hit Enter, and it gives you a report on your site.

Checking Johnchow.com

For example, let’s take a high-traffic blog, johnchow.com. Even John Chow’s blog has a number of problems.

Slow network speed. It took 2.21 seconds to retrieve the page, whereas it takes about 0.8 seconds for digitivity.org, and some other sites that I frequent.

Gzip compression is off.
Gzip is the name of a kind of compression format. It’s the standard for compressing web pages. The advantage to that is you use much less bandwidth. ismyblogworking.com will tell you exactly how much. For example, digitivity.org is saving 77% of bandwidth using compression. Most dedicated server plans have fixed bandwidth allocations. Even if you have an unlimited bandwidth plan, your site’s visitors can have a faster experience since their browsers have less data to download.

Information shown by ismyblogworking.com

RSS feed: exists or not
RSS feed: speed
Page generation time
Page retrieval time
Robots.txt: allows search engines or not.
Google indexing: number of results
Bing indexing: number of results
Gzip compression: on or off
WordPress version

Even if your blog doesn’t exhibit any major problems, ismyblogworking.com can give you an idea of how your server might be decreasing in speed over time, which would indicate the need for a new server.

Be sure to check out the RSS alert feature which tells you if your blog is working or not. Put the status updates RSS address into your RSS feed reader to be notified when your blog has something wrong with it.

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1. Feed Errors in CommentLuv: Getting Unbanned
2. Dreamhost Problems Status RSS
3. Updating Your WordPress Blog Too Frequently: Avoiding Getting Banned from Ping Services

Here’s the step-by-step process for installing the plugin.

Installing the cbnet Ping Optimizer

Log in to WordPress as admin and go to Plugins > Add New.

In the Search box, enter “cbnet ping” and hit “Search Plugins”:

A list of search results of plugins is shown. Select Install for the cbNet Ping Optimizer:

A description window comes up for the cbnet Ping Optimizer. Click on the orange Install link:

WordPress installs the plugin, and informs you that it’s installed. Once the plugin is installed, you have to activate it. Click on the Activate Plugin link to activate it.

WordPress tells you the plugin is activated:

In the list of plugins, there’s a link for the cbnet Plugin Optimizer settings:

However, due to a small typo in version 2.3.2 of the plugin, the settings link from the plugin list doesn’t work. Instead, you should go to WordPress Settings > cbnet Ping Optimizer.

Resources

cbnet Ping Optimizer

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But it also does that every time you update the post, which for me is often five times in 10 minutes after publishing.

If you ping them too many times, they can ban you for spammy behavior.

So, how do you avoid getting banned?

What is a ping?

The word ping was originally used as the name of the Unix utility ping, which tries to contact another computer on the network to see if it’s visible to your computer.

In the blogging world, ping is used to mean your blog contacting a blog indexing service to tell it when you’ve published a post.

WordPress blog pings

By default, WordPress pings rpc.pingomatic.com when you publish a post.

The settings for this are in Settings > Writing > Update Services.

However, and this is key, it also pings when you update the post.

While this is OK if you’ve come back to the post a month or even a week later and added some material that you want indexed, it’s not so good if you’re just changing some minor errors.

What I normally do is proofread a post before publishing it. But no matter how much you proofread, there’s always something you miss. Sometimes I’ve updated a post up to five times after publishing for minor stuff like:

• Adding a picture
• Changing the alignment of a picture
• Bolding a word
• Adding a link
• Adding a tag

All of this in the space of 10 minutes or so. In that time, the web indexing spider for the blog index may or may not have even come around to visit your site, and you’ve already sent them multiple pings.

Overpinging

It’s like ringing someone’s doorbell over and over again when they’ve already heard you and haven’t reached the door yet. You’re likely to annoy them, and they might just not open the door whereas they would have if you didn’t keep ringing.

As for the blog indexes, they don’t really like over-pinging. Think about it if you were the blog service. You already receive millions of pings per day for legitimate posts. Would you really want to receive twice or 3X or 4X that number for no reason?

