So Anil Dash Wants WordPress Users to Change to Moveable Type…

Anil Dash has put up quite an intriguing post arguing the case. Matt Mullenweg are you listening?
I’m gonna add a few more reasons to his list of reasons why it would be wise to do so, but before I do that I thought I’d tell Anil why I’m not doing that…YET…

1) I don’t know of any Six Apart family of product users that are overwhelmingly happy with the spam message filters. Akismet is still king of spam deletion. Though lately Akismet is showing cracks of vulnerability.

2) Trackbacks, I have yet to see Six Apart products reliably and consistently accept my trackbacks. This highly unfortunate and unacceptable as trackbacks are a major foundation of the blogoshere. Until you fix this, across both Typepad and Movable type, I will likely continue to be tempted yet decline your offer. UPDATE: I sent a trackback to Anil’s post and it did not immediately post to his blog. :( 

3) The duplicate, make that often triplicate, content problems that pollute the blogosphere from Typepad are repulsive and show a complete disrespect to all members of the blogosphere. It makes it hard for me to respect Six Apart as an organization as much as I respect it’s wonderful individuals such as yourself, Andrew Anker, Mena Trott, etc. The situation is simply unacceptable creating inaccurate Technorati link counts, duplicate and even triplicate content and is blogosphere pollution, plain and simple. I met a Typepad representative at last year’s Forrester Consumer Forum and she stated that this area was “not a priority to fix”. I was dumbfounded and confused by this response. Worse, she said Six Apart was working with Technorati to come up with a fix. I’m not exactly the world’s biggest Technorati lover, but why the heck should they write a kluge in their code to fix your massive flaw in your Typepad software? That’s right, they shouldn’t spend a minute on it, they should be fixing the death of blog search. Six Apart should immediately fix this mess and show you respect user’s time by cleaning up this duplicate and triplicate content that inflates Typepad users link counts. I’ve made a note to revisit this issue on May1st, 2008.

4) Your post URL (http://www.movabletype.com/blog/2008/03/a-wordpress-25-upgrade-guide.html) is well, really kinda lame. How about dropping the .html extension on the end? I mean I know of the warm, fuzzy feelings for dot.com 1999 era, but this would be so much cleaner (and better for trackback extension convention standards).

OK, onto WordPress.

1) Anil in my opinion did a fair job in communicating the current state. In fact, many WordPress users will consider this status generous.

2) The plugin problem jumps out at me as the one that is the largest laughing stock, the continual disrespect of the user by not creating a professional backward compatible process in both themes and plugins is NOT sustainable over the long run. Anil should have ranked this issue at the top of his list in my opinion.

3) The widening feature gulf between the Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org (self-hosted) is becoming absolutely embarrassing and needs to be addressed. It also creates massive potential new blogger confusion as to what is what.

Alright, WordPress I love you, but that love is not blind. Anil is right you need to do much better, in fact Anil didn’t go far enough in where you need to go. My number is on the bio in my blog if Anil or Matt care to reach out about the issues I’ve raised in more detail. I will be watching your progress and wish you both good luck!

Bryan Eisenberg Seminar: Website Optimizer: What Should I Test?

Check it out! There is a Google Website Optimizer seminar with Bryan Eisenberg on Tuesday, March 11, 2008 at 9:00AM Pacific Time is a great opportunity to try it out and learn about the Google Website Optimizer!

It’s also useful in Wordpress, if you haven’t downloaded the Google Website Optimizer for WordPress, now might be a good time to experiment with it before this valuable free seminar. It should be a treat as anyone who can analyze Amazon’s calls to action in the shopping cart and has literally written the book on call to action can surely teach you how to get more action from your website through testing!

See you on the call!

Lee Odden’s Top Ten Online Marketing Tactics for 2008 Survey

Lee Odden has posted the results of his online marketing survey. The blog result is likely directionally correct, but is likely skewed on the high side a bit due to the survey being on a blog. Go figure. :)

Now Sporting Wordpress 2.3.2

Please clear your cache! I’ve installed the latest version of Wordpress and made several theme tweaks and additions. I’m pleased to announce that all of the plugins I now have are compliant with Wordpress 2.3, I hope this cycle time continues to improve. If you have any problems or have suggestions for improvement, please advise! I welcome your thoughts.

