This announcement may be yesterday’s news for some, but I just discovered Aaron Lerch’s “Kick It” plugin today and it works like a charm.  If you are using WordPress AND Windows Live Writer is your go-to editor AND your posts tend to be .NET related, give Aaron Lerch’s DotNetKicks “Kick It” Counter Plugin for Windows Live Writer a try.  Again, it works like a charm.  Well, if I am being completely honest, I haven’t tested it yet as I’m not prepared to submit my own post to DNK. So, who’s going to be the first to test the plugin for me?

 With the attention that Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google are getting for agreeing on a standard sitemaps protocol, I figured it was probably time I got one in place which meets standard found on sitemaps.org. 

Though I’m sure I would have had a lot of fun using the Google Sitemap Generator Python scripts recommended by Google Webmaster Tools, I opted to go with yet another WordPress Plugin instead. 

Sitemap Generator for WordPress v2 was a single file download and a single click installation.  There’s a beta release of the next version available, but I stuck with version 2.

Though the plugin pings Google and let’s them know about the new sitemap.xml file, I still visited Google Webmaster Tools and set things up manually as well. 

First, what is FeedBurner?  At it’s core, FeedBurner republishes blog feeds.  This alone isn’t all that exciting, however, the service provides so much more.

FeedBurner’s most attractive feature is it’s analytics.  The service keeps track of feed subscribers, applications used to access your feed, where your readers are located and a few other statistics. 

Not only does FeedBurner manage your analytics, it also helps build your user base by introducing easy ways for readers to subscribe to your feed (via RSS, HTML and/or email) and by submitting your posts to numerous search engines for easy indexing.  And, of course, there’s the attractive FeedBurner counter you see on everyone’s site these days.  I mean, who can resist clicking on that little baby?

FeedBurner presumably maintains your reader base as well.  This is done by ensuring your feed is compatible with all aggregators and by adding features to your post such as email options and links to social bookmarking services.  Additionally, FeedBurner lets you change your feed location.  If you happen to move your blog to another domain you are going to want to bring your readers with you, right?

Any of these features are good reason to sign up with the service, but why did I start using FeedBurner?  Mostly because everyone else is doing it.  That’s right.  I guess I submitted to the peer pressure. :)

If you are interested in setting up a FeedBurner account or if you want to know how to integrate FeedBurner into your site, keep reading.  I also go a little deeper into feature list mention above as well.

FeedBurner Account Setup

This part is easy and free. 

1. Figure out your blog’s feed URL.  (I don’t know what it looks like for all blog types, but for WordPress it is similar to http://www.sitename.com/feed.)
2. Visit FeedBurner and submit your feed URL.   
3. Provide very little account information (blog name, user name, password, etc)
4. Activate features.  I would suggest browsing through the options on the Optimize tab first.  I added some “FeedFlare” such as links on the footer of each post to comment counts, add to del.icio.us, add to digg and email.  I also modified my feed’s Title/Description.  Many of the “Optimize” features are free so go nuts.
5. Head over the “Publicize” tab.  You will probably want to select all of the options under “PingShot.” This automatically notifies services like Technorati and Ping-o-matic when you publish a post.  If you would like to display the FeedBurner counter (chicklet) on your site, check out “FeedCount.” I would also recommend looking into ”Email Subscriptions” even though I haven’t activated this feature myself yet.  
6. Wait about 24 hours and then have a look at the “Analyze” section.  Twenty four hours is the amount of time FeedBurner needs to start “building” your feed statistics.  If you need some instant gratification, “Live Hits” should be immediately available.
7. Have a look at the premium service.  They aren’t expensive and they may be worth it to you.

Site Integration

How do you integrate a new FeedBurner feed into your blog?  After all, you may have millions of readers already tied to your current feed URL. 

If you are running WordPress, you are in luck. Check out the FeedBurner Plugin v2.1 from OrderedList.com.  The plugin detects all of the ways one might be accessing your WP feed.  For example, both http://www.johnnycoder.com/blog/feed/ and http://www.johnnycoder.com/blog/wp-rss2.php are valid feed URLs for this site.  After detection, the plugin will automatically start redirecting callers your new FeedBurner feed.  The redirection will allow you to track all subscriber - existing and new.  The plugin handles forwarding for your main post feed and optionally your main comments feed.  It is quick and easy to install and, to some extent, it will even walk you through the FeedBurner account setup. I was personally up and running in minutes and I understand the plugin works for both WP 1.5 and 2.0.

