Category: General Blogging

As you may have seen, I was running an experiment on Twitter to see if I could provide technical consultancy via 140 character interchanges here is the original post https://dev.neilmatthews.com/twitter-wordpress-consultancy-experiment.

I also  said I would write up my findings, so here you go.

How Many Takers Were There

I was completely underwhelmed with the results, I only got two takers .

Financial Results

I made a big fat lonely zero in pounds, shillings and pence.  Nada, zip, bugger all, sweet FA, nothing.

The HUGE problem

You cannot give consultancy in 140 characters.  It is too small to express the problem people have, and again too small an amount of characters to give out information. In both cases I dropped from twitter to email exchange very quickly.  I was expecting to give out small how to’s, pointers to other documents or plugins that type of request, but what I got were very big and complex problems or blog design requests.

I got one really meaty problem and that took up a large part of my afternoon, so trying to give support via twitter was pointless, in the end I got my hands dirty and fixed the issue.

What I learned

Although financially it bombed,  I have learned quite a lot and I believe there are some great client acquisition techniques to be learned from what I did.  Here are some of the things I learned

You cannot sit back and wait for people to come to you.  I asked a few twitter chums to RT what I was doing and I tweeted a number of times to introduce the concept.  I sat back during the morning and waited for the stream of tweets asking for help, but none came.  I changed my technique and went searching for people.  This is where my hits came from.  I pushed the URL to my experiment in front of people tweeting about their WordPress problems.  This brought action.

Timing seems to be quite crucial on Twitter.   You need to get your offer in front of people at the right time, my initial push was early morning UK time, this obviously missed the US and Canada, and on the other side the Aussies and Kiwis were off to bed.  If I was doing this again, I would use a service like Tweetlater.com and setup and number of timed announcements to push to people in other timezones.  I am going to take this further and time my blog posts to publish at a specific time and push tweets about them during core hours.  I am not sure when that is yet, need to get out a world clock.  Any suggestions when the most people are awake please drop a comment to me.

I was able to push work to other members of my twitter network which was cool.  I am not a web designer and one of the requests was for prettyfication.  I was able to refer that to someone in my network.

I generated a bit of of buzz.  Quite a few people have noticed the tweets and are following me because of it.     This is another area I will investigate further.  The ideas which come to mind are free webinars push out like this, then gaining paying clients on the back of that.

Twitter is an excellent client acquisition tool.  If you know how to tap into search you can place your offering before people just at the point they are having the problem your service or product solves.

You need to develop your twitter network.  A lot of the contact came from people re-tweeting my messages.

Will I Do It Again?

No I won’t.  I lost a day of billable hours to the experiment, but I learned a boat load of new techniques which I will be using to push people to my blog to gain readers or even clients.

Got any more questions about the experiement please leave a comment.

What’s The Big Idea

I am doing an experiment on Twitter throughout Wednesday 20 May 2009 09:00 – 20:00 GMT to see if there is a way for subject matter experts to provide their professional services via 140 characters and earn a fee for it.

Here is the offer, I will give anyone who tweets me  a 140 character consultation/technical support answer on any WordPress technical issue they may have.

In exchange I will ask them for a tip.  This is completely at your own discretion.  If my answer was no good or you feel it is not worth a tip simply walk away.

This may cause uproar, a lot of people think the interchange of information and ideas should be free on twitter , but why not carry the real world personal services tipping culture online.  I remember a time a gave a hotel usher $1 to open a taxi door, surely some expert advice is worth the same gesture?  Let’s run the experiment and see what happens.

How to give a Tip

First you need to register with TipJoy.  Tip Joy is a cool little startup which allows people to send money via a tweet.  You need to create an account and then charge your account up via your credit card.

To make the payment you need to make a tweet in the following fashion

p $X @wpdude for wordpress services

Replace X with the amount you want to tip, the recommended amout is $3, but if you think my tweet is worth more (or less) please feel free to change the amount.

