On the Web with Kim Vallee » wordpress

Adding BackType Connect to Your WordPress Blogs

Kim Vallee — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:49:09 +0000

We installed BackType Connect to integrate related Twitter conversations into the post comments. It is not hard to do by yourself. Adding a plugin in WordPress usually works like a charm.

Since we are perfectionists, I asked my tech guy to fine-tune a few things that required his programming skills. One thing, Jerome did what to add the @ character before the username of every tweet (see the arrow on the image). This way, it is easier for you to notice that the comment originated from Twitter.

If you are a blogger, you probably notice that comments on blogs are broken. They are because many people say they like your post on Facebook or share their opinions about your posts on other social networks. I personally concentrate my efforts on Twitter and Facebook. Since Facebook is a closed network, we cannot export the comments and likes. For Twitter, you can retrieve the relevant tweets. On tools that enable you to do this is BackType Connect that works for WordPress blogs.

Besides Twitter, your can include comments from Digg, FriendFeed, Reddit and Hacker News. Here is a small description from the information BackType is gathering per social networks.

Twitter – whenever someone tweets one of your posts
FriendFeed – whenever someone comments on an entry for one of your posts
Digg – whenever someone comments on a submission for one of your posts
Reddit – whenever someone comments on a submission for one of your posts
Hacker News – whenever someone comments on a submission for one of your posts
Other Blogs – whenever someone comments on a post that links to one of yours (I do not recommend this option)

For my blogs, I feel that only tweets are making sense. Analyze what it is best for you. There are a few preferences amongst which I choose to:

Not include retweets with no additional comment
Do not include connected conversations from my own blog
Mix comments by time stamp. Since I believe in the life stream effect, I feel it is easier for people to follow conversations as they happen. The other option is to separate the tweets from the blog comments.

The only thing I wish there was available is to eliminate my own tweets. Since I promote every post on Twitter, I feel it adds noise.

Matt Mullenweg Talked about His Open Source Story to Christian Aubry

Kim Vallee — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:10:36 +0000

This is the follow-up interview realized by my friend Christian Aubry with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. In this second segment – a third is coming – Matt Mullenweg talked about how he started WordPress and how the open source community swelled the popularity of WordPress. It is a case where the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Over and over at WordCamp Montreal last weekend, people talked about the fact that WordPress, WordPress MU and BuddyPress are platforms, an infrastructure of which you can build upon. The added values emerged from what you can do with it. WordPress is used to achieve different objectives, to suit an infinite number of markets and is applied in many creative ways. You benefit from not reinventing the wheel. Instead, you concentrate on how you can serve your community. In fact, this is the main reason why I migrated At Home to WordPress.

Matt also talked about the importance of helping each others. If you think about the unconference movement and about blogging, it is mostly people sharing their expertise for the good of others. At the end of the day, it makes a better world where we feel empowered. Be prepared to be inspired.

You see in the background, a group of partcipants at WordCamp Montreal. A third part of this interview is coming soon. If you are looking for a guy to hire for your video reportage, put Christian Aubry on your short list. He has many years of experience.

A Quick Recap of My Experience at WordCamp Montreal 2009

Kim Vallee — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 22:48:56 +0000

I had a great time this weekend at WordCamp Montreal. The conversation with the founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg was inspiring and calming. Matt was really zen while he answered questions from the crowd. In the after-talk, many people pointed out to me his soothing voice. Amongst other things, Matt shares the core value of his company. To give you an idea, check out this short interviewed realized by my friend Christian Aubry.

About Our Presentation

I like going to this type of conference because you always get back from them with some ideas. Several talks gave me food for thought. Plus there is the fact that being a speaker forced me to reflect on my blog design and features. Jerome Paradis and I talked about my migration from subText to WordPress.

We devised the presentation to highlight the perspective of the blogger and the preoccupations of the developer. I am happy because people seemed to appreciate that duality. I made the envy of a few bloggers to have free access to such a talented developer. Without Jerome, I would have never been able to have made this transition as perfectly as he did.

Now that I migrated to WordPress, I can envision the future. What to do next? I started by increasing the width of the pictures on posts. A lot is more to come. And I think it will be exciting for you.

I cannot recall the name of the caterer but the food was excellent. It is the best food I ate in an inconference in Montreal. Thank you to the organizators and the participants for making it a success.

PHOTO CREDITS:
Except for the laptop image, all the images were taken by the extremely talented Eva Blue. I invite you to see her WordCamp Montreal 2009 photo set, you will not regret it.

