Ilya Gorodnyanskiy - IT-Blog » Blogging

Comment Notifier Plugin for WordPress.

Ilya G. — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 21:34:46 +0000

Today I decided to try out Comment Notifier plugin for my WordPress. You’ll find now a checkbox “Notify me when new comments are added” under the comment form. At a first glance this plugin makes a good impression! It installed itself properly and after a little configuration it could send already notification mails! Great! The only shortcoming I could find so far is when you delete some comment, the email of the deleted author stays in the comment_notifier table. Personally I would expect, that the addresses of the potential spammers whould be also deleted from the notification list…

By the way, I’m positively impressed how easy it has got to install plugins in the latest version of WordPress! Only one click! In former versions one needed to copy a source code of a plugin in a particular folder on the server and to run a MySql script to create plugin tables in the database. Ok, it was not a great act….but still! Now this process is fully automatized!

What is a Tumblelog?

Ilya G. — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 21:34:47 +0000

Tumblelogs (also known as tlogs, tiny logs etc.) is what I’m going to talk about today. As the wikipedia article states this term appeared two years ago on April 12th, 2005. Where I have been all the time I don’t know, but what a tumblelog is, I’ve got to know only today.

From a usual blog a tumblelog differs by its structure and posting philosophy. The postings are often very short and represent just links, videos, music, photos, quotes and dialogs. The author may leave a few words to a linked resource, but it’s then really only two or three sentences. As for comments, they are usually absent, although I came across some tumblelogs with comments functionality. Here are some examples: anarchaia, ocean on the moon, ratbag (in Russian), ccb2 (in German).

At the first glance a tumblelog looks quite messy and may be even like a personal trash can for media content. But the concept is not that bad and imho has a large potential. Tumblelogs can be a good completion to a personal website or even to an existing blog. I wonder why this kind of blogs is less popular than “normal” blogs. It’s seems to me like only a metter of time.

What is the Ideal Length of a Blog Posting?

Ilya G. — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 09:04:33 +0000

Looking for the answer to this question I looked through numerous articles and blog postings. Nobody gives concrete numbers, like “250 words are ok and 260 are already too much”. At this point I should mention that I’m interested in a number of words that is comfortable to a human in general. So I mean a human psychology, the values like “an advertisement must not contain more then 7 words” or “up to 4 apples a man can register without counting the items”.

In some articles I found advices to write more if the postings are in general quite seldom and to write shorter if the postings are frequent. This is an interesting point. Does our mind really depend on the period of time too? Or is it just a matter of habit, we know that most of the blogs have such a behaviour, so we expect this behaviour from any blog we visit?

I’d like to introduce some statistics values. According to Stuart Brown’s analysis of Technorati’s top 100 blogs, most of the postings so about 60 percent contain between 100 and 249 words. 20 percent of postings are medium long and contain between 250 and 499 words. All the other postings are very long or very short. This posting of mine contains about 170 words.

Casual Friday Concept in the Blogger’s World.

Ilya G. — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 15:35:26 +0000

Friday is the last day of the week. In many firms where the workers are obligated to wear an official cloths like a suit, there exists a concept of a Casual Friday. On this day you may put on free time cloths like jeans and t-shirts. That was new for me to read out at yigg.de, that the same concept can be also applied to a blog. The idea is that once a week you write postings on topics that have little in common with the main theme of your blog. For example you are specialized in publishing of some IT articles, but on Friday you write about the most popular and discussed events. On one hand your readers have an entertainment and a bit variety on your blog. On the other hand using popular key words you make your blog attractive for the search engines. The blog visitors who come from search engines to you, may leave your site quite quickly again, but still it’s a kind of advertisment for your blog. Maybe they remember that your blog is specialized in IT and if they have some day a problem they will come back to you.

I find the Concept of a Casual Friday quite nice. In any case I don’t see any negative aspects, that could harm your constant readers. Maybe I’ll even add a new category on my blog as an experiment, let’s see then whether this concept is really good and suitable for blogging.

Website promotion. Technorati.

Ilya G. — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 11:50:55 +0000

Some days ago I devoted my evening to looking through articles and blog entries about SEO and the ways of website promotion. These topics seem to be the most discussed after Paris Hilton’s adventures. Not that I decided to make my hobby blog to something commercial. I just have no experience in this sphere and so wanted to get a common impression about these technics. Being the owner of a blog, the tips and tricks for bloggers were of a special interest for me. As I understood the key to the success and to the popularity of the blog was in the first place to be active. Active in all the ways. To write regularly, to read other blogs and to leave there your comments. There was also an advise to register your blog in all the possible search engines. I don’t have a list of such engines, but what I noticed is that after I launched i-gorod practically three days later I was visited by Technorati and added to its index. After a while I decided to make an account at Technorati and to claim there my blog. What I mostly liked is the registration procedure. After you choose your nickname and password you can add your blog. To verify whether you are really the blog owner Technorati determines itself the engine, that your blog is powered by and asks you to create a temporary posting and put in a link with some id. After you’ve done it in the seperate browser window, you come back and submit the request. Two or three seconds Technorati spider runs through your blog (maybe only rss feed?) and finds the link. After that the registration is complete and you can take out the temp posting.

Caution! Spammers!

Ilya G. — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 21:02:04 +0000

i-gorod was visited by spam robots today for the first time! There is no reason to be glad actually, but still I’m proud. The content published here might look suitable for those, who think he’ll be rich publishing ads for medicines of a well known kind and for pics and videos of girls. I should say my respect for WordPress has grown. The engine has recognized and filtered out all the comments that were of a spam nature. I guess it’s getting time to think about the plugin for WordPress preventing robots to publish something at all.