The Write Up

I will also write up a detailed description of the day to let you know the response and how well or poorly the experiment worked including full disclosure of money earned, the amount of work required to do earn this cash and my observations on the day.

Micro Payments Are The Future

I think micro payments are the future of the knowledge industry.  Instead of the large hourly consulting fees or deleveoping content for a miniscule adsense click awaywhy not give a micropayment tip. Sometimes you just want quick pointer or nugget of information not a full on consultation.  Check out Nick Cernis’ excellent blog post on the subject http://putthingsoff.com/the-end-of-free-content/.

I need Your Help

Please tweet and RT this page by clicking on the button above, I need to generate some buzz for Wednesday.

Many blogs are moving away from being text only to include multimedia files.  Audio, images and video are all common in WordPress blogs.  In a three part series I would like to give detailed how to’s on adding these type of media to your posts, how to manage the files and the best available plugins to extend WordPress so it can serve up your shiny new content to your readers / viewers or even listeners.

In the first part of this series I would like to look at how to add a podcast to your blog.

What Is A Podcast

In the truest sense of the form, a podcast is an audio file available to download and be played in an audio player such as an iPod.  The podcast will be a series of audio files which can be subscribed to using an aggregator.  The aggregator will then download each new episode as it is released and make it available to listen to at a time convenient to the user.  For me this means I can subscribe to a pocast in iTunes and upload it to my iPod.

Bloggers may not be creating pure podcasts, perhaps we are doing a one-off audio posts with no series, but the techniques are the same.

I have created a podcast using the techniques I describe to highlight this posts, it is available at the bottom of this post.

Why Podcast Over and Above Writing?

Podcasting is not a replacement for the written blog posts, I think it is a useful addition to your articles.  Here are some benefits and pitfalls of podcasting versus writing.

Getting your voice over – a podcast allows people to hears and associate with the real you, rather than assuming what you are like via your writing

Interviewing people – there is no real replacement for a person to person interview, it has to be audio or video, the nuance of voice is lost when an interview is transcribed to text.

Distributing large amounts of content – if you are delivering a large amount of content, podcasting may be for you, it allows people to get the content for review whilst they are traveling or have it playing in the background when doing other tasks.

If you audience is not online all the time – podcasting is great for an audience which is not listening all of the time, the asynchronous format means you can record and distribute your podcast and your listeners can hear what you have to say at a time convenient to them.

Podcasting takes practices –  once you are comfortable with the medium you can rattle off a podcast with a great deal of content very quickly.  Writing the same amout of content would take much longer.  As you can tell from my podcast, I am not very comfortable with the medium, but that would come with practice.

Podcasting is linear – your reader may not need all of the information you are spouting out, is it not easy to jump to a particular section of a podcast as it is with a written document.  Use podcasting where podcasting works use blog posts where thye work best.

A very good example of a podcaster cum blogger is Ozzie blogger Yaro Starak, why not skoot over and check out some of his podcasts.  Yaro blogs about blogging and internet marketing, here is one of his podcasts http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/1104/scocco-interview/.

Subscribing to A Podcast

As I have already mentioned, podcasts are available to subscribe to using the RSS format.  This functionality is not available out of the box with WordPress so your old WP install needs to be extended, I sense plugins are needed.

Creating the media file

Creating your audio file is a little beyond the scope of this posts, but I will give you a few pointers:

Microphone – buy the best one you can it will show in your final production. I use a fairly cheap one and you can hear the hisses and pips as I breath out or speak.  Check out podcasting microphones on amazon they are not cheap but if you are serious about podcasting you will need to make that investment at some point.

Recording Software -MAC and PC both come with an audio recording package, as you can expect these are limited. It looks like a lot of people are recommending audacity, an open source recording package available to download for free at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/.  This is what I used for the podcast included with this post and I found it easy to use and full of neat little editing tools and effects.

Uploading the media to your blog

So you have recorded your podcast and converted it to an MP3 format.  Now you are ready to upload it to your blog for play back or subscription via an MP3 player.