How to Add a Related Posts Section for each Post

Kim Vallee — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:16:04 +0000

Well-designed blogs encourage readers to explore the blog longer. One way is to achieve that is to add a Related Posts section at the bottom of every post. You could select the posts manually but this is too time consuming. If you assign WordPress tags to every post, you get a way to intelligently automate the process. This is what I did. And the results are relevant.

I selected the WordPress Related Posts plugin which assigns the related posts based on the higher number of matching WordPress tags. If you are good at tagging properly your posts, you will see that that this method is quite effective. I typically detailed the content of my categories using tags.

Installation Tips

I am lucky to have a test version of my blog. So I tested the results first to make sure the look and feel were the way I want it. It took me less 2 minutes, including testing, to add a Related Posts section at the bottom on every post to On the Web with Kim Vallee. For my design blog, At Home, my programmer modified that same plugin to show thumbnails arranged in a row instead of a bullet list. I did not use the image option for my social media blog since not every post has a picture.

You simply search for Related Posts on Plugin Browser/Installer of your WordPress interface. Selected the one developed by Denis. Pay attention to the developer name since there are more than one plugin called WordPress Related Posts. Like you do for any plugin, install it and activate it. Then, configure the preferences (available via the Settings menu once the plugin is installed).

Related posts is one of many methods that you can use to create serendipity in your blog and increase the page views.

Need for More User Control with Mashups

Kim Vallee — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:32:37 +0000

One of the main reasons why I migrated my blogs to WordPress is to be more independent technically. I wish to be able to add features using plugins without needing the help of a programmer. For the most part, it works fine.

But as many other bloggers, I often wish to mix and match plugins in a different way. This is where I hit a wall. I hit a few walls so far. Some are due to the fact that I run a design blog where the visual aspect is quite important. At other times, I wish to bring a feature to the next level.

Mashup Sites

Today’s blogs are mashups. WordPress blogs are the king of mashups. Plugins are developed by a bunch of programmers of different skill levels. The ideal plugin gives control to the user with parameters. One size fits all does not work to bring the ultimate experience to your community.

To understand my point, let’s look at the mashup of P2 theme with Twitter Tools. Two teams developed the 2 projects. I decided to put them together to create my Live blog. I used these 2 tools as an example but the same hold true for most Web 2.0 tools that you put together.

The Situation

Like I mentioned yesterday on my At Home blog, I created Kim Vallee Live to publish quick posts, without photos and to live blog when I go to conferences. The P2 theme interface provides a Twitter-style interface without limiting my comment to 140 characters, which provides the right framework for what I want.

One feature of the Twitter Tools plugin is to automatically publish a tweet by shortening the message I entered in Kim Vallee Live. But the way it is done right now does not add value to my readers. See for yourself, why I do not like the current result:

Twitter Tools automatically adds “New blog post:” in front of the tweet. Even if technically, each entry I published in P2 is a post, there are not from a user viewpoint. My programmer changed the plugin to put #kvlive instead. If the maker of Twitter Tools had better thought about usability, they could have add one more parameter to their long list of options so I can fill the text of the prefix. If I do not wish to add a prefix, I would leave blank the text box.

The other problem is that the tweet message is too short to be meaningful for my followers. What happened is that the Twitter Tools plugin used the post title as the content for the tweet. The P2 theme stored the first 40 characters as the post title. The maker of the P2 theme did not anticipated that it could be a problem since this WordPress theme was designed to show Twitter-style posts.

One lesson I learned from years of experience in software development is that users will always find new ways to use your applications. As more and more non-technical people are embracing social media and running different types of blogs, it puts more pressure on developers of mashup tools to give more control to the users.

Custom-Made Solution

I defined with Jerome of Paradivision (we own Paradivision) the ultimate automatic tweet generator for Kim Vallee Live. We still have to implement it. Until then, I disabled the automatic tweet feature. When it is done, Jerome and I will share with you what we did.

Microblogging with the P2 Theme for WordPress

Kim Vallee — Sat, 16 May 2009 16:34:42 +0000

I was one of the 5 official bloggers at 6th WebCom edition, an International Web 2.0 conference which happened May 13, 2009 in Montreal. Liveblogging is not an easy task. I was wondering how I could manage it. I thought microblogging will simplify the reporting of the sessions. This is how the P2 theme for WordPress made my dreams come true.

What makes P2 different than a typical Blog Theme?