That’s why it’s believed that some of these services actually ban you if you ping too often.

cbnet Ping Optimizer WordPress Plugin

Since bare WordPress pings too often, you have to use a plugin to make it work like you want. The best overall plugin I’ve found for that is the cbnet Ping Optimizer.

It’s a fork of the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer, with the difference being that you don’t have to sign up for their e-mail newsletter to get the plugin.

After installing the plugin, go to the settings in Settings > cbnet Ping Optimizer.

Note: Don’t click on the “settings” link in the Installed Plugin list. That doesn’t work in version 2.3.2 of the plugin.

I checked the “Limit excessive pinging in short time” option and set the time to 15 minutes and click Save Settings:

You can set the blog index services to be pinged either in cbnet Ping’s settings or in WordPress’s own settings at Settings > Writing. On the backend, it’s the same setting shared between the two of them.

Ping log

Another advantage of cbnet Ping Optimizer besides avoiding excessive pinging is the ping log. It tells you when WordPress pinged a blog index, and when it didn’t (i.e., you updated a post in quick succession, but the blog index wasn’t sent a ping due to the settings):

Other WordPress Ping Plugins

There are some other ping plugins for WordPress, but they’re not as fit for the purpose or accessible as cbnet Ping Optimizer.

Smart Update Pinger v2.00

This plugin by Christian Davn is discontinued according to various blog posts.

I can’t find an original source for it, and it’s basically abandoned at this point.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

This is a ping plugin that works with the latest WordPress’s, but you have to register your e-mail to get the plugin. The plugin itself is free and open source under GNU GPL.

Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger

This is also a ping plugin that works with the latest WordPress versions, but you have to register your e-mail to get the plugin.

There’s a Ping Watcher and Ping List Checker plugin too, but they don’t do what the other ping plugins do.

Resources

cbnet Ping Optimizer

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2. Making Minor Changes in WordPress Without Updating the Last-Updated Date with the Minor Edit Plugin
3. Canonical WordPress Plugins

Claiming your blog allows you to use Technorati tags to drive traffic to your blog from Technorati, which is the biggest blog search engine and aggregation site on the Internet.

Before Technorati associates a given blog on the Internet with your Technorati account, it needs to verify that that blog is under your control. It does this by giving you a unique code, and asking you to use that code within a blog post.

Once you post the code, you tell Technorati to check your blog.

Claiming Your Blog

After you’ve signed up for an account at http://technorati.com/account/signup/ , go to your Technorati account profile at http://technorati.com/account/ and

Click on “Claim a blog” and enter your blog address (with the http://).

Technorati tells you that it’ll send you an e-mail with blog claim instructions:

Claim Technorati Blog: Claim Status

In my case it was about 15 minutes before I received the e-mail.

The e-mail tells you to use a specific code and also check your account profile for more info:

Claim Technorati Blog: Claim E-mail

When you go to your Technorati account profile for more information, click on “Check Claim“.

You’re shown your blog’s claim status:

Claim Technorati Blog: Blog Claim Status (2)

Here’s what it says

Technorati will need to verify that you are an author of the blog by looking for a unique code. Please put the following short code MFD767KGRM88 within a new blog post and publish it

All this means is that you need need to have the claim code in the text of your blog entry. For me, I’ve already done that since the code is quoted above.

After you’ve published the blog entry with the claim code, go back to the claim status page and click the Verify Claim Token button.

Claim Technorati Blog: Verify Claim

Technorati then goes to your web site and verifies your claim token.

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When a reader comes to the end of a blog entry, do you want him to leave your site? Or view another article?

Chances are, if he was interested enough in the current post to open it up, he’s likely to be interested in other posts on the same subject. But people are naturally lazy. They won’t be bothered to search through your archives on the off chance that there might be a similar article that you wrote before.

Much better to simply show your reader a list show a list of posts that are related to a given post. It’s too hard and time-consuming to manually come up with a list, though. Not to mention the fact that your archive of articles is constantly changing.

The Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

So it’s much easier (and better) to use a plugin for this purpose. There are a number of related posts plugins, but I wanted one which:

• Is easy to use. One related posts plugin actually requires manual database updates.
• Is used by a lot of people. (The more popular a plugin is, the more likely it is to be updated and not abandoned.)
• Doesn’t require any changes to your template.
• Customizable.

YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) fits the bill here. You can use it simply by installing it. You don’t have to do anything else (although you can for customization).

In this post, I’ll walk through a simple installation of YARPP, and some light customization.

Installing YARPP

YARPP installs like any other WordPress plugin hosted on wordpress.org. Just go to your administration panel, search for YARPP, click to install.

YARP works by matching post titles, body text, tags, and categories.

If you look at a post to check out YARPP working, you’ll likely see some numbers by the post titles:

WordPress YARPP Default View

These are the match scores (the degree of relatedness between the current post and the related post). These are only show if the logged-in user is an administrator. Your readers won’t see them.

Customizing YARPP

YARPP works right out of the box, and if you don’t want to anything more, you don’t have to.

But you can also

• Disallow posts from certain categories or tags from being shown in the related list
• Show only posts no older than a specified number of months
• Increase or decrease the weight given to post titles, body text, tags, and categories in matching one post to another.
• Show or not show related posts for the main site, and again for your RSS feed.
• Show or not show a small excerpt of the related articles
• Use a custom template file for the related posts list

One thing that I did change was the default HTML that wraps the related posts list.

By default, it is:

Related posts:
<ol></ol>

The default “Related posts” text looks too small for the reader to even notice.

I changed it (i.e., the text right after “Before / after related entries display:”)

WordPress YARPP Wrap Options

to:

<h2>Related posts:</h2>
<ol></ol>

This makes the “Related posts” into a level 2 heading (H2), big enough to grab the reader’s attention:

WordPress YARPP H2 Heading

Check out the changes

Log out and view a couple of your posts the way readers will:

WordPress YARPP Related Posts as the User Sees Them

If your option changes don’t work:

• Be sure you’ve saved changes
• Be sure you’re changing the options for website articles, not for RSS.

You should notice the results right away.

Whereas before, people would come to the blog, read an article, and go away, I’ve noticed that now, they will often click one or even two related articles. The rate at which people leave your site after coming to it is called your bounce rate, and you should see it drop.

Resources

YARPP

http://techie-buzz.com/wordpress/yarpp-best-related-posts-plugin-for-wordpress.html

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/wordpress-plugin-related-posts/

http://epicalex.com/yarpp-templates/

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3. Updating Old Posts or Posting New Ones

Why have excerpts instead of full posts on your home page

Some reasons you might want to show excerpts instead of full posts on the home page include:

• It can be difficult for readers (new and old) to get a quick overview of your latest articles when they have to page down a couple of times to get to the next article headline.
• Search engines don’t like duplicate content on your website. So it’s better to have your content on single pages as opposed to both home and single pages.
• The fact that a user has to click on an article to read it means that you get feedback on which articles your readers like. If they read the entire article off the front page, you don’t know if they read the article, or closed their browser immediately after loading your homepage.

Why have full posts instead of excerpts on your home page

On the other hand,

• Some people believe the “no duplicate content” rule to be overblown.
• Having full content on the home page makes it easier for people to read without constant clicking.
• Having full content on your home page instead of excerpts means you get full content in your RSS feeds as well, which many of your readers may find handy.
• Having full content on your home page means more text which often results in some combination of keywords which can be a match for a user’s Google query. I don’t know if that’s the kind of random traffic you want, though.

Before you switch

In the end, I decided to go with excerpts because my digital how-to’s were getting to be longer than 6 pages (i.e., six times pressing the Page Down key in a typical-sized browser window). Having to page down six times just to see what the next article’s title is seemed to me to be too much to ask readers to do. With excerpts, you can now page down just five times to see all the latest articles.