Login to your WordPress dashboard and click on the tab marked media.  From there click on add new, and browse to your podcast file.  Upload it. The file will be saved in the wp-content directory.  In the case of this podcast, it is saved at https://dev.neilmatthews.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/howtoaddapodcast.mp3

Bandwidth Concerns

Streaming MP3 over the net will use up your bandwidth quite quickly if you have a popular site with a limited amount of downloading on your hosting plan.

There is a solution to this problem and that is to host it on a third party server.  I have never done this so I cannot recommend any provider over another, but a search for podcast hosting on Google will return quite a few, if any readers of this posts can recommend any podcast hosting providers please leave a comment below with a link – cheers.

The Plugin

Ah god bless em over and over again, the happy little plugin developers.  I have seen podcasts on other peoples blogs so I knew there would be a plugin out there for me.  I made a small list of things I wanted from my plugin and went a-searching.  I wanted:

• Podcasting subscription functionality
• Use a local or remote file – this allows me to host the file wherever I like
• Ability to Play from a blog post – I want immediate or downloadable access to my podcast.
• A neat player with pause / play / volume functions

I went to the WordPress plugin repository and did a search for podcasting, this returned all the plugins available, I checked the functionality against my list and got a hit with my first plugin.  I am using the imaginatively names Podcasting 2.1 plugin produced by Spiral Web Consulting.   It is available to download at the following location:

http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/podcasting.2.1.zip

To add a podcast to this page, I enclose the URL to my podcast with a tag {podcast}http://podcastURL{/podcast}. If I want to play a remotely hosted MP3 I simply point at the remote file, all of my problems solved.

To subscrive to this podcast or any future podcasts,  the plugin has created the appropriate feed at https://dev.neilmatthews.com/feed/podcast. At the time of writing this does not work, I will update once I have sorted the problems.

You can see my nice little player at the base of the post with volume controls, play and pause controls – a very nice little plugin.

Conclusion

Podcasting is a great way to build a more personable feel to your blog, it lets your readers hear and get a sense of what you are like.  Sometimes our written voice is  not the real us, this helps to grow brand-you.

I the next part of this series I will talk about adding video to your blog.

My Podcast

Here I am with my lovely Geordie accent, an English accent which most people outside of the UK never hear, we don’t all talk like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins you know.

[podcast]https://dev.neilmatthews.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/howtoaddapodcast.mp3 [/podcast]

As you read this I will be sunning myself for two weeks in sunny Italy.  I thought I would write a post on how to keep your blogs momentum going when you are on holiday (I’m British I go on holiday not vacation).

Why Will A Blog Loose Momentum?

People have an expectation of your content output, if you don’t keep up your side of this bargain (unwritten as it is) , you may be subjected to readership apathy and they will unsubscribe from your RSS feeds or email newsletters.  This will probably effect the end goal of your blog.

You have probably worked damn hard to build your reader base, your don’t want to loose it whilst you are relaxing.

Tell Your Readers

Let your readers know you are offline for a short while, a short post saying you are offline or a quick tweet and you are good to go.

Hi everyone, just in case you missed the point, I am away and will not be posting as frequently, will not be able to moderate your comments or take on new coaching clients.  Please send me an email from the contact page I will pick it up when I get home.

Post Later

The method I used to deliver this post whilst I am away from home is to use the post delay function of WordPress.  This allows me to write and publish a post, but for it to appear live to my readers at a set date in the future.  I have written and post delayed two articles for you whilst I am away.

I discused this function in depth in my blog post Write Now Post Later.

Guest Posts

If you have a large enough following you can probably put out a request to you readership for guest posts.  You can get people to write your content for you (for free!) and publish that instead of your own work when you are away.

A little organisation is required for this process you need to put the call out, get the posts and pre-publish them before you go away unless you are trusting enough to give the keys to your blog to the guest poster to login write and publish while you are away.

Be warned they may have a party and trash the joint you know what bloggers are like.