My technical support staff quickly installed the P2 theme under At Home with Kim Vallee. The P2 theme acts like the Twitter interface without the 140 character limit. My Tweets are also aggregated in P2 because we installed the Twitter tools plugin.

Everything can done from the main page of your blog. Once logged in, the blog author can publish new posts directly from the home page of the live blog. The readers can also comment directly from the home page. This advanced programming theme does not reload the entire Web page as you enter new information. Thus, it is quicker for you and your readers.

Keyboard shortcuts enables you to speed thing up when live blogging.

We still need to brand the theme to my overall blog theme and to integrate it into the navigation. This will be done in the coming weeks as our agenda is full right now.

What is the use of P2 Theme for a regular blogger?

Besides covering events, P2 can enhance the curated experience you provide to your readers. Using my iPhone, I plan to provide my readers with pertinent information as I encounter it on my daily basis. Things, like quick links, that my readers will like to know but that are not enough to write a full post are the type of content that I expect. This will not replace my regular blog; it will complement it. Since it is a new concept, the way I use it will evolve with time.

Why can I do all that with Twitter? First because P2 is not limited to 140 characters. Second, because my Twitter followers are not necessarily my blog readers. Third, I aggregate the conversations on my property while I still participate in the must-be social networks (Twitter and Facebook).

Disclaimer: My husband is the founding president of Paradivision and I own shares.

Why Did I Migrate My Main Blog to WordPress?

Kim Vallee — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 06:07:43 +0000

If you follow me on At Home with Kim Vallee, you know that I undergone a major redesign as I migrated my blog from subText, an obscure but effective Open Source blogging platform to widely popular WordPress.

This was a team effort: Jean-Marc worked as the graphic designer, Jerome as the database developer/Wordpress specialist and myself in the role of the client and creative director.

Three reasons led to this move:

subText has a poor publisher user interface that is particularly inefficient if you publish lots of photos. Since I use a Mac, I needed to run a Microsoft desktop application to publish my post with a more efficient blogging tool. The process added time and was unnecessarily complicated. Ever since I moved to Mac, I was looking for a quicker solution. Migrating to WordPress solved that problem.
As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to host the full range of 300-pixels wide IAB ad units on my sidebar. These ads are more popular with advertisers; therefore they bring more money. I also thought my blog could be more clean. I felt the old layout did not put enough focus on the content.
As I worked on the mock-up, it became clear that many features would have to be programmed on subText to make me happy. It sounds like a waste of time and energy since many of the features I wanted already existed as plugins or standard features on WordPress.

After considering all these facts, Jerome and I decided to migrate my blog to WordPress. Since WordPress is also open source, Jerome will be able to improve on existing features if they do not work as I want them to be.

The Conclusion

I now benefit from a blog platform that is more flexible and that I can grow with. Making the switch to WordPress was a sound business move. Already the new design improves the page views by almost 1 page per visit.

Jerome wrote his side of the story. He talked about the challenges and the added features of the revamped blog. I invite you to read his post on Paradivision’s blog.

Disclaimer: I own shares in Paradivision. If you are on the market for a blog on WordPress, know that Paradivision designs and develops WordPress sites for businesses.

Top 3 Tips for a Blog Design Makeover

Kim Vallee — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 22:14:47 +0000

If you follow me on Twitter, Facebook or read At Home with Kim Vallee, you are aware that I migrated my main blog to WordPress last Friday. Any blog migration comes with a blog redesign. Let’s examine my top 3 tips if you are planning a blog makeover.

What are Your Goals?

Whether you do it yourself or outsource your blog integration, the first thing you need to do is to write a program that clearly expresses:

the mood you wish to create, the style you aim for
where you wish to bring your brand (a blog is brand). I believe that you must design for the future, not the past
and to define your needs and the features you wish to have. Do not forget to specify the maximum width of your layout and other technical issues.

This long and hard process is crucial. While reading the comments I received about the new AHWKV look, I was proud that my readers spot my goals as something they like about the new design. It proves that we were successful. To stay focus the entire time, we considered my program over the whole design and implementation stages.

What Design Problems Do You Wish to Solve?

This is more and less a part of the mock-up step. I include it separately as people often get hooked on the problems. I have 15 years of quality software assurance to support this claim. Writing them down permit you to pass to something else.

For At Home with Kim Vallee, I wanted to solve the fact that my sidebar could not fit the Medium Rectangle ads (300×250 IMU). It was the trigger point for the new layout. But many other factors led to the fact that I switched to a 2-column layout.