But before you do anything, be sure to make a full backup of your WordPress installation, including the MySQL database.

Creating single.php and editing index.php to show excerpts

OK, the file that WordPress uses to generate the home page is called index.php. You can also have a file called single.php that generates the “single pages” which display a single blog post per page. If you don’t have a single.php, WordPress uses index.php for double duty.

But since we want the home page to look different from single pages, we have to have a separate single.php. Just copy the index.php file as-is to a new file called single.php.

Now, we have to edit index.php. Do this with a text editor, or from WordPress administration (Appearance: Editor). If you use the WordPress Editor, look for Main Index Template.

Look for text that says the_content():

<?php the_content(); ?>

Replace it with:

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

That’s it!

Click here to read this entry

OK, but now after reading the excerpt, the reader has to now go back to click your blog post title to actually read your full post.

Let’s make it easy by adding a link that reads “Read the rest of this entry”:

<h3><a class="more-link" title="Read the rest of <?php the_title(); ?>" href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">Read the rest of this entry ...</a></h3>

Note that I wrapped the link in h3 tags to make the link larger, more visible, and easier to click. This is what it looks like:

Read the rest of this entry …

Save the file and reload your homepage to verify the changes.

Thanks to Pro Blog Design for this excellent tip.

Excerpts in RSS feeds, and tags, categories, and archive pages

Note that by making these changes, your RSS feeds, and tags, categories, and archive pages will show excerpts as opposed to full posts.

You can get fancy by coming up with various combinations of having or not having full posts vs. excerpts on the front page, RSS feeds, tag pages, etc. with various other edits or plugins, but that’s the basics.

You can also show your entire latest post (or latest x number of posts) in full with the rest as excerpts. Again, that’s for later.

Default excerpts

By default, WordPress shows the first 55 words of your article as an excerpt. It also strips all tags and formatting and just shows plain text.

Some people use plugins to show full sentences and not break in the middle of an excerpt.

But I actually prefer the default which does break sentences. Think about it: if your phone conversation gets cut off, don’t you call back to listen to what the other party was saying? A break in a sentence actually makes me want to click the link just to complete the sentence.

Excerpt word count

If you want to check what 55 words amounts to, you can (among other methods), use the wc command in Linux (which is most likely what your web host provider is using). At the command prompt,

• type wc -w:
• paste your first paragraph or so right into the command shell
• press Enter
• press Ctrl+d

js@webhost:~/$ wc -w

wc responds with the word count:

Some of my posts have been getting longer and longer, especially how-to's. It's hard to scan the front page for articles, and I thought it was time to switch from full posts to excerpts on the home page.
 
Why have excerpts instead of full posts on your home page
 
Some reasons you might want to show excerpts instead of full posts on the home page include:
66

66 is the word count.

Resources

Display Post Excerpts Only in WordPress

Template Tags/the excerpt « WordPress Codex

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2. Updating Old Posts or Posting New Ones
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1. Global undo/trash

2. Image editor

3. Batch plugin updating

4. Easier video embedding

It also has 4 under-the-hood features that make blogging better with WordPress:

1. Canonical URLs

2. Automatic database optimization

3. Comment metadata

4. Faster Press This bookmarklet

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2. Promote Your Articles with BloggerDen, Digg for Bloggers
3. Showing Excerpts Instead of Full Posts on the Home Page in WordPress

1. Trash status for posts, pages, and comments (includes restore and permanent delete)
2. Allow user registration to be enabled by an XMLRPC client
3. rel=’canonical’ for singular pages
4. Scroll back to the same location after saving a file in the Plugin and Theme editors
5. Add means of automatically repairing tables
6. Image editing: crop images
7. TinyMCE 3.2.7
8. Separate fields for ‘image alt’ and ‘image caption’ in Media uploader
9. Media embedding made easier
10. Minify admin CSS

Download the WordPress 2.9 release candidate here.

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