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!

This is the first update / roundup style post on More Than Scratch The Surface. I originally thought I’d stick to articles, but I can now see the need to write about things that aren’t worth a full post. Expect to see these occasionally.

Plugins

I spent most of last week on the IFrameWidgets plugin. There were quite a few issues, but now there’s only one left: the site who makes the widget won’t know which page the widget was called from. This is fully explained on the plugin’s home page. I’m waiting a little while to see what the fallout of this is (if any) before I start to actively push it. I learnt a few HTML / Javascript tricks while sorting out the issues, so expect some posts on these soon.

The new version of the DualFeeds plugin should have been released six weeks ago, but I just haven’t gotten around to finishing the documentation yet. I’ve been busy, but that’s terrible! I did fix an obscure bug (only present when switching feeds and for some versions of php) over the weekend. Thanks to Dmitry from www.sportreport.ru for helping me sort this out. Anyway, expect this to be released towards the end of next week.

Alexa Milestone

A couple of stumbles from K-IntheHouse and Andy Beard helped push this site through the 150K barrier at Alexa recently. I’ve been surprised how easily I’ve moved up the rankings, but I’m anticipating that it will be harder from now on, as I’m in the same area as a lot of other great blogs.

Stormy Weather

Google storms, Blogrush storms. There’s a lot going on in the blogosphere. I’m an interested reader of it all, but there’s been no impact on me personally.

My blog is newish, so I don’t have any toolbar PR yet to lose. As Josh points out it seems that only toolbar PR is affected, not the SERPs. Let hope that’s true. I suspect it’s all part of Google’s bigger plans for PR, whatever they are (and we’d all love to know). It would be good to see Google being more open about what’s going on, but I’m not holding my breath!

I haven’t signed up to Blogrush yet, so this is just based on what I’ve read. I will say in Blogrush’s defence that it is a public-beta, so people have to expect issues. However, it’s got to be said that the recent episode of making 10,000 blogs inactive has been handled very poorly. It would have been better to warn people that didn’t match the criteria and given them time to address it, rather than just pulling the plug on them.

I’ve worked in the software industry for 13 years and been responsible for releasing product and managing client communication. You can’t keep everyone happy, but right now Blogrush have way too many people unhappy with them. I think long-term they’ll probably sort out their issues, but they have alienated a lot of people which will make their job more difficult.

Guest Post

Something else I’ve been doing this week is writing a guest post for Snoskred’s Get Out Of Your Niche series. We’ll be moving back to Australia in six months, so I’ve written about what I’ll miss about China and what I’m looking forward to back in Australia. It should be appearing tomorrow on Snoskred’s site, so check it out if you’re interested.

Return readers will notice some changes here at More Than Scratch The Surface. I normally don’t blog about changes, but in this case, there are so many that I thought it would be worthwhile. Here’s a rundown on them.

Modified Theme

My theme was just a customised version of the default WordPress Theme. It still is, but I’ve modified it further. One day I will design a Theme from scratch, but for now I’d rather spend my time writing plugins.

The main change is that I’ve widened it: it was optimised for 800×600 with one sidebar, it’s now optimised for 1024×768 with two sidebars. I’ve put both sidebars on the right, although I may change this. I’ve stayed with fixed width, because I prefer to know exactly how it will look.

I’ve been threatening to do this for a while. Actually it’s only been 6 weeks (seems longer) since I said I’d do this in the comments of Untwisted Vortex’s The Death of the 640×480 Resolution.

Menu Bar

I’ve removed the Pages section of my sidebar and added a menu bar instead. I suspect this will get crowded as I write more plugins, but for now I’m happy with it.

Contact Page

I now have a Contact page, which was one of the things picked up when my site was reviewed on Untwisted Vortex.

I am using a WordPress plugin to do this, but I won’t tell you which one yet. I tried out five different plugins in making the selection and I’m planning a series of reviews in the coming weeks. I don’t want to spoil the conclusion!

Articles Page

I’ve added the Articles plugin by Alex King and used it to create an Articles page, so my articles are not buried over time, as pointed out by Hari when he reviewed my site. I will supplement this with some extra article features in future (such as a Most Viewed Articles section in the sidebar).

One thing I noticed while setting this up is that I have gotten away from article style posts in recent times. I am going to work to get back to articles in future.

The Corn Factor

I removed my ‘blurb’ and changed my tagline (from A Journey In Web Development to Exploring Web Development). My blurb seemed good to me when I started out, but now it seems corny. To prove I still have the corn factor, I’ve added the infinite loop image to my header.

If I had a travel blog, I’d add a great photo to the header, but it’s not so easy to do when you are writing about web development! I’m sure something better will come later.

Social Widgets

The Bumpzee, MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog widgets have migrated from my sidebar to my footer. They were just taking too long to load. They aren’t any quicker in the footer, but at least they aren’t holding up the rest of the page.

DualFeeds Beta

I’ve also been running the beta version of DualFeeds 1.1, which includes a sidebar widget and the ability to show the RSS feed links after each post. You can see these in action on my site.

Actually, I’ve held up the release of DualFeeds 1.1 while I’ve been redesigning the site. People haven’t been clamouring for it and I want to have my site right before I start pushing the update.

FeedBurner

I started using FeedBurner for my feeds several weeks ago, as part of testing DualFeeds 1.1. I am not sure I’ll keep using it. It’s nice to get stats about the number of subscribers and there are other benefits, but although FeedBurner works well for the main feeds, it’s not so good with WordPress’ dynamic feeds (eg category feeds). I’ll discuss this further later on.

Also, it appears that FeedBurner feeds don’t work in China, meaning I can’t use my desktop reader to read my own feed! Makes testing interesting. The Subscribe To Email feature may sway me to stick with them.

Antisocial Plugin

I’ve adopted Andy Beard’s Antisocial hack of the Sociable plugin, which adds social bookmarking links to end of each post. Antisocial makes the links nofollow, so you don’t leak too much PageRank. I’m not sure if anyone is using them, but they sit just nicely below my feed icons.

The Dreaded Adsense

I’ve been warned that Adsense is not going to make me much money and that it may even drive readers away. I understand that my core readers are mostly Adsense blind and less likely to click ads. So why am I adopting it?

I’m about to develop a site for someone else and I may do more freelance web development in future. I should at least try Adsense shouldn’t I? I’ll be trying other options too in future, but I’ll try not to go overboard.

Polls

I’ve adopted Lester Chan’s WP-Polls plugin. Polls are a great way to interact with your visitors, so I’ll be adding one every so often.

Alexa Widget

I’ve added an Alexa widget, now my ranking is semi-respectable. I know, I know, there are serious flaws with Alexa, but it’s one way to measure my progress. Let me add it damn it!

The Future

That’s all the changes for the moment. There will be more changes coming in future (rework my About page, separate comments and trackbacks, add a top commentator section, sort out my meta tags and a bunch of other stuff). I’ll leave all of that until after I get the DualFeeds 1.1 update out the door.

If you’ve read this far, you truly have stamina (or at least you’re not easily bored!).