Start with a Mock-Up

Illustrating your need with a mock-up is more efficient than writing everything down. You indicate what goes where. You validate and must take into account usability from a reader’s point of view.

If you are an interior designer, imagine this step as your initial space planning. You must take into account the actual size of things. Therefore, use Photoshop or a paper montage where you put what plugins and in what order do they will appear on your sidebar.

If it easy to be carried away with all the WordPress plugins that exist. Doing this exercise, allow you to validate their purpose. I always asked myself if a plugin adds value to my readers.

My Top Tips To New Bloggers

Kim Vallee — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 01:04:14 +0000

I meet many people who are asking me advices on the art of blogging. To start answering that question I compiled a to-do-list to ease up the launching of a new blog.

Set up a self-hosted WordPress

The blogging platform of choice these days are a self-hosted WordPress infrastructure. It unites flexibility and a vast array of functionality.

If your blog complements a Web site, add a /blog directory as the blog URL (i.e. mainsiteURL.com/blog). This will enhance the SEO of your main Web site.

Plugins and Other Programs To Install Before Your Launch

Use AKISNET from the start since it will catch most spams. Since WordPress is extremely popular, spammers target us. I suggest not moderating the comments; readers prefer the immediate feedback. Allow time on your agenda to review the comments and remove the undesirable comments. The new comment email notification of WordPress saves me time. This way, I log in to the WP admin software only if I want to mark as spam or delete a comment.

Set up your RSS feed with Feedburner. You get basic stats on your RSS subscribers (not that useful). The most important reason to use Feedburner is if you ever need to change your blog URL (it happens more than you think), your readers will follow you automatically. It is worth to setup a link (or a form) for Email subscription to your feed with Feedburner.

Start collecting statistics from day one. Install both Sitemeter and Google Analytics. Both software is used for different purposes. Any serious blogger uses both; I will tell you why in another post (long to explain).

Necessary Content Before the Launch

Take the time to finalize 5 to 7 posts before launching your blog. Publish 3 to 5 posts and keep the rest in reserve before you open your blog. Having several posts at the inset let your readers know what to expect. As a result they will be more inclined to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Writing several posts gives you a chance to see if you can produce content for your niche. Having a few posts in reserve will reduce the initial pressure and adjustments that come with running a blog.

Disclose your publishing schedule to build reader loyalty. Be realistic. It does not really matter at first if you publish a post once a week or once a day; the important thing is to select a publishing schedule that you can follow.

Nice photos sell a story. Put a big photo immediately after the title. If appropriate, add 1 or 2 more photos spread inside the post.

How to add Site Meter and Google Analytics to a WordPress Blog

Kim Vallee — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:56:05 +0000

My educational background is statistics, so you will be surprised if I tell you that I use several Web services to track the statistics of my blogs. Each service has its strength and purpose.

First, I use Site Meter as the statistics I open to the world. You do not need more than the free PRO service. I believe that even if you have low traffic it is a good idea to make public your Site Meter statistics. You can set your privacy level at Medium if you wish that people only set the “General Summary” report. Since I support advertising on At Home with Kim Vallee, my prospects can check the statistics on Site Meter even before they contact me. Since I wish to share more reports with them, I leave the privacy setting to normal.

Google Analytics provides the most insightful data. You do not share this info. This is for your eyes only. You will be able to learn what works and find clues on what does not work. Google Analytics allows you to drill down your data extensively.

I check the General Summary report of Site Meter daily, often a few times a day, to get a glimpse of what is happening that day. I also checked 3 Site Stats reports on Feedburner: Pages, Incoming and Outgoing. Looking at Site Meter and Feedburner takes me 30 to 60 seconds top. When if I wish to analyze my blog, I visit Google Analytics. I do that every one or two months.

If you have more than one blogs, you need to open a Site Meter for each blog. Feedburner and Google Analytics let you manage multiple blogs through a single account.

My Step-by-step Instructions

The easiest way to work is to open a tab on the browser where you log on to your WordPress dashboard.

click on the arrow next to Appearance and
then, click on the Editor menu to get access to the theme files on the right column.

Open a second tab on your browser and go to Site Meter.

How to Add Site Meter to WordPress 2.7?

After you joined Site Meter, you need to:

Move to the tab window of your WordPress dashboard
Click on sidebar (sidebar.php) to edit this theme file
Insert the Javascript code provided by Site Meter before the last in the sidebar file.
Update the file to save your changes.

