There was a piece of nonsensical link bait published last week asking whether blogging was dead. Obviously not. But it is changing and that means that some aspects of blogging will inevitably die. Standing in one place it is hard to judge which, so what do you think is on the way out?

Calendars

When was the last time you decided to put a calendar in your sidebar? Once upon a time they were de rigueur but they don’t really add much to browsing a blog and they aren’t seen very often any more.

Come to think of it, when was the last time you even used one?

Blogrolls

It used to be that linking out from a blogroll was a way of creating connections. It showed your interests, provided search juice, and, by way of referrers, maintained an awareness of your blog in the minds of others. Now though linking is much more about context, and giving someone a specific reason to follow that link.

Although there are still a few about I see less and less of them and it has been a very long time since I have wanted to declare my allegence to a group of friends on my sidebar. So are they dead? or do you still see a value in them?

Personally I wish the links / bookmarks / blogroll feature would be removed from the WordPress core as I think it is a niche application now.

Linking In general

Blog rolls aside, the whole point of blogs used to be to link. The idea that you could link from one post, to one post of another blog, to one post on another blog, and so on ad nauseum, was a strong and interesting one, but more and more, blogs are being written by freelancers with the end game being for you to exit the blog in a controlled way, i.e. through adverts or affiliate links. Not so much fun for the casual reader.

I do still see a lot of linking going on so pronouncements of death are hideously premature, but the madly incestuous linking to anyone and everyone that used to define the blogiverse seems to have calmed. Even this post has no links (although I would have to do that just to prove a point really wouldn’t I?).

Reverse Chronological Layouts

OK, this one is a little specious, but once you add a sticky post, then decide to show the most recent post from a number of different categories, magazine style, even though some of those categories may not be as recent as other posts, you are heading down a dark road towards issues, and editions rather than a simple list of dated posts.

This may be nothing but a passing trend or it may be the future for serious blogs, as opposed to fun light hearted blogs (like this one ), but as people get more interested in being published, and find more and more weight can be added to their words by following a more professional style of presentation will the blog layout as we know it start to die?

Would that in itself mean that blogging is dying or is a small online media outlet nothing but a blog in disguise?

I had a tweet this morning asking what I thought of the new Adobe Air Moderator App for WordPress. Having been heavily embedded in Non-WordPress things for the last few days I hadn’t seen it, but now I have I feel compelled to blog about it. It’s Awesome.

Daniel Dura has preempted the 2.7 comment API by adding the functionality he needs via a plugin and giving that plugin an Adobe Air front end. What this means is that whenever a new comment arrives on your blog you don’t need to open up your browser and log into WordPress, it appears in the desktop app and asks what you want to do with it.

I’ve been playing with it on a local install, here’s a screenshot:

If you get a lot of comments, or just want to know the moment you get a comment so you can respond to you readers in superquick time (you can’t reply directly yet) then you need to check this out.

I’ve just written a post on my Habari blog that demonstrates some of the differences between WordPress and Habari themes.

I have converted the ever popular Dilectio WordPress theme over to Habari and produced a reference guide to show how the functions from WordPress map to those of Habari.

I have just closed my poll about what other WordPress sites you visit on a regular basis and given the number of responses that I got I have decided that a few more polls wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Results: Which WordPress sites do you visit on a regular basis?

The clear winner of this poll (not that it was a competition) was WPCandy. The were around 160 votes in all and 41 of those were for WPCandy. Those guys have clearly captured the interest of WordPress users and developers.

There were 24 other sites listed in the poll, including four that were adding under ‘Other’: WPStart, Nathan Rice, Justin Tadlock, and Wordpress Deutschland.

What are you when not a superstar blogger?

Last night I went into Leeds to meet up with a group of Northern Bloggers for a chat and a curry, and one of the interesting conversations I had was about the jobs that people do back in the real world. It is really quite interesting that when you get a group of bloggers together you all think of each as types of bloggers in the same way as you might think of someone as an accountant, or plumber. When you ask someone what they do you are more likely to get the answer, well I blog about X, rather than, I answer calls on a support desk, or I shuffle paper.

What does come across at though is that actually blogging very often is a part time gig. So I wondered what is it that most people do? Are most WordPress users and developers coders by day, or do they do something really different. That is the point of this poll.

I’ve started the ball rolling with my day job which is as a financial compliance policy specialist. So what do you do?

A week or so back I write a post on the back of the Intense Debate acquisition that was quite critical of third party blogging services. Honestly I didn’t really get the point. Now I’m here to say I’ve changed my mind, and to explain why.

Let me ask you a question: Are you looking forward to the comment changes in 2.7?

Are you interested to see how Intense Debate will give you more comment options?

Why wait?

I’ve been using Disqus on four blogs for a few weeks now and there are a few things that it provides that I really love, especially in light of the upcoming 2.7 changes.

