Jerry Leventer

To disable nofollow in your WordPress comments, use one of the following plugins:

Nofollow Case by Case – Allows you to turn ON the nofollow attribute for SELECTED pingbacks, trackbacks, and comment links. This works well if you moderate the comments on your site.

DeLink Comment Author – by Alex King. This plugin gives you the ability to remove the link a commenter left as their URL without removing the entire comment. A link to do this is added to your new comment e-mail notifications and to the comments list in your admin area.  Alex has a nice list of plugins that he’s developed.

Ultimate List of Dofollow & Nofollow Plugins – This is a well-maintained list of plugins to add nofollow and remove nofollow from various elements of WordPress. The list also covers other blogging platforms such as Blogger, Moveable Type, Typepad and Drupal.

Comprehensive Reference for WordPress NoNofollow/Dofollow Plugins – A concise, current, and comprehensive reference for WordPress no-nofollow and dofollow plugins. Currently featuring 12 dofollow/no-nofollow plugins, this ultimate guide will help you choose the best plugin for your blog.

NoFollow Free – Includes the option to use dofollow only when the author has posted a certain number of comments, and to put back the nofollow when some blacklisted words are matched.

Also, be sure to check out CommentLuv – This plugin will visit the site of the comment author, while they type their comment, and retrieve a selection of their last blog posts, tweets or digg submissions which they can choose from to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.

The WordPres Codex – has also provided some resources to help you find do-follow plugins.

MindJet MindManager is one of my favorite mindmapping software applications. If you are looking all over for the Options or Preference settings in version 7, then you are not the only one.

It’s quite simple, really, but somewhat hidden in their non-standard user interface.

Click the circle logo in the top left of the application window. This is referred to as the “MindManager Menu.” Then at the very bottom you will see two buttons, “Exit” and “Options”. There it is!

If you want to provide yourself a shortcut, then Right-Click in the Toolbar area next to Tools. Select “Customize Quick Access Toolbar…” Choose commands from “MindManager Menu” and select, “MindManager Options.”

My cat Huxley died this month and I got a cedar box for his remains from Bubbling-Well Pet Cemetary.  Thanks Dan, for a great job on the engravings.

Talking Communities is a web-based conference room. Lynn Terry uses it for her Tuesday and Thursday SSWT Webinars. Darryl Graham is also using it in his 12 Minute Commute project.

I was having difficulty getting the software to work properly on my machine, and I was unable to login or even get the login screen to appear.

I wrote to tech support on Monday and received an answer from Clyde on Tuesday, but that did not resolve the issue.

They provide a phone number on their site, so I gave tech support a call. That was on Wednesday. I was told to leave a message and I did so. I mentioned that I had a conference to be on the next day. I called again and left another message on the “Sales” line.

I received three calls that same day. One from the original tech support agent (Clyde), one from the software manager (Steve), and one from the owner (George).

George and Steve stayed on the phone with me for two hours while we went through every possible scenario as to why this was giving me trouble. They were concerned that others might be having the same problem.

It was not until a few days later that we finally discovered it was my Eset NOD32 anti-virus program causing the problem. I believe Eset provides excellent protection, but I’ve decided to use Webroot in its place for now.

The support I received from the Talking Communities team tells me they care about providing a quality product to their customers and will do what they can to work out problems and make improvements.

Here are some handy tips from Google to consider for your on-page Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Design and Content Guidelines

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
• Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
• Review our image guidelines for best practices on publishing images.

Source: Google.com

I just received this email from EZineArticles.com in which the author talks about how to get unstuck when brainstorming ideas for one’s next article or series of articles.

“The content of today’s newsletter comes courtesy of social media expert Chris Brogan. These idea-generators were originally written with bloggers in mind, but they work equally well for article authors like yourself.”

Looking for some fresh ideas for your next article? Read on and learn from a blog expert!

Topics to Get You Unstuck:

1. What challenges are my potential customers facing. Do I have any advice for them?
2. What have I read lately? What points were interesting? Can I add more to it?
3. What bugs me? Can I write about another way to approach it?
4. Who do I admire? Can I write something about them that explains how to emulate those traits?
5. What has the potential of helping (hurting) me or my community in the coming months? Are there possible ways out of it?
6. What kinds of tools are missing from my environment that would help things along?
7. Which companies or parts of an industry might benefit from my ideas?
8. How do other industries compare to what my community is thinking about?
9. What kinds of thoughts will inspire my audience to contact me (or support a cause, or buy my product, or support my interests)?
10. What do I want to know that I can ask my community?
11. How ___ is like _____.
12. __ Ways to Convince the Boss to Try ____.
13. How do I _______?
14. Here are some new ways to ________.
15. My personal recipe for ______.
16. If I ran the _____.
17. Three improvements to my company’s _______.
18. My first steps into ______.
19. If I find yourself stuck, try _____.
20. Restarting now would _____.

