The Insert File Plugin for Windows Live Writer has been around for a while.  Here’s my attempt at trying it out.  It’s documented to be tested with WordPress.  Wish me luck… 

Update: It worked like a charm.  I wonder if it will still work with a post update from WLW?

Update: Yes, it does. 

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.

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.

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.

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.)

First. What is a trackback?

Per Wikipedia: TrackBack is a mechanism for communication between blogs: if a blogger writes a new entry commenting on, or referring to, an entry found at another blog, and both blogging tools support the TrackBack protocol, then the commenting blogger can notify the other blog with a “TrackBack ping“; the receiving blog will typically display summaries of, and links to, all the commenting entries below the original entry. This allows for conversations spanning several blogs that readers can easily follow.

Fine. So I am ready to submit my post and I want to have the trackback listed in the comment section of the article to which I’m referencing. Simple, right? No. More like infuriating.

First. I go to the referenced post in order to get its Trackback URL. I’ve seen a lot of blogs provide Trackback URLs in plain text on the post or provide a link to get the URL. This site didn’t provide this, however, there were already a few trackbacks in the comments so I knew trackbacks had to be supported. I ended up viewing the source of the page to come up with the ping address. (At this point, I’m feeling like a detective. I’m not stupid yet.)

Next. My blogging software (I’m currently using Zoundry) accepts a comma separated list of trackback URLs for each post. It’s clear as day and nearly fool-proof. (note the word nearly)

I added the URL and published the post. Prior to posting, Zoundry presents a dialog which basically summarizes all actions which are going to take place. The dialog lists all of the sites to which the article will be submitted (i.e. Technorati), which images will be uploaded, etc. It also allows me to verify trackback information AND lets me modify the comments which would be submitted to the called page. By default, the first n words of my post were displayed, but I could simply have the comment read, “I like your post. Now check out mine.” Recently, I’ve seen some clever trackback comments so I was excited to see this feature. So, I update and publish and I’m told all actions were completed successfully, but the trackback comment never showed up on the called page. Bummer. I gave it a little time. It was a long shot, but perhaps the owner of the other blog approves comments/trackbacks before they are displayed. This wasn’t the case. It simply didn’t work.

I wasn’t able to find any documented issues of trackbacks not working through Zoundry, but I figured it would be best to try the trackback ping through another tool. I tried the online WordPress admin tool and the attempt was successful! But I was disappointed since I wasn’t able to send alternate text and the trackback comment includes the first n words of my post which looks and sounds (take a guess) stupid.

I’ll probably do a few more test which other blogging tools, but for now I’m going to rely on “poor man’s trackbacks.” (a.k.a. dumb man’s trackbacks) I’ll drop a “real” comment on a post I wish to blog about and in the comment provide a link back to my article. It should do the trick, no? It’s nearly fail-proof and I will never need to hunt down trackback URLs or hope trackback pings are enabled or wish I could alter trackback comments again. Stupid, meet Simple.

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?

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.

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.

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?

UPDATE: I have now been using Windows Live Writer for quite a while.  You can find my write up here.

Registration: In another 5 years, it is going to be impossible to obtain [yourname].com so it was somewhat of a big deal to me to get my hands on [myson].com. A quick visit to godaddy.com and ~$30 later, I had the domain privately registered. Though the private registration is about $8 more than standard registration, I think it’s worth it. Ultimately, it means your personal information isn’t exposed to anyone at any time and it effectively eliminates all spam associated with the registration.

Cost: $30

Hosting: Since cost was the biggest factor in finding my host, I couldn’t be too particular when it came to options. Since I work for a MS shop, I would have really liked a host which supported .NET and SQL Server, but I knew I wasn’t going to find this on the cheap. And since I wasn’t going to find a host which supported my programming language of choice, I needed to find (rather than code) a blog. This is where BlueHost.com came in. They will host up to 6 domains for $6.95 / month. They support Perl, PHP and MySQL and they provide automatic installs of many, many products including 5 different PHP blogs.

Cost: $166 for two-year agreement

Blog: After about 30 minutes of research, I decided WordPress would support my blogging needs. Really, I only had a few requirements:

1. Text and Image Support
2. Site Templating Options
3. Offline Blog Editors Support.

Since BlueHost.com provided a free installation of the product, it was a no-brainer.

Cost: $0

Blog Editor: I wanted the ability to write and publish my blog entries using a third-party tool. Though WordPress provides online admin tools, I’ve never met an online text/html editor which I’ve liked. Thus, I chose to go with WB Editor – a desktop blogging tool. Since using the product, I’m not particularly impressed. It is super-easy to use, but I’m a geek. I don’t want easy with barebones functionality. I’d prefer complex with lots of options.

Cost: $20 (You get what you pay for)

I recently thought there may be a business opportunity here. Setting up one’s own blog isn’t difficult (heck, check out Blogger on Google.com if you want easy), but the process isn’t necessarily easy for everyone. I don’t know if personal blog setup is something that the GeekSquad does already, but blogging is becoming more and more popular so maybe someone should capitalize on it.