Some Wordpress Tips:

- If you have a have inactive plugins you should delete them to make your blog run faster.

- This is how to add tags to your Wordpress 2.3 theme.

My Wordpress 2.4 wishlist for Matt Mullenweg and friends (pretty short):

- Post previews that are forwardable to people for feedback in proper link structure with content. :)

- Reduction of cycle time of plugin incompatibility. :)

- stop emails from being sent from a spam trackback. :)

Snowy Chicago Blogger Brunch

Several Chicago area bloggers, including Joi Podgorny, Liz Strauss and Jean Russell joined out of town visitor Tara Hunt for some breakfast grub at Over Easy where the delightful server Gwen brought us quite tasteful helpings quite flavorful food!

Though I’ve exchanged many emails with Tara before, I had never met her in person. After the meal we chatted and did some shopping. It was really nice talk to Tara as our conversation was focused and introspective - the kind of conversation that makes both people better for it, it was fun. Great fun with everyone chatting about things they are working on and things they want to achieve in 2008 and beyond.

Thanks to everyone who came out on a snowy Chicago morning (and those who didn’t) for some blogger bonding! May many future trackbacks take place…

Tara and Joi are fans of the site Ma.gnolia, is anyone else out there a big fan? I might have to try it out.

Rick Klau from Chicago to Honorary Engineer at the Google Dance

Rick Klau was an honorary engineer for one night at the Google Dance 2007. You’ll recall that Rick, formerly “Mr. Naperville”, moved west to work at Google’s headquarters shortly after Feedburner’s acquisition. Rick reports that his commute consists of a short 10 minute drive followed by a one hour bus ride that is fully productive with Internet access. It was nice to see you Rick, hope to see you again soon!

There are good summaries of his speech on blogs and feeds lurking about. Important stuff! Especially now in the universal search era. Speaking of blog and feeds, I recently changed over to the Feedburner Mybrand product and my new feed is http://feeds.daviddalka.com/DavidDalka , please update your feed readers! Thanks.

WordPress 2.3 Beta 1

Wow, Wordpress 2.3 Beta! Small problem I’ve still not migrated to 2.2 due to plugin incompatibility / instability - especially podpress. As I’ve stated before, I hope that many of these more complex plugins functionality gets integrated into the core of Wordpress, reducing this painful upgrading issue.

So my question is this, does Wordpress 2.3 work flawlessly with the following plugins? If not, when will if be incorporated into the main code or the plugin made compatible before release of Wordpress 2.3?

Add Meta Tags 1.2
Akismet 2.0
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator 3.06
Feedburner Feed Replacement 2.2
Google Sitemaps 2.7.1
podPress 7.9 I’ve never upgraded to Podpress 8.2 or from Wordpress 2.1.3 yet due to the problems reported

Recent Comments 2.1.1 beta
Related Posts
ST Add Related Posts to Feed .02
Subscribe To Comments 2.1.1
Trackback Validator 0.7.1
Wordpress PDA 1.0

Thank you for your attention to this important issue, I appreciate it deeply.

Wordcamp 2007 Future State Wishlist for WordPress 2.3

The 2nd annual Wordcamp, a gathering of WordPress users, will take place this weekend in San Francisco! The agenda looks quite interesting and I wish I could be there amongst some of the speakers which I count as friends, not blithering idiot blog readers. It’s awesome that every speaker is a WordPress user! I hope some folks will come here and post live stream URL’s Saturday morning so folks can tune in.

It’s also interesting to note that Google blog search shows 583 posts on this while Technorati shows 541. You might want to check out my post on “The Death of Blog Search” and politely encourage Mr. Matt Cutts to put the blog search on the home page of Google. :D

I do think the conference falls short on what is truly needed - a long, heart to heart conversation about he overall health of WordPress platform and it’s future direction and stability, driven more by usability and stability needs than it is at present.

So without further delay I say hello to my fellow WordPress users and present my Wordpress wish list for the era between now and the next Wordcamp in 2008 - I strongly encourage blogosphere discussion of the current state of self-hosted WordPress and desired future state of Wordpress.org.

Current state of self-hosted WordPress:

- Lack of stability/testing of newly released versions - over the past year, see Wordpress (version 2.0.6) and plugins see Podpress (version 7.7) have been released to the user community that broke feedburner feeds.