Bonus Tip: Pictures help stimulate the writing process.

[Read more →]

What is a Spirograph?
by Anu Garg

A Spirograph is a curve formed by rolling a circle inside or outside of another circle. The pen is placed at any point on the rolling circle. If the radius of fixed circle is R, the radius of moving circle is r, and the offset of the pen point in the moving circle is O, then the equations of the resulting curve is defined by:

x = (R+r)*cos(t) – O*cos(((R+r)/r)*t)
y = (R+r)*sin(t) – O*sin(((R+r)/r)*t)
(moving circle outside the fixed circle)

x = (R-r)*cos(t) + O*cos(((R-r)/r)*t)
y = (R-r)*sin(t) – O*sin(((R-r)/r)*t)
(moving circle inside the fixed circle)

Here is how you can use the controls in this Spirograph applet:

• The first three scroll bars in the control panel let you change R, r and O respectively.
• You can use the next three scroll bars to change the color of the drawing. These scroll bars change the red, green and blue values of the color (in the range 0-255) respectively.
• The last scroll bar lets you choose the number of iterations for the Spirograph. Move it to beginning and then slowly increase it to see how many iterations it takes to complete the spirograph.
• You can use the Random button to select random values for the radii and color.

Created by Anu Garg.

A friend asked me to explain what the different user roles in WordPress 2.7 were capable of and what permissions they had.

I decided to post my findings here so everyone can benefit.

Here’s a simple list:
from Hippo Web Solutions

By default there are five Roles, each of which has progressively more power:

• Administrator
• Editor
• Author
• Contributor
• Subscriber

Capabilities represent the various tasks that you can perform given a particular role:

• publishing, editing, and deleting posts and pages
• moderating comments
• managing users
• managing themes and plugins

Here’s what the authors of the WordPress Codex have to say about version 2.0 (couldn’t find anything more up-to-date in the Codex):

Summary of Roles

• Administrator – Somebody who has access to all the administration features
• Editor              – Somebody who can publish posts, manage posts as well as manage
  other people’s posts, etc.
• Author            – Somebody who can publish and manage their own posts
• Contributor    – Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish posts
• Subscriber      – Somebody who can read comments/comment/receive news letters, etc.

Here are several Essential WordPressâ„¢ plugins that you should find most useful. Keep in mind that WordPress future updates will often incorporate a plugin into their core functionality thus rendering the separate plugin unnecessary.

The first two are useful for frequently updating WordPress.

1. One Click Plugin Updater
http://w-shadow.com/blog/2007/10/19/one-click-plugin-updater/

2. WordPress Automatic Upgrade
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade/

3. No Revisions
Disables post revisions in WordPress 2.6+ to keep saved posts from clogging up your database. They must be removed from the DB by hand, but this plugin will deactivate the auto-save feature.
http://www.hostscope.com/wordpress-plugins/norevisions-wordpress-plugin/

4. bs-wp-noversion
Removes the WordPress Version to prevent targetted attacks and version fingerprinting.
http://blogsecurity.net/

5. Simple Link Manager Plugin
by Teli Adlam
http://www.wpaffiliateguide.com/link-manager/plugin
Teli Adlam is a good person to become acquainted with. If you buy one of her products you can join her support forum. ( It seems this product is no longer available. )

6. Redirection
When you change the permalink URL of a post, you should provide a 301 redirect to it in case you have people linking to the old address.
http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/

7. WP tags to Technorati
http://www.geekyramblings.org/plugins/wp-tags-to-technorati/

Rapid CSS Editor & Emulator

Let’s you see the results of your CSS edits before you upload them.
CSS Editor & Emulator by BlueMentals

The Firefox “Developer Toolbar” Plugin will also allow you to do this and lots more.
Firefox CSS Developer Toolbar

Be sure to also check out Joe Cheray’s designs and artwork at Wild HeArts Works