If you aren’t using WordPress and you can’t leverage this plugin, you’re going to have to find all instances of the RSS feed in your blog template and modify them to point to your new FeedBurner URL.  It should not be too hard, but it may be cumbersome.  You will also want to inform your readers of the feed URL change since they will have to resubscribe to your RSS.

Alternatively, if you have the means, write your own redirection routine at each entry point.  This way, you too, can automatically keep your current reader base. 

I’ve freely shared that my blog is “powered by” WordPress and I have enthusiastically endorsed the product time and time again. Heck, I may have posted enough praise to last WordPress a lifetime, but since Andreas Kraus asked for it, I am going to share a little more.

Here’s the top 3 things I love about WordPress (and how I incorporated them into my site.)

Number 1: Themes

There are literally hundreds of available WordPress themes. The trick was to sift through the clutter and find those which I liked. Just do a Google search for the top or the best WordPress themes and you will see what I’m taking about. You should find a number of sites featuring their own WordPress theme competitions with link list to preview all the submissions. You will also sites which simply list their favorite skins. AlexKing and WebLogToolsCollection are good example posts.

After lots of searching, I came across Fury at Alexallied.com. Since installing the theme I have modified it considerably but you can still see where JohnnyCoder’s foundation comes from.

Number 2: Plugins

I’ve downloaded and reviewed a number of plugins. Per an earlier post:

In nearly all cases a simple Google search, a two-second download, a two-minute installation in five minutes of play time is all that is required to get a plugin and running. On occasion, I will modify the codebase slightly, but the majority the time the plugins include ample configuration settings to provide the exact functionality I need. But when I do need to modify the code base, the code is clear and easy to navigate and tweaks to the code typically take only a few minutes.

Here’s the running list of plugins I’ve incorporated into this site (in no particular order). All of these plugins were freely available. All of these plugins came with source code, installed effortlessly and worked without any issues.

01. Akismet - This plugin checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You can review the spam it catches under “Manage” and it automatically deletes old spam after 15 days. You will need an API key to use this service, but if you are running WordPress, this comes free with an account. In my opinion, this plugin is a must-have.

02. Brian’s Threaded Comments - This gives you threaded/nested comments and a “wandering” comment form. To be honest, I’m not sure what the “wandering” comment form is all about, the threaded comments worked nearly perfectly out-of-the-box. I have modified the plugin code slightly. For more, check out my previous post.

03. WP-Notable - Adds social bookmark links and icons to each blog entry. For more, check out my previous post.

04. Breadcrumb Navigation - Shows current viewing post or page, search results, category, and archives. This plugin was included with the original Fury theme.

05. Customizable Post Listings - Display Recent Posts, Recently Commented Posts, Recently Modified Posts, Random Posts, and other post listings using the post information of your choosing in an easily customizable manner. You can narrow post searches by specifying categories and/or authors, among other things.

06. WP-PostViews - Enables you to display how many times a post have been displayed.

07. Get Recent Comments - Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar.

08. Live Comment Preview - Supplies users with a live comment preview. For more, check out my previous post.

09. Nice Categories - Displays the categories conversationally, like: Category1, Category2 and Category3.

10. XSD Snapr - Snapr simply integrates WebSnapr-Script in your Wordpress blog. Adds preview bubble to all external links. For more, check out my previous post.

Number 3: Community

There are a number of blog engines to chose from these days. I was lucky enough to decide on WordPress primarily because of its extensive userbase. There are some many contributors, I have found endless freely available code (mostly themes and plugins) and support in the form of WordPress-related sites. Though I love figuring stuff out on my own, my research is typically limited to an online search when it comes to my WordPress blog thanks to the many helpful individuals who work with WordPress too.

So there you have it — the making of JohnnyCoder.com. Let’s consider this a living post as I’ll continue to update as I enhance the site.

If you are interested, you may find more about site registration and hosting on one of my early posts.

What is it?  Well, WebSnapr 2.0 is a service which lets you capture screenshots of (almost) any web page. It  allows your visitors to instantly visualize any web page before clicking.   And it claims to “increase site traffic, click-through rate and site stickiness,” though I’m not sure how. 