- Lack of testing of security in new Wordpress versions - See WordPress 2.1.1 dangerous, Upgrade to 2.1.2

- Constant changes in Wordpress’ core structure are frequently not backward compatible with old plugins. This often causes immediate and time consuming break downs and make upgrading Wordpress a major chore instead of the low maintenance joy that it should be. (I’m presently running Wordpress 2.1.3 because Podpress apparently has several conflicts with Wordpress version 2.2.1 in an effort to prevent this)

Proposed self-hosted Wordpress User Bill of Rights:

- As a WordPress self-hosted user we both respect and understand your time is valuable and that you deserve to have a low maintenance experience when installing plugins or upgrading versions and that the WordPress open source community should prioritize changes based on user suggestions based on functionality.

- Users have a right to expect fully tested software before release and appreciate those efforts greatly. We realize and hope for less frequent, more stable releases are strongly preferred as more and more WordPress users utilize WordPress for mission critical functions and do not have time to debug these items.

How do I suggest we get to this desired future state and what’s on my wishlist?

- Make releasing stable versions with coordinated releases of all plugins a priority for each new release. Maybe even develop a robust testing checklist?

- Integrate popular plugins into the core functionality of WordPress to prevent the above problem. Ideally, I’d love to be able to post podcasts, videos (especially Youtube) , pictures and other media without reposts and glitches. Plugins I’d like to see integrated include Viper’s Video Tags, Podpress, Trackback Validator 0.7.1 and Feedburner Feed Replacement 2.2

- Make RSS feed compatibility - images, videos and formating an area of focus. I have one friend whose images do not consistently show up and I had a major formating problem for a long period of time due to the Podpress 7.7 feed problem of which I was not aware.

- A Wordpress dashboard allowing people to check if all plugins currently in use are safe for the latest version based on a centralized database of reports of issues.

- Make it so trackbacks are standard in all Wordpress themes.

These are my main areas of concern, I’m sure you can think of others that I may of left out, but I just wanted to post my top few items. Again, I’d like to hear from others on their desires for the future of the customer experience and advancement of Wordpress, so I’ll tag:

Bill Slawski

Cshel

Lee Odden

Aw, heck, let me tag everyone signed up for Wordcamp 2007(using the list on the official site)!!! Have a great conference and I’ll be attending in spirit! I look forward to checking in on your suggestions and conversations of these topics at Wordcamp!

