A quick heads-up on the latest TCW update, in line with the release of WordPress 3.1. This update also addressed the comment hijacking issue that, while wonderfully suggested and fixed by Stuff by Sarah quite a while ago (and implemented by yours truly on v.0.999a) , were not fully effective in blocking the comment spammers. Basically it’s a small rewrite of the database query, that’s all. This means that v.1.4.2 won’t affect your >=TCW 1.4 settings in any way.

Nevertheless, Top Commentators Widget v.2.0 update, to coincide with the next WordPress update (whether major or minor), will again affect your setup.

1. The form control, i.e. what you see in the Widgets section, will be re-arranged to simplify it.
2. Further modification on the look of your Number of Comments will be enabled.
3. Styling of the list for CSS purposes will be improved.
4. Addition of DIV on top of Numbered and Ordered.

I like WP 3.1. Do you?

Related posts:

1. Urgent update: Top Commentators Widget v.1.4.1 beta
2. WordPress Top Commentators Widget v.1.4

IMPORTANT: If you have customized the styles in any way on this widget, be aware that this update may break them!

Fingers crossed, this version of TCW (downloadable in WP.org’s plugin repository) should address all of the problems encountered in v.1.4 as mentioned in the comments of my previous post (especially those disappearing settings / changes in form not committing). I honestly THANK YOU for your comments – you have no idea how I appreciate all those bug reports you all have given.

The widget has gone through a heck of a major rewrite between v.1.4 and this one, so what does this really mean for your blog?

1. This version and any future updates of the Top Commentators Widget will no longer be compatible with WordPress installs prior to version 2.8. Sorry, folks, it’s just to inconvenient to make it backward compatible.
2. TCW is finally using the widgets API available since WP 2.8, which means that 1.4.1 beta now supports multiple instances of the Top Commentators in your blog!
3. Due to the support for multi-instances of this widget, the ID and CLASS styles may be called differently. You may not notice much difference especially if you’re only using a single instance of the Top Commentators widget in your blog, but you need to be aware of this in any case.

If you don’t feel at all comfortable with the changes in v.1.4 and this one, the older versions of this widget is still available at the WP.org repository; just find the link at the sidebar named “Older version” and grab the version that fits your blog.

Version 1.4 is so unstable, that I’ve decided to label this update as a beta. However, please feel brave enough to at least install this version in your sandbox and let me know how it goes in your blog. Please please please let me know, working or not, I would really like to know.

The TCW may be deactivated from your Widgets list due to the new API calls it makes. Therefore, once upgraded, please make sure you revisit your Widgets page and re-do your settings, then Save them.

I’d better give my back a rest. This slipped disc injury is scarily painful; I hope I’ll gain full mobility soon. My home and my kids are a wreck without me.

Related posts:

1. WordPress Top Commentators Widget v.1.4

This blog has been quiet, but it doesn’t mean that my life as a geek has been put on hold.

Far from it, as you can guess from the title of this post.

First off, I’ve scheduled a release of the latest version of the Top Commentators Widget sometime in November. A couple of bugs were mentioned by users like you, which I hope can be addressed by v.1.4. So, thanks for taking the time to report the errors. Please continue to do so by going to WP.org’s Support Forum if you can find anything else that’s in the widget in need of improvement. Information like these help make TCW useful and usable.

Secondly, I’m cooking up a project that I started three months ago (infact, it was two weeks after I gave birth to my son with designer genes). And it wasn’t until recently that I found out it has a name, thanks to my recent endeavor into Drupal.

My project is called the WordPress Installation Profiles. It might not work the way the Drupal community does it, but the idea is more or less there. This idea has also been discussed before, but as the post mentioned, the closest one out there was done by WordPress QI, and that’s still not quite like what I was hoping.

This idea came about after I saw a couple of Internet marketers out there monetizing a “software” that supposedly improves your WordPress site’s SEO. Upon further investigation, it turned out that it was merely a collection of already well-known (and free!) WordPress plugins, packaged into a single zipped file, and can be installed with a few clicks through a customized install.php file. I realized that, hey, I can do this too!

I was thinking of building one, then selling them off. But then I thought, in the spirit of open-source and WordPress, why not make them free as well? So, yeah, it’ll be available for you to download, FREE!