The main features that Disqus provides are:

• Threaded comments
• In-admin replies
• Cross site commenter reputation (helps with spam)
• Paged comment screens
• choose any comment order you want on your blog
• Avatars
• Comment rating
• Comment editing
• Reply by e-mail or mobile (I don’t how them mobile stuff works)
• Easy reblogging of comments.

For WordPress, Disqus integrates really well. When you install the plugin you have the option to import all your comments into Disqus so not only do you not lose the old comments, they are displayed in the same way as the new ones, and your WordPress admin still shows your comment counts and new comments in the dashboard.

I particularly like that I can see the comments form all of my blogs on one page if I want to.

I also find it nice to simply hand over the theming aspects of comments to Disqus. The fact that the plugin simply replaces the standard comment form without needing any theme changes is great and I like knowing that I won’t have to make any changes to my theme when 2.7 is released, and almost inevitably any changes that happen in 2.8.

It is surprising just how satisfying it is to go through the WordPress plugins page turning off all the commenting plugins. No more Akismet, Subscribe to Comments, Ajax Edit Comments, Comment for Humans, etc and more

Using Disqus has genuinely been very easy and satisfying and I do honestly think that it is helping me engage better when people comment on the blog. At least I hope that is your experience of it. So, without wanting to come over all conspiratorial on you, I urge you to give it a try, even if it is just on a test install on the back of your domain ( I don’t think it will work on a local server ), before Intense Debate becomes the de facto default for WordPress blogs and before you have to make theme changes under 2.7.

If you have tried it what did you think? If you haven’t then let me know how you think it changes this blog: for the better? or do you find commenting harder or less satisfying than previously.

A few days ago I gave a shout out for help on my beta plugin: Fun with widget structures. Kaspars, the guy who produces the competing tabbed widget plugin, very charitably came to my aid and corrected my mistake so the plugin errors are now solved.

Beta 2 of 0.1 is now available for download, for anyone to test. I’d love to hear your comments on it.

P.s. There is still time to complete the poll on the WordPress focussed sites you visit regularly. I’ve had a great response so far.

In the past few days I have read quite a few posts about the decline in advertising revenues as a result of the credit crunch. That put me in mind of all the great WordPress related blogs that I visit that have advertising so I decided to do a quick poll.

With Automattic’s acquisition of PollDaddy it seemed rude not to use it, so this seemed like an opportunity to give it a try, again. So here is the poll:

I recently wrote a post asking does WordPress really needs a search function any more. The general consensus was that although there were other, easier options out there a default was still needed and despite my thoughts that it should be as an optional plugin rather than a core function I agreed with that.

Since I wrote that post I have been developing this new theme with the intention of using Google search instead of the internal search. I have now added this (Check the sidebar ) but this isn’t a direct replacement.

One of the points of the new theme was to more closely align the blogs that I have. I split one up into to two and effectively restarted part of it, and I also added a new blog for another blog platform.

The benefit of using the Google search box is that it lets me offer a search that includes all of my blogs; for example, searching for WordPress will give you any posts that mention WordPress on my other blogs.

The downside, of course, are the adverts but they come with the search so whatever right?

I still need to look at the options to see how I can best optimise it for content, rather than archives pages and similar, but on the whole I think this is a good alternative to the built in search.

For a good few months now I have been developing a replacement to my Fun with Widgets plugin. The new plugin is called Fun with Widget structures (the beta version is on the site here). Unfortunately I have run into a problem which I can’t solve and I was hoping someone out there might be familiar enough with the widget system to help.

The plugin works like this. When you add a sidebar structure widget into another sidebar, the plugin registers a new sidebar into which you can add other widgets. This then displays them in a more structured way, such as in a tabbed interface or accordion structure.

This part of it works fine. Where it all falls down is that even when the widget is removed, the sidebars still get registered. Whenever I change the code to tell the plugin not to register the sidebars for widgets that are not active, the whole widget system gets strange and widgets start appearing in the wrong sidebars, if at all.

I have reached a bit of a dead end with trying to understand the widget system. Each time I thought I understood it and added appropriate code to compensate the same problem re-occured. I am now in the situation that, if I can’t find a solution to this I will need to abandon the plugin. This isn’t the end of the world, as there is a good alternative available from Kaspars, but I do think this plugin has some nice features that could prove useful.

If you think you may be able to help let me know, either in the comments, or e-mail me: andrew.rickmann@gmail.com. Thanks

I’ve been working on the basics of a new theme for a little while and today is the day that it goes live.

Over the past few weeks I have been working to make my sites consistent in appearance and branding, that includes Fun with Habari, Fun with Opinions, and Fun with Photographs. They all now use the same single theme even though some are running on Habari and some are running on WordPress.

This also brings some changes to this site; for example, I have moved all my categories to tags, and I am also now using Disqus as my commenting system.

It will be clear from the site that it isn’t entirely complete yet, I decided that it would be better to get the basics working and then to consider what I wanted after living with it some. It may therefore be a little harder to find some things while I work on creating a new organisation scheme.

In the meantime I hope the redesign will help to focus on the content instead of the packaging.