What it looks like using my own Site Meter code - some info will be different for you

Then, visit Google Analytics from the tab window you used for Site Meter.

How to Add Google Analytics to WordPress 2.7?

After you signed in to Google Analytics, you need to:

Add a Web site profile.
You want to add a profile for a new domain. Fill in your blog URL and time zone and click Finish
Copy and paste the code segment provided by Google Analytics.
Leave that tab window open, just in case
Move to the tab window of your WordPress dashboard
Click on footer (footer.php) to edit that theme file
Copy and paste the code segment into the bottom of your content, immediately before the tag of the footer file
Update the file to save your changes.

What it looks like with my own code - your tracking code will be different

It may take some time before you see your statistics but no more than 24 hours. I will talk on how to install Feedburner on WordPress 2.7 on a future post. Feb. 2, 2009 Update: Since this becomes obsolete, I will not cover it.

Simple Way to Add a Background Image to a WordPress Blog

Kim Vallee — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 04:42:36 +0000

I purposely selected a simple WordPress theme for this blog. I wanted to see what is or is not necessary when you start a blog. The Zindi theme that I used was programmed with a boring solid beige background. It did not feel like me.

I decided to add personality with an image. I first found a free pattern on Squidfingers. I twinkled it a little on Photoshop. I enlarged the size of the pattern and changed the color from orange to aqua blue.

A new feature in WordPress simplifies the process. I uploaded the background image using the Media menu. I then viewed the image on my browser and opened the image property (control-click on the MAC or right-mouse button for Windows) to find the exact Image Location. Copy (Command/Control C) it since the path is long.

Then, you open the Editor of your Theme (Apparence menu). Click on Stylesheet (style.css) to edit it. Add url(exact Image Location you copied) repeat to the background element of body.

Mine reads body { font-size: 12px; font-family: Verdana, Arial, ‘Lucida Grande’, Sans-Serif; background:#e4e4e4 url(http://ontheweb.kimvallee.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/bgrnd4ontheweb.png) repeat;color: #555; }

Save your changes and your blog should have a background that reflects your style. My blog went from this

to this in a matter of a few minutes.

Supporting Facebook Connect for Commenting

Kim Vallee — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 04:23:43 +0000

Part of the mission of On the Web with Kim Vallee is experiencing with plugins and widgets that I think add value to a blog.

My geek husband suggested Facebook Connect as a practical feature for my comments. If you are on Facebook, Facebook Connect will reduce the amount of info you will need to type for commenting. You simply login to your Facebook account using a button. If you like, you can publish your comments on your Facebook walls. A popup will ask you if you want to publish your comment on your wall – so you decide what you put on your Facebook wall.

As a blogger, I like this feature as it gives me a chance to be known by your friends (while respecting your privacy settings). For yourself, it enables you to share what you like. Others may look at it as a way to keep a trace of what you did online.

There are many WordPress plugins for enabling comments with Facebook Connect. We installed Facebook Connect by Adam Hupp. We also tried Facebook Connector by Javier Reyes. Although Facebook Connector has some nice community features, the login is less intuitive interface when commenting. This is why I selected, for now, Adam Hupp’s Facebook Connect.

Have you ever used Facebook Connect? Have you installed a Facebook Connect plugin on your blog? If so, which one did your select?

On the Web with Kim Vallee » wordpress

Adding BackType Connect to Your WordPress Blogs

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Matt Mullenweg Talked about His Open Source Story to Christian Aubry

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A Quick Recap of My Experience at WordCamp Montreal 2009

About Our Presentation

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How to Add a Related Posts Section for each Post

Installation Tips

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Need for More User Control with Mashups

Mashup Sites

The Situation

Custom-Made Solution

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Microblogging with the P2 Theme for WordPress

What makes P2 different than a typical Blog Theme?

What is the use of P2 Theme for a regular blogger?

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Why Did I Migrate My Main Blog to WordPress?

The Conclusion

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Top 3 Tips for a Blog Design Makeover

What are Your Goals?

What Design Problems Do You Wish to Solve?

Start with a Mock-Up

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My Top Tips To New Bloggers

Set up a self-hosted WordPress

Plugins and Other Programs To Install Before Your Launch

Necessary Content Before the Launch

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How to add Site Meter and Google Analytics to a WordPress Blog

My Step-by-step Instructions

How to Add Site Meter to WordPress 2.7?

How to Add Google Analytics to WordPress 2.7?

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Simple Way to Add a Background Image to a WordPress Blog

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Supporting Facebook Connect for Commenting

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