Hire Writers

If you can afford it why not hire some writers to get some content written for you.  In the same way as a guest post you need to organise this a couple of weeks in advance get it written and published before you go.

The Problogger jobs board is a good way to advertise for writers.

Reduce Frequency

I have a posting plan of three posts per week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  The thought of writing six posts whilst preparing for my trip did not appeal so I went for a reduction in posting frequency, during my break you will get two posts, one each Wednesday.

This still keeps my blog ticking over without the stress on me to get content produced and uploaded.  It may not seem so, but I spend a lot of time on each post, researching, writing and honing until I am happy.

Close Down Certain Aspects of Your Blog

Another thing to do is stop certain sections of aspects of your blog.  Here at WP Dude I have stopped all paid advertising, stopped taking any new clients from my wordpress coaching practise and setup an email autoresponder to anyone trying to contact me via email.

Bon Voyage

That’s it from me, see you when I get back.

Wish You Were Here – love the WP Dude

Introduction

Premium Video Tutorial

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VIDEO TO BE ADDED

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How to Text

When you need WordPress help, where can you go?  Here is a list of WordPress help and support resources:

WordPress Coaches – There are some excellent people out there who will give you a one on one coaching sessions 🙂

WordPress Support Forums – There is an excellent forum populated by very helpful people, drop your problem as a new post and you can expect some help http://wordpress.org/support/

RTFM – Read the effing manual at http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page

Twitter – Have you tried tweeting about your problem, there are loads of WP experts out there tweeting replies to questions like this, why not ask me @wpdude.

Automattic’s List of consultants – Automattic, the company behind WordPress holds a list of approved consultants for hire, check out

There are many other resources, please feel free to leave any good ones in the comments section of this post.

Using sitemaps you can speed up the process of getting your blog posts into Google’s index and hopefully you can begin to enjoy some benefits of Google Juice.  This post will tell you how to do this using Google’s webmaster tools and a plugin or two.

What Is A Sitemap?

A sitemap is an xml file which contains details of the pages and posts from your blog, what the priority you think, each deserves and the frequency that page is updated.  This sitemap is read by the Google bots and your posts and pages are added to the search engine’s index.

You can see what my sitemap looks like at https://dev.neilmatthews.com/sitemap.xml.

You can manually create / update your sitemap with a text editor and then upload it to your blog or use one of the many sitemap plugins available.

Why Create A Sitemap?

It tells the search engines about your content, how often it is updated and most crucially you can prompt the search engines to index your new content as you add it.

Your site will eventually be spidered once it has some incoming links, but a sitemap will speed up that process by proactively telling the engines about your stuff.

Google WebMaster Tools

Google has a suit of Webmaster tools at google.com/webmasters, which allow site owners to check out how many links they have, tell Google how often to spider and update the content of their site and a host of other functions including sitemaps.  This post will focus on sitemaps.

I think every blog owner should have a webmasters tools account if they are serious about getting their content into the search engine indexes and get organic traffic coming to their site.

The Verification Process

Once you have created an account with webmaster tools, you must verify your ownership of the site with Google.  The verification process can come in one of two methods you can add a meta tag to your blog or upload a file with a specific name to your root directory.

meta tage method -using this method, you add a meta tag to the header of your blog. From the dashboard, click on appearance go to the editor.  Click on the file called header and add the verification meta tag above the </head> tag.   The meta tag will look something like this:

<meta name=”verify-v1″ content=” {verification string goes here }” >

file upload method – the second method is to upload a file with a particular name to the root of your site.  Google will give you a file name such as abdcasdkjadsfkjhkdfssadf.html, create a blank file on the root of your site.

Once you have installed your chosen verify method, click on the verify button inside of google webmaster tools and a check will be done, if it is okay, you are good to go and add your sitemap.

Telling Google About Your Sitemap

Inside of the tool is a section imagenatively called sitemaps.  Click on this link, and there is a section to submit the URL to where your sitemap will be stored, this will usuaully be in the root and be named sitemap.xml.  Once this is added, Google heads off to check the site map and add any pages or posts it finds to the index.

