I found an excellent tool at Blogworld. Its not launched yet, but promises to enable readers of blogs to help recommend corrections and editing suggestions for WordPress blogs.
Now, I also work with Dragon NaturallySpeaking and from time to time I might make a mistake with it. Despite my efforts at editing, I am a better writer than I am an editor, especially of my own stuff.
So I have been looking for a tool that would enable me to get some advice and help from you my readers. I often get comments about words that aren’t quite right, but its never easy nor efficient.
So imagine my surprise when I saw this great demo at Blogworld showing off a tool that did just that!
It can also track metrics for the quality and regularity of corrections, contributions and suggestions. Despite its folksy name that is reminiscent of a description of the arc or curve a bathroom faucets or something, this is definitely a tool that you will want to keep an eye out for in the future. Its not launched yet (as of 9/27/08) but you can sign up for a notification list at their site.
Here’s a little plugin that I should have looked for a long time ago!
It adds RSS feeds to all of your categories. This is very handy if your blog is somewhat diverse and some of your readers want to specifically follow just a category or 2 via a feed.
Its even more useful if you want to establish some interesting layouts on your blog with pages, feeds, and feedburner!
The Plugin
The plugin can be found at Perishable Press. Its called Category Live Bookmarks which is kind of an old fashioned way to refer to feeds and getting a link to a feed, but there is not too much that is old fashioned about the plugin in its final execution. Its compatible with WordPress 2.3.
It doesn’t come with an installation folder, which is a little annoying if you like to keep your folders and plugins organized. Fortunately it only has 3 files.
You Upload and activate the plugin, then replace your normal category list call with the code provided by perishable.
You can then set some variables to display the feed icon or a count of articles next to each category or what have you and that’s about it. There are CSS options if you want to code things more effeciently with CSS.
Rocking and Rolling with Feeds
Once you have this setup, you can achieve some very interesting results with your blog design and organization of articles, pages, and more creating a very dynamic presentation.
One of these days, I’ll write a more complete document on how to do this, but for now I’ll just leave you with the plugin. Later on when you are ready for the step by step tutorial but do not want to walk up the stairs yourself, I’ll power up a stair lift tutorial and let you go to town, like that old lady in the Movie Gremlins that gets ejected out of her house.
There is a great video that I found on YouTube that is called Dogs in the Kennel and its a song with slide show set to the tune of Kats in the Cradle. Now the original song is a bit of a tear jerker, and this parody is almost as much if not more of a tear jerker.
Regardless of my protest, I highly recommend the program even though it will require a little manual PHP coding in your sidebar file after you install the plugin. But it dos work and looks great.
Here’s the code that I used for my image:
The plugin creator gives the code excerpts, all you have to do is put the PHP tags around the code calls. That wasn’t terribly clear in the instructions, but I’m not complaining!
Note I went with a small image as it was going in just one column of the sidebar so the image is about the size of a Gameboy or PSP as opposed to a full screen or something that you might see on a PS2 or something. I already knew how to do large screen sizes for videos, but when I attempted to just embed the code from you tube into my sidebar, I received a message that I needed a plugin and that no plugins were available for firefox.
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