Donncha O Caoimh
Matt Mullenweg
Niall Kennedy
Rachael Kalicun
Patrick Havens
Brian Oberkirch
Kyle Neath
Matthias Zeller
Lori Berkowitz
Beau Lebens
Andrew Grumet
Chris Jara
Bill Humphries
Ray Baxter
Tim Bishop
Jared Kim
Charles Stricklin
Michelle Leder
Josh Hallett
Sarah Jaquith
Joseph Scott
Bill Gram-Reefer
Glenn Kerbein
Jason Hoffman
Eric Amundson
Sara Quale
Robert Ellis
Anthony Cole
Jason Cosper
Andy Sternberg
J.J. Toothman
Hillary Hartley
Kenn Wilson
Ethan Diamond
Jennifer Firlik
Bradley Charbonneau
Debbie Foster
Matthew Batchelder
Casey Bisson
John Biehler
Min Jung Kim
Nick Gernert
Zachary Tirrell
Sally Kuhlman
Enric Teller
Greg Hartnett
jeff ubois
Denis Hiller
Jake Wasserman
Rachel Luxemburg
Eric N.
Carson Black
Kari U.
Jean Bedord
Robert Nelson
sarah browne
Jared Bangs
Debra England
Brooke Kuhlmann
Stormy knight
Abby Zimberg
Paul Stamatiou
Eleanor B
Yohannes Wijaya
Alicia Preston
Paul Bryant
Eric Toledo
Danny Howard
Ronald Heft
Stephanie Booth
Shawn Grunberger
Daniel Nowak
Harry McCracken
Andy Skelton
Mary Kolesnikova
Sean R.
Max La Riviere-Hedrick
Alex Moskalyuk
Shahriar Marachi
Dan Cameron
James Tippins
Robyn Tippins
Deena M
Scott Rosenberg
Brian Ghidinelli
Liz Kao
Susan Tenney
Jerome Chevillat
Ray Hernandez
Thomas Hardjono
Jason Cara
Natalie MacLees
Nicki Dugan
Dimitry Bentsionov
Luciano Zanardo
Anne Hill
Andrew Mager
Kristen Kenedy
Douglas Bell
Phil Freo
Michael Dorausch
Nick Topolos
Ben Wells
Nicole Hamaker
Chris Heuer
Richard Munden
Robert Parker
heather vescent
Robin Patronik
Shabd Vaid
Jason Gohlke
Bob Beaty
Enrique Gutierrez
Liz Henry
Jon Silvers
David Lin
Theo Armour
Declan Fleming
Tom Ballantyne
Judy Larkins
Mike Pilley
Tom Ransom
Mike Melanson
Daniel Brusilovsky
Michael Barbarino
Rickey Yaneza
Rafael Ebron
Bart Szyszka
Betty Walker
Paul Burd
Steven Miyakawa
Jessi Hance
Westianne Haughey
Diana Bolanos
Kevin Barrow
Jessie Stricchiola
Mike Goldman
Eric Olson
Doug Bird
Chuck Soper
Jason Deadrich
Lee White
Kat Markert
Todd Abrams
Michael Tchong
Mark My
Michael Aires
Bill Hopps
Erica OGrady
Ulysses Ronquillo
Joan C
Kathy Lane
Christopher Conlan
Evan Scheingross
Kimo Crossman
Brianna Privett
Josh Wood
Lisa Barone
Arian Haffezi
Antonia Hollander
Balentin Gonzales
Lauren Scime
Jeremy Anderson
jochen siegle erich bonnert
erich bonnert ken kurita
Lionel Mayrand
Tony Perrie
Darin Jensen
Stephan Spencer
Crystal Williams
Marianne Betterly
Jeff Hester
Kristopher Smith
dana stuart
Adam Tow
Garrett Gee
Christopher Hire
Dustin Eichler
Michael Malone
Nat Welch
Knarl Stuart
Rachelle Chase
Jeremy Wright
Aaron Brazell
Mark Jaquith
Marc Lawrence
Heidi Nyburg
Richie Greenberg
Tom Ortega
John Michael Fay
Lindsey Holm
Estelle Weyl
Chase Granberry
Tina Smith
Lisa Brewster
Justin Kelly
Calliope Gazetas
Gary Germano
Tiffany Kosolcharoen
Kay Mackenzie
Adam Helweh
Sarah Liberman
Sherri Schultz
Silver Smith
Catrina Brewton
tim tran
Stewfy Stewf
Jesse Andrews
Holly Hagen
Bob Page
Yohsuke Miki
Kingsley Joseph
Fred Davis
Gregarious Narain
Eric C.
Anthony Nemitz
John Pozadzides
Tony Adam
Maciej Mlynek
Tris Hussey
Andy Ford
Bonnie Young
Marcus Rector
Richard Olson
nicole lopez
Liz Williams
Alvin Cheung
Kevin Lingerfelt
Davide Pasqualato
Naoko McCracken
Shahar Nechmad
Michael Jaret
Mark Smallwood
Cathryn Hrudicka, Chief Imagination Officer
Michael Alderete
Christina Wodtke
Justin Lewis
Rosaline Zoey Setiawan
Scott Beale
Al Billings
Leslie Sumrall
Rochelle McCune
Ryan Sharp
Cary Miller
Craig Smith
David Spark
Mark Ristaino
Dustin Blake
Dave McClure
Christian Cabuay
Liang Jin
Amelia Bellows
Jeffrey McManus
Mark Jones
Jamie Whitaker
Brad Montgomery
Steve Spangler
Jim Meyer
Travis Wellman
David Ulevitch
Dr. David Klein
Jorunn (Jo) Klein
Karen Hanner
Jeremy Zilar
Andy Kaufman
Sean McGilvray
Colin Devroe
Rich Owings
tim habersack
maiki interi
Jason brightman
Michael Kariv
Tom Geller
Ron Johnson
Allen Lew
Gabriel Hernandez
Valli Hilaire
Thomas Roche
Bridgitte Rivers
Joe Rodriguez
Sonia Rodriguez
Byron Woods
George Yang
Philippe Alexis
Tracy Rabold
Bill Dickson
Anthony tureck
Pat Sjoholm
Daniel McKeown
Taylor Horton
Kent F.
Jessica Dryden-Cook
Sudarshan Gaikaiwari
Sharif Naas
Gregory Auld
Jenna Lane
Diego Orjuela
Joel Price
Elea Chang
James D. Cornelius
Alison Bowman
Jen-Mei Wu
Lorna Dietz
Kristopher Tate
Christopher Allen
Kim Komenich
Joyce Guan
CameraGirl
Richard Smith
Sean McBride
Stephen Danko
Brian Shih
Brendan Doms
Brendan McKenna
JP Allen
Brendan Nee
Lorelle VanFossen
Mark Riley
Lidija Davis
Demitrious Kelly
Barry Abrahamson
Nikolay Bachiyski
Matt Thomas
Lloyd Budd
Julia Budd
Liz Danzico
Maya Desai
Edison Guerra
Ryan Boren
Inna Boren
Toni Schneider
Michael Adams
Raanan Bar-Cohen
Ryan Park
Grace Shulner
Orion Star
Erin Wiegand
Dan Tentler
Alex Shiels
Martyn Davis
Michael Cummings
Ben Metcalfe
Derek DeMarco
susan conerly
Matt Nudelman
Elisa M Welch
Randy Stewart
Eddie Kay
Kurt Oeler
yvonne deir
Winson Shuen
aaron wall
Valerie Crowell
John Dunbar
Daniel Ciomek
Seth Blank
J. Key Lim
Sarah Mattern
Brian Shields
Brian Williams
Ryan Kennedy
Julie Nelson
Matt Cutts
Harald Rudell
Robert Hoekman, Jr.