Sitemap Plugins

You can manually create your sitemap as I have said, but this is arduous for a blog which is updated on a regular basis.  The plugin fairies have magicked a solution for us WordPress blog owners.  Here is a link to the xml sitemap section:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/xml-sitemap

I use a plugin called Google XML Sitemap Generator.  It allows me to automatically build a sitemap whenever I add a post or page, it lets me set priorities of pages and posts, but most importantly it automatically notifies the search engines when I add a new post.

What About The Search Engine Also-Rans

Sitemaps are also used by Yahoo and MSN, it was a standard developed by all three search engines so your work should gain you traffic from all three of the search giants.

Conclusion

Sitemaps are two years old (or so) and are the future of pushing content into the search engione indicise, I advise all WordPress blog owners to get their sitemap sorted now.

In my post 7 reasons to leave blog comments I talked about leaving comments to build a conversation, in this post I would like to provide a how-to for WordPress 2.7.x blog owners to teach them how to reply to and engage with people who leave comments on their blogs.

Why Reply To Comments?

It’s all about engagement, a reader of your  blog has added their input, it is only polite to acknowledge, or to discuss their point.  You cannot operate a  sucessful blog in a bubble, casting posts from on-high to your readers and then shutting the doors to your writing castle is not the recipe for success, you need to communicate with your readers and engage with them, one way to do this is by replying to comments.

Examples Of  When I Reply

I reply to comments here at WP Dude under the following situations:

• Someone asks me a question.
• I feel I need to clarify the comment e.g. someone recently left a comment about nofollow, I explained what this meant just in case other readers did not understand this.
• Someone adds a point I missed in my post, I like to thank them and validate what they have said to my readers.
• Critics – get your point of view across to critics of your post.

When Not To Reply

I personally feel I don’t need to reply to comment trolls, spammers or the “nice post” brigade.  They are either moderated, deleted or approved and left to themselves, I only reply to people who have joined the conversation.

That may sound a bit sniffy of people leaving a nice post comment, but I think they are giving me a thumbs up not asking for a chat.

There’s a Comment That Needs A Reply

Someone has left an insightful comment – check.

You have moderated it and published it on your site – check.

Now you want to add your voice to the conversation to reply to, or add to what has been said in the comment, how do you do that?

Inside of the comment section of your dashboard,  scroll down to the comment you want to reply to and hover your mouse over the comment.  Up pops a reply link, click on this add your text and voila, you have joined the conversation.

Threaded Levels of Comments

There is an option on WordPress blogs to enabled nested comments.  This means you can allow people to see the threaded comments and to reply to other commentors.

To enable this function go to settings -> discussion and enable the following:

Enable threaded (nested) comments X levels deep

NB: Your theme needs to be configured to handle threaded comments for them to be displayed correctly.  They are usually indented.  There is a plugin to do this if your theme does not handle threaded comments.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-thread-comment/

Replying To Many Comments in One Reply

There is a increasing number of bloggers who reply to their commentors in one fell swoop (these are the swines who get many many comments) and they are adopting a twitter like syntax of using an @ sign before a users name i.e.

@commentor1 – nice point

@commentor2 – I disagree, get off my blog

They will create one new comment and reply to all of the commentors they feel need a reply.

E-Mail a Commentor

If you really want to engage with a commentor, I highly recommend you send them an email.  As part of the commenting process, they will send you their email address, why not send them a short message thanking them for their

This is also a good place to reply to comments for individual requests which you do not wish to share with other readers of your blog.

There are plugins out there which will send an autoresponder message to new commentors, this is great, but I feel it looses the individual and personal touch of reaching out to a new reader.

Test Comments

I have left a test comment along with a reply at the bottom of this post so you can see how I have replied

That’s All Folks

If someone has gone to the trouble of leaving a comment on your blog, teh least you  can do is engage with that reader, make them feel special and they may become on of your 1000 true fans.

