Roundup - Life, Ratings, Tags, Plugin News, Alexa Milestone
December 20th, 2007 by Stephen Cronin (834 views)It’s been almost two weeks since my last post. Here, I explain why and run through some of the other things that have been happening behind the scenes here at More Than Scratch The Surface.
Real Life
The last week and a half has been written off by a virus affecting several family members. Ultimately, it wasn’t serious, but there were moments when it seemed it might be and we had the chance to experience the Chinese hospital system. The less said the better, but it wasn’t pleasant. Thankfully, things are slowly returning to normal now.
As much as I love blogging, there are times when you realise it’s not that important.
Ratings Gone
I’ve had the WP-PostRatings plugin installed from day one, but I uninstalled it recently. I really like the idea of it: If someone doesn’t have time to comment, then they can let me know what they think just by clicking on the appropriate star.
The problem is that very few people actually use it. On average, there were two ratings made for every three posts. Of the ratings made, more than 85% were 5 out of 5. That’s very nice, but ultimately it’s not providing any real value (beyond the pretty yellow stars!). So, it’s gone.
Thanks to Josh from the Make Money Blog, RT from Untwisted Vortex and K from Shankri-la for leaving the majority of the ratings that were made.
Tags Here
I wasn’t using tags, but of course they are now part of the WordPress core (from 2.3 onwards). I’ve now gone back through all my old posts and added tags to them.
The built-in tag functionality is very basic, so most people end up using one or more plugins to supplement it. I looked at quite a few plugins and decided to use Simple Tags, which is very popular and seems to include all the functionality you could possibly need.
I’ve added a tag cloud to the sidebar, but I’m not sure if it will stay. At the moment, the wordpress plugins tag is a lot larger than any of the other tags, which makes it look a little strange.
The main benefit of tags is that I now have a related posts feature. I know there are other ways of doing this, but it makes sense to do it via tags.
Theme
With the removal of the ratings and the addition of tags, I took the opportunity to tweak the theme a little. This shows mainly on the home page and can be seen underneath each entry (the area with Tags and Posted In).
Plugin News
I have been talking about ‘releasing’ the IFrameWidgets plugin for a while now, but it keeps getting put off. By ‘release’, I mean promote the 0.14 beta release to version 1.0 and start promoting it on plugin lists etc. There will be no difference to 0.14. As Christmas is just about here, I may hold off until the new year (for maximum exposure).
IFrameWidgets only works with widgetised themes. I am planning to add functionality allowing IFrames in other places, such as the post body and theme files (such a single.php or sidebar.php). I am not yet sure if this will be part of IFrameWidgets or a new plugin.
I will release a new version of the DualFeeds plugin in the coming days. This will only have a very minor change: in the current version (1.1), the sidebar image and the RSS icons at the end of the post are missing the alt attribute, which breaks the validation of pages using these images.
Alexa Milestone
More Than Scratch The Surface recently broke through the Alexa 100K mark. The site is only a little over 6 months old and I don’t post nearly enough, so it’s quite satisfying. Thanks to all those who’ve stumbled my posts!
The Final Word
There’s more going on, but the other things deserve a post on their own. Hopefully these will appear in the near future!
Tags: alexa, dualfeeds, iframewidgets, site improvement, wordpress plugins
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It’s great to see you’re back and even better to hear you and your family are OK!
Congrats on the newly achieved traffic ranking. I had a nice jump a month or two back and peaked at around 60,000. Now I’m sitting at 70,000 after the recent update, but it’s still not too shabby.
I’m behind in times because I still haven’t implemented a tagging system. I guess I’m just not convinced that they’re all that effective if you have a good link structure, although everyone and their brother uses them. Know of a good article that would convince me otherwise?
See you around Stephen!
btw, I didn’t realize you could see who rated your posts
I thought I was doing it incognito 
I guess you matched IP’s.
Hi Josh,
Thanks. I’ve seen your Alexa rank and I have to say it’s well deserved. Congrats yourself!
I wasn’t that sold on tags myself. As I said, the main benefit I was after is the related posts feature (via the Simple Tags plugin), which you can get through different means. Having said that, I can see a couple of other benefits:
1. It lets me keep my categories nice and clean. I have a tag for Google Reader, but it would be overkill to have a separate category for it. Someone landing on my site, who was interested in Google Reader, may click the tag and stay on my site longer.
2. I’ve heard that tags can help with Technorati (and even search engine traffic), but haven’t looked into this yet.
The WP-PostRatings plugin shows you who made the ratings, if they’ve made a comment (it uses the name from the comment). It must be based on IP address.
Congratulation to your Alexa traffic ranking.
You are doing great. Keep it up!
Terence, Thanks! It’s been a lot of hard work, but very satisfying.
Stephen,
Glad to see you back and to hear that your family is alright.
Congrats are in the order for breaking the 100K mark! That’s excellent and well deserved.
I love it that you have a tag cloud now. I am a firm believer of tags and you have already made 2 excellent points on their usefulness.
Keeping my categories broad and short is one of my favorite things about category. Plus, when I look at a tag cloud I can visually evaluate quickly what this blog is about and what you talk about the most here.
I have this at the top of my sidebar just for this reason as I believe it will help quick navigation for my reader beyond the traditional category based navigation as well as give them a good feel for what my blog is about.
Also, if you use tags for the right keywords that get searched on your blog the most (Google Analytics Site Search feature), with a plugin like Search Unleashed your search results can return highly relevant posts for your reader.
But, this is all coming from a guy with 120K+ Alexa ranking so take it with a grain fo salt!
About the rating system, I almost added it to ShanKri-la but now you have made me change my mind. i don’t it gets used on blogs like ours but I think I’ll have better success with it in a recipes blog my wife and I just started.
Wow just looked at the preview and this has gotten long! Thanks for the link love.
K, Thanks. I think you’ll pass the 100K mark yourself in the not too distant future - your site is quality.
Good point about tag clouds letting a visitor quickly evaluate what your blog is about. I guess I’ll keep it somewhere. I take your point about having it near the top, but I feel it would look better in a wider area (than the sidebar). I haven’t looked at Search Unleashed yet, but will do so.
I checked out your wife’s recipe blog and now I’m hungry! Great site!
Stephen, thank you! I have been building my RSS subscribers.. but my site traffic has held steady for a while now which is what Alexa uses for ranking I guess.
You are absolutely right about the tag clouds looking better in a wider location. I am right now tweaking my theme to get a wide area at the top where I could feature a few 125×125 squares and the tag cloud!
Thanks to your iFrame widget plugin, I am using it even for the ScratchBack widget & the Buxr.com widget and it works like a charm!
Glad you liked my wife’s recipe blog. She is just starting out with it and we are hoping to build it up as we go with things past just recipes.
K, Alexa is nice, but subscribers are more important and you’re doing better than me on that front (I’m nearing 80, you’re 200+ right?). I get traffic coming past, but a lot of it doesn’t stick. I need to look into that and address it in the new year.
I’m working out the design for a new blog which I’m launching soon. I’m thinking of using a single very wide sidebar. That will allow me to get a wide tag cloud and mean that recent posts will only take one line instead of two (which looks a little ugly). For thin items, I can probably put them next to each other, with a divider between. I’m not sure how it will work out, but we’ll see.
As for the recipe blog - there’s so much you could do with it. You could start a store and sell the hard to find ingredients, you could get a video camera in the kitchen and broadcast a cooking show - the possibilities are endless! Good luck!