My first WordPress installation profile will be created around the concept of affiliate marketing blogs, with the following plugin options built into it:

• autoresponders
• opt-in subscriptions
• affiliate products auto-detection
• ad rotator / manager
• those SEO plugins for sure

This profile should also include a suitable theme, which I’m still trying to decide which to use. Then once this is done, I’ll be leveraging my Blogging Fu web site, where it will serve as a repository for all the installation profiles which I will be building later.

I’ll figure out my monetizing strategy later, but one thing’s for sure, those readily-available installation profiles will remain free once they are up there for downloading.

Any comments? Suggestions? Feel free to vent in the comments section below.

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My sidebar still has the MyBlogLog widget hanging around. It’s mostly for the benefit of visitors who are MyBlogLog users; it gives their sites or blogs the extra exposure by allowing people to click on their avatars and visit their sites.

But I don’t use MyBlogLog anymore. It’s probably been half a year since I logged in, and half a year in this digital age is a very long time.

Why did I start using MyBlogLog? I thought it would be an easy way to build my blog community around it.

The problem is, I didn’t intend WebGrrrl.net to be a place for me to network; this blog is merely a place for me to share what I discover and learn. Over time, I guess this blog did kind of gotten a life of its own, and a little build-up of followers seemed to be a natural way of its evolving to be what it is today.

Like many other social bookmarking / networking sites, using MyBlogLog is hard work if you’re counting on it to bring traffic to your blog. Think about this though: do you spend more time online searching for information and solving problems, or do you spend more time networking with people?

If you’re looking for answers to your problems, a service like MyBlogLog might not be the first thing that comes to mind — you’d be going straight to the Big G or the Yoddeling search engine and do you stuff from there. However, if you can spare the time and really do enjoy connecting with other people, then you should definitely continue to work the MyBlogLog sites and such.

When it comes down to it, I’m just as happy blogging for the sake of blogging. It’s great to know new people, but I don’t necessarily need to. I’ll still keep the MBL widget, though, as a courtesy to my blog visitors. Giving back links are always a nice to do.

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Yes, and finally it’s version 1.0. It’s a small update, but one which can improve the sidebar layout if you have been affected by it. The latest version fixes the extra tag that appears on all other pages when Show In Home Only is selected. Thanks to Ulquiorra for reporting the bug.

Download Top Commentators widget v.1.0 now.

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Some of you who have visited my site since a couple of weeks ago may have noticed the Tip Me (Scratchback) widget that I added in the sidebars. Yes, you don’t see it anymore, I’ve removed it. I suppose there’s no point, really, in using that widget if you want to get backlinks from my site. since all you have to do is comment on my post and your link automatically appears in my Top Commentators list. The only difference between the Tip Me and Top Commentators in terms of link visibility is the fact that Tip Me appears site-wide, whereas the Top Commentators links appear only on the home page of WebGrrrl.net.

I installed the ScratchBack widget to see whether I can really make money out of it. I probably should have promoted it a bit by posting about it; on the other hand, since I was only experimenting with it, it wasn’t a big deal anyway. I started off with a $5 tip per link, then lowered it to $2 a link, and still no buyer. Looks like Scratchback isn’t as effective as Text Link Ads or Linkworth if you’re meaning to use it as a way to sell links in your site. At least with the latter two, they do the work of looking for advertisers on your behalf, while with Scratchback, you may have to work extra hard to convince people to buy your links.

No related posts.

Bloghopping through my MyBlogLog visitors led me to a cute little plugin called ClickComments by PostReach. Instead of typing out their comments, your blog visitors can instead click on an icon representing how good your particular post is.

This plugin can be supported in many types of blogging platform such as Blogger, MovableType and of course WordPress. Even the setup looks fairly easy to use. You just need to fill in the form on the right-side of ClickComments’ web site with your blog URL (which is the only compulsory field to fill), and select the style you preferred when your plugin appears in your site. The icons representing the comments can be as simple as two icons representing I Like It / Don’t Like It, to as many as six icons representing Cool / Fun / Insightful / Fell Asleep / I’m Confused / I Disagree.