A number of people have asked me about the theme I use here at WPDude, so I thought I would write up a review of the theme and let you know how it works, where to get it from and how much it costs.

Ice Cream Dream The Premium Theme

Rhyme in a post sub-title cool, The name of the theme I use is Ice Cream Dream and it was developed by the very funny and lovely Nick Cernis over at WordPrezzie

Click here to view more details (damn right it’s an aff. link I love this theme)

Quanta Costa (as they say in Italy)

When this posts goes to press, Ice Cream Dream costs the very reasonable sum of $89.

When trying to decide if a premium theme is a good investment, I like to use the following equation.

• Can I do graphic design – no, buy a premium theme.
• Do I want a more unique theme than the run of the mill blog – yes, buy a premium theme.

What Configuration Options Do I Get

The theme comes in 5 colour combos of mint, raspberry, vanilla, chocolate and strawberry (thats green, pinky red, beige, brown, and red for those of us not into artsy-fartsy language).  There is also a custom option so you can set your own colour scheme.

There is a neat logo and banner changing option to simply upload images.  You can change the top logo, the dude on my site and the banner, the notebook.

Lastly there is a very good option to set a custom property pointing to a thumbnail image.

What Makes It So Cool

It was developed for one type of business blog, the blog wanting to sell a single service or product like my coaching service.

It has a highly visible call to action so you can direct visitors to your goal page or your offering.  It is simple and unfussy, and it works, I write blog posts, people come to my site, see the hire me badge and bingo I get work.

None of This Developers License Shite

Sometimes when you buy a premium theme you buy per domain, Ice Cream Dream does not go in for this type of nonsense you buy once and get to reuse the theme as many times as you want.

Other theme developers are asking for multiple purchase or selling an inflated price developers edition.

Where’s The Downside?

If you want more than one prominent call to action on the front page you are going to have to code it up yourself.  This theme is also shite for anyone wanting to sell ad space.  This is for people selling their own services not “yet another” banner ad.

You will need to be able to resize or obtain images that are 240 pixels wide for the thumbnails shown on the front page.  Do you have a graphics package that can scale images?

Nice After Sales Support

On a number of occasions, I have requested support from the team and it was very good, in particular when I asked for some new images.  It was paid support, but the costs was very reasonable and the excellent Hayley got me my updated images in zero time flat.

The documentation that comes with the theme is very comprehensive and you should have no problems getting the theme up and running.

While I am Being an Ice Cream Dream FanBoy

WPDude and and WordPrezzie sitting in a tree kay-eye-ess-ess-eye-en-gee

Nick Cernis also has a couple of other excellent offerings, his excellent and very funny ebook Todoodlist and his not very often updated blog, but still very worthwhile read Put Things off,  consider an RSS subscription, then wait for quite some time until his next excellent missie hits your reader app.

Go On Buy It You Know You Want To

You can see more about Ice Cream Dreams at WordPrezzie.com

I thought I would write a beginners guide to RSS for WordPress, this is designed for new comers to WordPress and RSS.  The post will talk about what RSS is, it’s benefits and how to monitor your feed with services such as Feedburner.

What Is RSS

RSS stands for really simple syndication and it is a way to publish your blog posts as a syndicated feed.  Your posts are translated into an XML file which can be pulled into other applications.

WTF is a Syndicated Feed

This is a cut down version of your posts without your theme, widgets and doo-dahs which can be syndicated from your site and republished elsewhere.

Your Not Selling This Very Well

It is a way to allow your true fans to subscribe to your site and pull your new posts to them on-demand to a feed reader (see below) without the need to visit your site, so they are always up to date on your latest content.  Trust me when I say you want RSS, it’s going to replace news papers in the not too distant future, and you want your blog to have this function.

Why Do People Want to Syndicate Your Site

If you engage a reader with your content and they know about RSS, they do not want to bookmark and return to your site every few days to see your latest stuff.  They want to subscribe to your RSS feed and aggregate your content to a central point from which they can read your work at their pleasure.