Wordpress Admin Panel Change - Please Revert Back

Recently, the incoming links panel froze for several days.

Now it’s showing the name of the blog post instead of the name of the blog. I prefer the old version and would appreciate a reversion to it. Thank you.

Wordpress Trackback Spam On The Increase Akismet Needs To Step It Up

All with the same 10 drug names over and over. It’s time for Akismet to step it up a notch or for you to remotely allow banning of certain words in trackbacks as a trigger to kill real spam.

A functional, spam-free trackback community is critical to a functional blogosphere as it’s a critical component of the conversation!

Wordpress Wish

One unified login that stays logged in, for my self hosted blog, the wordpress.com admin panel and all blogs I visit that require login to register.  Thanks for listening.

Fixing Akismet Comment False Positives

Robert Scoble posted today about Akismet and the spam filtering features that save him time. But there are times those misclassified posts can cause escalation of a discussion into something more accusatory like deleting comments – that is not fun. For example, Danny Sullivan posting comments on Blake Ross’ blog late last year and the perception that Danny’s comment had been deleted.

I had a similar problem to Danny recently that I was able to fix using the unique learning features of Akismet.

If you are a Wordpress blogger and you are having the problem of Akismet treating your comments as spam, please try following the following steps:
1.    Go to your blog on the computer that you have had the problems posting comments
2.    Make certain that you are signed out of your admin panel
3.    Find a post on your blog and post several comments with your email and URL manually the way you would on another person’s blog
4.    Login to your Wordpress admin panel and mark the “spam” comments then “de-mark spam comments”
5.    Repeat steps 1-4 above periodically until the comments stop being marked as spam

I hope that some people currently having this problem find this potential solution to be as helpful to them as it was for me. If you can think of someone who has this problem who is also a Wordpress blogger, please pass this post on to them.

Wordpress 2.1 Compliant Theme - Customized

Thanks to cshel for customizing this awesome Wordpress 2.1 theme! Bill Slawski also contributed useful ideas. Neil Patel gave me a few tips as well.

Thanks to all of my other friends who contributed feedback. Hopefully this Wordpress theme will work through versions 2.1, 2.2, 2.3,2.4,2.5, etc…

Matt Cutts Feeling Wordpress Pain - Chapter 2

Yesterday I wrote about Matt Cutts painful Wordpress experience upgrading to Wordpress 2.1. Later in the day his blog was hacked. This once again shows that Wordpress has released vulnerable software in the live environment. When is Matt Mullenweg going to put a quality control process in place to prevent these types of issues? matt mullwenweg enables matt cutts wordpress blog hack chicago gsb  

Update: THIS NOW APPEARS TO BE AN APRIL FOOLS JOKE - BUT IT WAS EXECUTED EARLY AND IT’S TOTALLY BELIEVABLE - BUT DOING IT EARLY IS EVIL!!!