I suppose this may be a good alternative to using ratings on your posts, but this may not totally replace the traditional comment form that we’re used to. For one thing, the inability for the plugin to record your commentors’ URL would put off some people from commenting for the sake of backlinking (thus avoiding spams, yeay! ). Also, ClickComments may not fit your need if you are looking at your comments section as a community-building platform.

On top of that, the plugin design and icons are still very limited to those options you see in the form. Maybe one of these days ClickComments will have the ability for its users to customize not just the plugin look, but also the types of icons that can be used so that the plugin can be customized to fit a particular blog’s persona or theme.

I was this close to putting this widget into my blog, if not for that fact that my recent web hosting predicament caused me to be aware of my blog’s loading time and avoid anymore plugin and widget add-ins (although the plugins did not cause my problem). I may use something like this in the future or for my other sites.

No related posts.

I am in the midst of updating the Top Commentators Widget, and have a few changes in mind for this:

1. Modifying commentator queries based on e-mail addresses instead of URLs. I have read a few posts currently in the Web about how Top Commentators plugin can be hijacked by spammers, by way of typing in legitimate site URLs of honest commentators in a particular blog, then possibly inserting the spamming URL in the content of a comment. The suggested fix to this issue is to do queries of top commentators based on e-mail addresses, which are hidden from comments (as is most often practiced). I have suggested a fix that does just that in one of the comments of the Top Commentators Widget, but I have not tested it extensively. I’ll be doing so before releasing the next version of this widget.
2. Fixing the unclickable form fields in the Control Form. There’s only one, really, that I have identified as problematic, and that is the “Specify number of days” field under the reset period. The problem is apparently caused by the label tag wrapping around both the reset period and reset day fields. I have redone that part in my current test.
3. Option to list only commentators with URLs.
4. Fix the exclude URLs field, which seems to not work the way it suppose to.
5. (Added 4/Mar/08) Option to display or not display comment count.
6. (Added 11/Mar/08) Option to set NoFollow on all links in the list.

There were a few more issues I would like to fix but which may be out of my control. For example, a few commented that changes were not reflected even when saved (this could be permissions issues or browser not refreshed after changes were applied), and the control form not showing at all (certain browsers can’t display the JavaScript-and-CSS-based form properly; you may want to try using a different browser just to make sure).

If you’re currently using the widget and have anything else to add before the update is released (probably end of March), please use the comment form in this post, instead of the widget home post, and I’ll see what I can do with the request.

No related posts.

Once I read Andy Beard’s feed update on the latest MyBlogLog widget and seeing how cool-looking it was, I immediately rushed to my MBL dashboard and generated the widget code to add into my blog. Unfortunately, the MBL widget that I used, even after updating it according to the instructions in the MBL page, didn’t work; the new code snippet refused to save itself into the widget form. So now I am still stuck with what MLB calls its crusty old Recent Visitors widget.

If you had the same problem as I have but managed to fix the problem, please let me know how you did it.

UPDATE: The problem has been fixed, thanks to Ian and the MBL team. After Ian mentioned about the fix, I only needed to regenerate the code snippet and paste it in the MBL widget for it to work.

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Out goes my Blogsvertise ad, and in comes Entrecard. I initially put up the Blogsvertise ad due to numerous requests to advertise in my blog, but since I don’t want the hassle of managing them, I thought Blogsvertise could do it for me. (Not) surprisingly, I did not get any ad requests after that.

Now, I have seen Entrecard being used in other blogs, prominent and the not-so’s, but I have never thought of incorporating it into my blog. The buzz around Entrecard seemed to be focused more about drawing traffic into their blogs and web sites, an issue which doesn’t matter to me as I’m not really concerned with whether people would read my entries or not, blogging has always just been a passion.

Lately, though, I was beginning to get what Entrecard is more about — networking different site and blog owners to each other by treating their Entrecard accounts as a sort of digital business card that they can drop into their site (I know, I know, Entrecard has been pitching that concept everywhere, but as I said, I only just got it!). And giving free ad space for my blog visitors? Sure, why not?

If you are an Entrecard user, don’t be shy and do drop your Entrecard as often as you wish. Other than through the comments and my MyBlogLog widget,  your Entrecard would be a fun way for me to know who you are. It also means that I have more places to bloghop to later!

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