People using RSS ususually follow a numnber of blogs, and they pull all their feeds into one place to read at ta time convinient to them.

You’ve seen the Symbol

Nearly every blog will have symbol like this on it:

This is the generally recognised RSS feed symbol and I know if I click on this I can subscribe to a site and have all the past and upcoming posts added to my feed reader.

If you are serious about getting your writing out there, your blog should have an image like this somewhere.  Mine is at the top right in a jolly green colour, feel free to click on it.  You may need to edit your theme to add the logo, but get one on your front page and in a prominent position.

WordPress Does It By Default

You will be very glad to hear that WordPress provides an RSS feed by default, if you type one of the following URLs into your browser you will see what the XML file of your RSS looks like (NB don’t do this on my site, I have plugins in place and you will not see the raw RSS feed).

• http://example.com/?feed=rss
• http://example.com/?feed=rss2
  
• http://example.com/?feed=rdf
• http://example.com/?feed=atom

As you can see there four different flavours of feed going on by default, since this is a beginners guide to RSS  I will not bore you with protocol details, I will simply tell you that these are four very similar methods to distribute your RSS feed.

Tweaking Your Feed Settings

There is one settings you need to conisder  when setting up your feed over and above the default and that is how much of your post you will push out.

From the dashboard click on settings->reading . There is a settings marked For each article in a feed, the options for this are full text or summary, meaning send out the complete text of your post versus a summary with a link back to the original source.  You may think that you want people running back to your site to click on your adsense or to view your banner ads, and a couple of high profile bloggers swear by this approach (I am thinking Aaron Wall’s seobook.com or Yaro Starak’s entrepreneurs-journey.com) but if you are reading this article it is unlikely that you are a AAA blogger to so I would go with a full feed to stop annoying people and preventing unsubscription. Full text is set by default.

RSS Syndication Services

So you have an RSS feed, there is a highly visible rss feed link on your site, now what?  Well you will probably want some stats on how many subsribers you have, what content they are reading.  Step forward the RSS Syndiation service.

These third party services take your feed and wrap them with statstics and other services to make monitoring the usage of your content away from your site easier.  The majority of these services are free with some sort of for a fee additional advanced services.

I use the Feedburner, a company which was aquired by Google. I am going to stick my neck on the line and say it is the most widely used feed service.  Feedburner recently made some big changes and there was a blip in their service with the ususal twitter (@wpdude) outcry.  That aside I still think it is an excellent service.  It tells me how many people have subscribed to my feed, what they are reading, and clicking through onto.

Alternatives to Feedburner are Feedblitz and Rapidfeeds.

A word or warning checking your RSS stats can become addictive don’t get hung up on your reader count.

Feed Readers

Many people use feed readers to get updates from their favourite blogs.  Using a feed reader, you add their RSS link to your reader and as new content is added, it is pulled into your reader of choice.

A small list of RSS readers could  include

• Google Reader
• Newsgator
• Feedreader
• Flock
• Netvibes
• Most Browsers also have RSS reader functionality

Some of the readers are clients you install on your machine, whilst others are internet servces you access from a website.

I use Google reader, it allows me to categogorises feeds into different interest sections, and to mark favourite  articles.

RSS Plugins

As with any problem in WordPress there will be a multitude of plugins to solve the issue.  Here is a link to the various RSS plugins from the WordPress plugin directory

The ones I use are the Feedburner Feedsmith which pushes my feed into Feedburner without too much configuration, I also use RSS Footer which I use to put a link back to my site in case anyone is scraping my content.

Get Your RSS out There

Get your RSS feed sorted, place a link to subscrive about the fold on your front page.  Belive me when I say it is the future of publishing.  It allows reader to select the content they are really interested in and pull it into a personalised steam of content, a DIY newspaper.

As your  blog begins to gain momentum and you receive more and more comments, you may want to impose some controls over what is written as a footnote to your post.