Matt Cutts Feeling Wordpress Pain

Matt Cutts upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 last night. It’s clear that it wasn’t smooth sailing - even for a tech guru like himself! When are Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider going to start taking these issues mentioned in Matt’s post and comments seriously?

Server Move

Hello there. It’s been quiet here as I attempt to upgrade everything to be Wordpress 2.1 friendly. To top it all off, I will be moving servers this evening. Pure craziness. So if this site in unreachable for a bit, that is why.

As always I appreciate your patience, friendship and assistance. Thanks.

Technorati Oddity

I got a new link from a “new blog” this morning. The only problem is that it’s one blog post that part of another blog that links to me already, SEO by the Sea. Here’s a screen shot in case it vaporizes:

Here’s the Technorati profile of this “blog”. This is kind of strange. What is going on here?

Sociable 2.0 Plugin Release Interview: Peter Harkins

Please bookmark as “Sociable 2.0 Interview” - Thanks!

I first met Peter Harkins in person at Barcamp Chicago in the Summer of 2006. As I’ve gotten to know him, he knows far more than just coding, as he appreciates and participates constructively in conversations about business strategy and monetization. It’s a winning combination.

The response has been incredible to the Sociable plugin, so you’ve been slammed with inquiries…

Peter: I’ve gotten dozens of mails about Sociable in the last week, from sites wanting to be included, users testing it out in unusual situations and last-minute feature requests. I’ve promised to get 2.0 out by Midnight February 1, so it’s been a race to the wire to get in new features.

Peter: I’ve added 26 sites at last count in this version. Just this morning a Hungarian programmer sent me at least a few more, so I may have as many as 60 sites in the next version.

You’ve add new language translations with this version, that is exciting…

Peter: Yes. It looks like this version will have support for Spanish, Czech, Italian, German and French with more to come. Before 2.0, interested users were just picking it up, translating it, and offering it for download on their blogs. It was a bit frustrating to track bug fixes between different branches of Sociable. Now we’ll have a unified project to share resources and drive development faster, I want to have releases at least every other month in 2007.

You keep the installation and interface pretty simple…

Peter: Deliberately, so, yes. As a programmer, it’s really easy to think of the UI as “that last bit I have to add so people can use my beautiful code” instead of what it truly is: the most important part of the application. So I spent a lot of time making sure that you can install Sociable just by unzipping and uploading it, rather than try to provide complicated install instructions. I spent time on a feature most people never see: when you install Sociable, it checks a manifest of files to make sure it was uploaded right, and it tells you what files go where if it’s not perfect. It provides help right when you need it most, and plainly enough that you understand it.

Peter: The drag-and-drop in the admin interface is just a delight to use, and deliberately so. I want blog owners to feel safe playing around with the different options to see what works on their site. So I’ve spent most of my time on making the UI really nice as well as fixing up the insides.

So you also reprogrammed the internals of the Sociable application for future development and expansion beyond Wordpress?

Peter: I want to start porting Sociable over to work on other blog engines like TypePad, Movable Type, Mephisto, and more. So I’ve cleaned up the internals of 2.0, laying the groundwork for 2.1 or 2.2 to support more engines. It’s also going to start doing a little stat reporting when it checks for updates. I know there are roughly 10,000 blogs out there using it, but I’d like to know more exactly and maybe cross-reference to traffic rating services to find out what kind of positive effect it has.

You have an alert system for updating?

Peter: Yes, Sociable checks for new versions when folks view the admin console and notifies the blog owner to go download it. Without it there’d still be people using Sociable 1.2 in five years, hopefully with it everyone will be upgraded in a month or two.

In the past you mentioned that there are three different types of users of Sociable…

Peter: First up, there’s beginning bloggers. They’ve just started a blog, and they’ve got stars in their eyes of being the next BoingBoing or something. Sociable is a tool they’ll use to get the word out about their new blogs, and I’m really glad to help out. As much trouble as some have had spelling “Sociable”, it’s been most rewarding to talk to them because they’re new to blogging and are so happy to be able to easily drop in Sociable.

Peter: Then there are the established bloggers. They’ve got an audience and they want to start leveraging it. Sociable makes it easy for their audience to start getting the word out and growing the blog. I get most of my feature requests from this group, and they’re the people who send me the code to add their favorite bookmarking site.