I first saw it used on DotNetKicks and I thought it was cool so I investigated.  WebSnapr 2.0 is free and it so easy to implement!  And talk about accommodating.  There are already a ton of plugins available which are featured on the site.  Of course, I zoomed in on the WebSnapr Wordpress Plugin which enables a “WebSnapr Preview Bubble” for every link on one’s site with zero code changes!  (You can add the preview for individual links as well, but that requires some effort — the manual additional of a style tag.)

Unfortunately, based on response times I’m seeing early this morning, I think the free and easy implementation is going to be the product’s downfall.  As far as I can tell, every captured screenshot will require a call to http://images.websnapr.com/?url=[url]&size=[size]. Though I am sure there must be some caching going on, my bet is the traffic is going to add up extremely fast now that WebSnapr topped the digg and del.icio.us charts last week.  (Maybe Google will buy the service and help out in this area?)

I activated the plugin on one my other sites and I received less-than-stellar results. 

In the first case, the preview was rendered very quickly.  On the WebSnapr site, it stated that “it might take a few seconds before the thumbnail is captured. If so, you’ll see a Snapshot currently in queue message. This will be gone as soon as your thumbnail is generated.” 

Since this message didn’t appear for the popular WordPress URL, I assumed the snapshot was probably cached which benefited the performance.  

On the same page, a less popular URL screen shot was queued (see right.)  This seemed logical, however, I also noticed a number of broken images on the same page (see below.)  

I wasn’t able to successfully grab a screen shot of the broken image (and they were there for well over a minute) so I browsed around to other sites to see if I could find an example of the “issue.” 

I was able to quickly find the same problem on the site where I downloaded the plugin. I have to admit that I found it very strange that the WebSnapr URL, itself, wasn’t rendering a preview.  It makes me think my caching assumption is bogus.

The WebSnapr service is a great idea and it is really very cool.  It is a nice addition to anyone’s site - especially when it’s performing well.  I look forward to reading more about the technology behind the product.  I guess it’s time I start translating the creator’s blog.

You may have noticed that I have already incorporated a number of plugins into my blog. I have added plugins for breadcrumb navigation, clean post tag displays, management of comment spam, display of recent comments, submission of threaded comments and to capture some site statistics. All of these plugins were freely available. All of these plugins came with source code, installed effortlessly and had been tested by the WordPress Community as a whole.

In nearly all cases a simple Google search, a two-second download, a two-minute installation in five minutes of play time is all that is required to get a plugin and running. On occasion, I will modify the codebase slightly, but the majority the time the plugins include ample configuration settings to provide the exact functionality I need. But when I do need to modify the code base, the code is clear and easy to navigate and tweaks to the code typically take only a few minutes.

With all this said, I really thought I was going to put them — the WordPress Community — to the test today. Today I was looking for a live comment preview plugin. My guess was that someone had already created such an extension. Now it was my job to find it. To my surprise, I found it with a single Google search. The installation instructions were ridiculously simple –download a single file, copy it to your site’s plugins folder and activate. The write-up stated that the extension would work with most themes with no needed changes.

I was so skeptical I did a few additional searches to see if I could dig up any dirt on this plugin. I found only documented praise. There were no complaints. There were no stories of this extension corrupting people’s blogs. There wasn’t even a single comment such as, “I activated the plugin, but it didn’t work. What’s up?” Still, I wasn’t willing to activate the plugin on JohnnyCoder.com just yet. I decided to activate the extension on one of my other blogs (a blog I could “sacrifice”) and I tested. The plugin delivered as promised. Wow.

So Live Comment Preview is now available on JohnnyCoder.com. It’s pretty slick (and it even helped uncover an existing stylesheet issue with the site which still isn’t fixed.) Who knows? Maybe I’ll be bombarded by comments soon. (I doubt it. The plugin is slick but not magical.)

To be honest, I am very surprised that threaded (or nested) comments don’t come out-of-the-box with a fresh WordPress installation. It’s not that I’m knocking WordPress. It’s great, but if every blogger would want this feature shouldn’t it be rolled into the product? Okay. Free is free. I’m done looking a gift horse in the mouth…

Though I don’t know a lick of PHP, I have found the WordPress code base is easy to manipulate so I added threaded comment support to the site last night. The functionality is heavily-based on Brian Meidell’s Nested Comments Plugin. He did a really nice job, but I made a handful of tweaks to address a few site/browser style sheet issues and I modified the verbiage slightly.