This how-to post shows the various comment controls available to a blogger using WordPress.  All settings unless stated are under the settings-> discussion section in the dashboard.  It is assumed that your blog is at version 2.7.x

Kill The Conversation

The quickest way to stop any comment control issues you are having is to close comments on your blog, in other words to stop all comments on your posts.  Think long and hard before killing the conversation, feedback to bloggers via comments is incredibly useful to extend the converstation.

To close comments on your blog check the box marked Allow people to post comments on the article.

All Things In Moderation

WordPress comes with comment moderation settings, this means that all comments need to be approved before they are shown on your blog.

They are held in a moderation queue until the blog admin clicks on an approve, reject or spam link.

To enable moderation, click on the check box An administrator must always approve the comment.

Pre-Approved Commentors

You can pre-approve commentors so that anything they subsequently comment upon will automatically be approved and displayed as a valid comment.

This is great if commentors are legitimate, but sometimes comments are raised manually as a precursor to a spam attack.  I personally do not like this setting, prefering manual moderation just in case they are bi-polar in their comments.

To enable comment preapproval click on Comment author must have a previously approved comment

Plugins

There are always a bag load of plugins to help control your comments, the one I rely upon to catch spam comments is Akismet, this excellent plugin analyses your comments against it’s database of offenders and marks anything it catches as spam and holds it for moderation.

There are many other comment plugins including ones which will show a captcha form before submission, ones asking questions to prove you are not a spam bot, others to make the conversation more advanced, please feel free to leave a comment with your favourities.

Here is a link to the comments section of the WordPress plugin directory

Keyword Moderation

You can send a comment directly to moderation if it contains certain keywords.  An example of this could be spammsters leaving comments trying to link to their male enhancement site, if you add viagra or cialis to your list, any comments with these words in will be moderated.

To enable keyword moderation, type the keywords into the blacklist box at the bottom of the discussion screen.

Links Schminks

Most of the trouble you will have in comments will come from people trying to use your blog as a forum for their own products or services.  There is an option to send comments for moderation if more than x links are spotted in a comment.  I have this set to 2.  If someone has a legitimate need for a link in a comment, my thinking is that there will only be one, multiple links spells spam in my book.

To enable link counting,set the number of links in the section entitled. Hold a comment in the queue if it contains
or more links.

Your Going On The List!

If someone is repeadtely spamming or trolling your comments, you can add them to a blacklist which will automatically send their missive to the spam queue.

You can add someone to your blacklist via their email address, blog URL or the originating IP address

The blacklist is located towards the bottom of the settings-> discussion screen, add one rule per line e.g.

• wpdude,com
• 192.168.101.1
• @wpdude

You can put parts of]j,ge a string for example the above email rule will stop all emails from the wpdude.com domain.

If Your Names Not Down You Can’t Get In

There is a function withing WordPress which forces users to register and login to your blog before they can leave a post.  This is a very powerful control process, but it is also a huge turnoff to commentors, many people will not comment on a blog, that said only people with a real urge to comment will register, click on the email verfiication link, login and then comment (I’m worn out writing it never mind doing it.

Lorelle VanFossen WordPress expert to the stars wrote an excellent piece for the Blog Herald on what changes your mind about leaving comments, you should probably read this before you make your commentors jump through too many hoops to validate your post.

To enable this function click Users must be registered and logged in to comment

Comment Editing

You may have a comment that you want to publish, but some part of the comment is causing you concern, as the blog owner you have the right to edit anything on your blog, feel free to extend this to the comments.

An example of when I have done this was with a recent comment which had a link in it.  Links are like a stamp of authority, and I was not 100% sure of the product in question, so I edited the comment and removed the link, leaving a human readable way to get to the product in question, but removing my sites validation.

A Parting Word – Control WordPress Comments

Commenting and the discussion it promotes is one of the best things about blogging.  Try not to make people jump through hoops join the conversation, but be ruthless with Trolls, and low quality comments.