Peter: I get a lot of links from the SEO crowd, who really put the word out about Sociable. They’ve found Sociable to be a useful tool, so they turn around and install it for their clients. Oddly they’re group I hear the least from, they almost never mail me. But they’ll be the most unusual mails sometimes.

So how are the SEO emails unusual?

Peter: I’ve gotten a really bizarre feature requests like - “You should make Sociable automatically submit each blog post to every bookmarking site! And then vote it up!” - or other crazy schemes! It’s frustrating, Sociable is a tool to help blog owners by reminding readers to bookmark good content. “Sociable should make other blogs using Sociable link to mine with the link text I fill in!” Ugh! I should mention that this is a tiny minority of the SEO folks, I’ve only gotten a half-dozen “Help me spam!” mails.

Sounds like we could monetize a Sociable SEO Pro version together?

Peter: There are definitely a few customers waiting, but I’ve got plenty of other projects ahead of it.

Like what?

Peter: I just recently launched NearbyGamers, a social site for tabletop gamers to find other folks to play card, board, and role-playing games with. It’s been a real blast, but my to do list is as long as my arm so it’s eating up my free time. And I’ve been trying to keep updating my own blog with web coding tips but it’s easy to slip out of the habit.

Sociable has created great networking for you. What are some of the better stories?

Peter: I ended up doing CrunchBoard for TechCrunch because I met a guy via a guy via a guy who used Sociable, and that was a real fun project.

What are some of the underused or misunderstood features of the tool?

Peter: One minor frustration has been writing CSS for Sociable that can deal with all the odd things different blog themes do. I’ve had dozens of people mail me asking (sometimes quite forcefully) why Sociable doesn’t look right on their blog, and so far none have thought it’s their own site doing it.

What else should the people know about Peter Harkins?

Peter: You should never ask him to sing anything…

Good luck with the release Peter!

Helpful Wordpress Tip + 7 Wishlist Items + 2.0.6 Released + Feedburner Related Bug

Wordpress 2.0.6 released! As many of you are aware, I recently struggled with a Wordpress problem that prevented me from sending outbound trackbacks. Due to my good friend Stephan Spencer’s help, I was able to finally locate a problem which dozens of other people had tried to locate but could not.

What was this problem? It turned out to be quite simple, I had a dead pinging URL entry in my Options>Writing>Update Services entry which caused the posting process to bog down. It appears the outbound ping trackback is behind Options>Writing>Update Services pings in the order of the execution and therefore the outbound trackback never was making it out (this is my theory). I’d urge Wordpress to investigate this and see if it would be possible to reorder this so the outbound trackback was sent even if there was a dead ping entry in Options>Writing>Update Services. If you are having trouble sending an outbound trackback remove everything in the Options>Writing>Update Services try to see if that works. If it does, you have a bad entry in Options>Writing>Update Services needing removal.

My current Wordpress wishlist:

1. Test your code fully before releasing a new version please. There was a significant glitch with Feedburner.

2. Start to incorporate major plugins (Feedburner, Podpress, Trackback Validator, Viper’s Video Quicktags, etc) into the core software functionality. If Feedburner and other major plugins were incorporated into testing, the problem above would not have occurred.

3. In my last wishlist in August, I posted the following: “I’d like all of the funtionality of being hosted on wordpress.org - when I signed up I did not know of these differences and quite frankly it’s a disappointment as I want my own domain. I hope you seriously listen to this. To get corporate users to adopt Wordpress this would pretty much be mandatory!” My wish has not come true yet.

4. Make eliminating Askimet “False Positives” a top priority. It has the potential to create serious problems in the blogosphere.

5. Create a solution for the Options>Writing>Update Services issue so that no Wordpress user ever has to deal with the issue I dealt with.

6. Release 2.0.7 and announce what steps you will take to prevent a version with a bug being released again. please show us your innovative learning culture is focused on the customer experience.

7. I hope that Wordpress chooses to actively listen and acknowledge known concerns and post future wishlists transparently on their blog in the future for community feedback.

Thank you for listening, I welcome additions and expansion of this list and the creation of happy bloggers everywhere!

UPDATE: Item 8 - Have embedded video work with WSYWIG editor without conflict!