I came across a new service this weekend: OutBrain and I’ve decided to give it a run out.

Outbrain does two things. Firstly it adds a rating system to each post. You can see now that at the bottom of each post there is a star rating system. I hope that this will get me some feedback as to the kind of posts people like most. This rating system should (I will see when I publish this post if it happens) also add the rating stars to the feed as well so posts can be rated without visiting the site at all.

This extra integration with Feedburner seems like a great addition that makes it that much more useful.

The second thing it does is offer some suggests for similar posts on other blogs.

It may not always be the most profitable thing to do but I like the idea of recommending good posts to anyone that is interested enough to visit the site.

Installation is pretty easy. There is a WordPress plugin and that is pretty much all you need. Importantly for me it can detect Disqus and work with it, as well as working with the default WordPress commenting system.

If you have used it yourself I would be interested to know what your experience is, otherwise I will report back in due course.

This week Automattic have acquired Intensedebate, and Disqus have announced the release of their public API. This has got me thinking.

I’ve previously felt that these 3rd party bolt-ons are of little real value to the blogging world, and for self-hosted blogs I still fell there is some merit in that. The featureset for Intensedebate is:

• Comment threading
• Reply by e-mail
• Importing / Exporting
• Commenter profiles
• Reputation points and voting
• Moderation / Blacklisting
• Widgets
• RSS Tracking
• Twitter
• Friendfreed
• Open ID
• Gravatar
• HTML Formatting

The Disqus feature set seems to be broadly the same.

So where is the value? None of these features is particularly interesting in and of itself; even when combined, the additional features don’t massively enhance commenting over the features that can (and have) been built into WordPress by the core team and plugin authors.

The real benefit is in meta-data.

Imagine being able to find the other blogs that your commenters have in common, and from there the blogs the commenters on the first set share in common, and you start to see the picture.

Now tie that data to one of the largest content networks out there, WordPress.com. Now you can connect those commenters with data about the content of those blogs, pre-categorised and tagged for easy use. Suddenly owning that kind of data really makes sense. If Facebook’s future is in search, then perhaps so is the future of WordPress.

This clearly makes sense for Automattic, and I imagine they will be able to use that data to provide some new services, or enhance the ones they have, Akismet in particular, but for those running self-hosted installations I am still uncertain as to the value.

It seems, to some extent, that this is yet another opportunity to give away your data for the benefit of others so each blog owner is going to have to ask themselves whether the added value it brings is worth more than the value you are giving away. Even if you can’t monotise that data yourself you want to be sure to get value when you ’sell’ it on.

I for one won’t be jumping on the 3rd Party Boat until I see something a little more exciting; how about you?

A few weeks OK, in Britain, a court ruled that a woman, who’s job it was to carry out marriages at a registry office, was entitled to opt out of performing doing her job if the ceremony was a civil partnership (gay marriage) as a result of her religious views. I am not intending to debate the rights or wrongs of that decision, but it did get me to thinking about support requests relating to websites where you disgree with the message.

Image you write an ass-kicker of a theme or plugin and there is a fair amount of take up. Someone contacts you and politely asks for you help because they are having problems with your plugin on their site. When you visit the site you find out that the point of the site is the promotion of a religious or anti-religious agenda that you find distateful, perhaps even offensive, although the person is not enciting violence or anything illegal.

I choose religion purely because it seems to stir up the most passion in both sides.

The question is: do you help him or her to fix their site or do you decline, ignore them, or any other variation thereof?

I have provided help to people even though I didn’t like the message or the point of their site, and to date I haven’t found one that has promted me to consider doing anything else. Perhaps I am just too nice a guy. But I can understand why someone would not want to put their spare time to helping further an agenda that was not their own. How about you?

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The time has come for a new update to the my plugin generator; there are new things for 2.6 that need to be included. But at the same time I have been considering changeing the way the plugins work a little bit.

Right now the plugin generator creates code that is all contained within a single class. There are good reasons for this but I would like to abstract some of the code away so that it doesn’t need to be dealt with.

What I am considering is creating a small class library to accompany the plugin template that contains a lot of the code that interacts with WordPress.

To give you an idea of how this would work, instead of creating a function to load and save the plugin settings you would create a new settings class and pass it the name of the settings file. The rest would be dealt with within the class.

Now this is fine when it comes to writing my own plugins, but I honestly have no idea about the level of knowledge and experience that the users of the tool have. Nor do I know how much of the code is amended after it is generated.

So here is my question for anyone that has used my plugin generator, or might use it: Would you be comfortable with this? with a plugin template that comes with a class library?