I’m happy with the implementation. How about you?

Earlier this month, I answered the question, What is Social Bookmarking? At the time, JohnnyCoder.com provided hand-coded links to only two sites: Del.icio.us and Digg. Since then, I discovered Cal Evan’s WP-Notable Plugin and, as you can see, the number of links to social bookmarking and networking sites has increase a bit.

WP-Notable is configurable to display any of the links below.

Each of the icons can be turned on or off and you can customize the character that go between the images. Additionally, the plugin generates a tooltip for each icon so you can prepend text to this tooltip to help your user identify exactly what clicking on the icon will do. The plugin is easy to install and the code which is generated validates with most common HTML validators.

This plugin saved me from writing a good amount of cumbersome code. Feel free to try it out.

I know what you are thinking. Why would any self-respecting blogger want to restrict access to site? Well, as it works out, there are two logical, completely reasonable, ummm, reasons.

1. You are a private blogger writing about sensitive topics which may cause problems in your professional and/or personal life. In this case, it would make sense to restrict access to family and friends or everyone all together.
2. You are a paid-content provider. I’m no businessman, but it’s fairly safe to say that you aren’t going to have a lot of paying customers if you give everyone access to your content.

In either case, if you don’t wish to share your content with the entire world, Angsuman’s Authenticated WordPress Plugin may be just for you. It is super simple to install (copy a file and active the plugin). I’m using it on another site and it works like a charm. The plugin site also provides information on how to configure your blog for private blogging or paid-content blogging once the plugin is activated.

I’ve been on a hunt for “the best blog editor” for some time now. I have tried out a handful of products, but I haven’t been completely happy with any of them yet. Perhaps I’m too picky…

At first I focused on desktop blog editors only. This may have been foolish since WordPress provides it’s own online editor which is perhaps the most reliable online text/html editor I’ve ever used. Notwithstanding, I began my search with a bias against online editors and I’m sticking to it*.

1. On Day 1, I purchased WB Editor after performing very little research. I paid just under $20 and I’m still using this product today. It has it’s issues, but for all intents and purposes it gets the job done. I like how it handles/uploads images, the fact that I can post articles as drafts and save posts to local files. I am disappointed, however, that I am unable to create new categories within the tool or change the post dates and times. I’ve also found that downloaded posts lose their formatting (even if they were originally posted through WB Editor) which is a real drag.

2. I’ve dedicated very little time to Zoundry, but I think it is going to win me over. It’s a free download and it addresses 2 of the 3 issues I have with WB Editor. Zoundry lets me manage the date and time of posts and it handles formatting quite well. I haven’t figured out the creation of categories yet and I need to play with photos still, but this product is starting to grow on me.

3. I played with Qumana for about 30 minutes. If you want software which is easy to use, this product is for you. I downloaded, launched the application and was setup for blogging in less than 5 minutes. What I think is interesting (and smart) is the fact that this product really markets the money-making side of blogging. Just check out their home page where they feature Q Ads and a banner that reads, “Write something, stick an ad in it, and bank the money.” In spite of the potential millions it could bring me, I don’t believe I will be using this product going forward. But again, it is SUPER easy to use.

4. And then there was w.bloggar. I admit I was turned off by this product before I even started evaluating. Unfortunately for it’s creator and one-man development team, I opted to download the product when the official w.bloggar site was offline. Rather than seeing the very impressive official site, I saw the “temp” page which was ugly and shared apologies of being in a state of restoration. I was able to download the application and try it out and it worked just fine. I have few complaints except I found the interface to be a little busy and I didn’t care for the way past posts were managed. Otherwise, great product. It definitely got me up and running in no time.

5. I liked the overall “feel” of Ecto. It is was easy to use and a nice product, but after an hour of playing with the trial version I could not justify buying the product for $17.95. It simply wasn’t a superior product compared to what I could get for free (or had already paid for.)

* Okay. So I lied. Even though I shy away from online editors, I had to make an exception and evaluated Performancing for Firefox. This product is awesome considering the fact it isn’t a desktop app. You should try it out. I’m also going to check out a couple of WordPress editor plugins as well.

How about you? Which blog editor do you prefer?