A while back we covered a plug-in called Subscribe To Comments.  It’s a great way to ensure that when visitors comment on your blog posts, they receive follow-up comments and stay a part of the conversation.

After using Subscribe To Comments for over a year, there was one major issue, fake email addresses.  Whether they are from people who didn’t want to leave their real email address, or from spammers, the number of bounce backs can become overwhelming.

The good news is there are developers out there that have taken the Subscribe To Comments plug-in to the next level.  They require a user to validate their email address before subscribing to the comments.  This ensures that they wanted to subscribe and that their email address is valid.

The two plug-ins that I’ve seen are Gurken Subscribe to Comments and Subscribe to Double-Opt-In Comments.  I’ve started to use Gurken Subscribe to Comments and like the added functionality.

One thing that I did notice however is that you need to make sure to customize the subscription confirmation emails that go out.  The default one went into Gmail’s spam folder, as it was very light on content.  Take the time and write out a nice email to help keep it out of peoples spam boxes and inform the user as to why they are getting the verification email.

Moderator is an Adobe Air application that allows you to peek into your WordPress blog and manage any comments that are awaiting moderation.

You can see who wrote the comment, their email, Gravatar icon, what they said, when they said it, and then you can decide to accept, spam or delete the comment.  The settings also allow you to set the refresh interval and hide Gravatars if you’d like.

Another nice feature is that there are dock and system tray notifications of the number of unmoderated comments.

At this time, Moderator does not allow you to do a whole lot, but they plan on adding the ability to see all comments, reply to comments, manage multiple blogs comments, and get desktop pop-up notifications of new comments.

Moderator is a combination Adobe Air application and WordPress plug-in.  It’s pretty easy to install and works on Windows, Mac and Linux.  The next version is rumored to just be an Adobe Air application with no WordPress plug-in needed.

I’m eager to see how Moderator advances. It’s already a handy little tool and has potential to become even better.

We’ve talked about the benefits of owning your own blog, but what if you’ve already got a blog someplace else and want to move it to your own, hosted, WordPress blog?  You can do that.

WordPress offers a number of easy import options for most major free or paid blogging platforms out there.  This makes it easy to move away from other software to your own, hosted, WordPress blog.

WordPress currently offers the ability to import:

• Blogger
• Blogware
• DotClear
• GreyMatter
• LiveJournal
• Movable Type
• TypePad
• Textpattern
• WordPress
• OPML Files
• RSS Feeds

Each one of these options can be access by logging into your hosted WordPress blog and visiting the Tools -> Import section.  From there, WordPress will give specific step-by-step instructions on what to do.

Additional blogging platforms can also be imported, but are not officially supported. This includes:

• b2
• b2evolution
• Blosxom
• Drupal
• e107 CMS
• Excel/CSV Spreadsheet
• Jogger.pl
• Live Space (MSN Space)
• Mambo
• Motime – Splinder
• Pivot
• Plone
• PostNuke
• Nucleus CMS
• Radio Userland
• Roller
• Typo
• web-log.nl
• Xanga

Analytics are one item that every site owner should be looking into to find out where traffic is coming from and how users are interacting with the site.  However, analytics can sometimes be to much to consume with to much information or a cluttered interface.

Fortunately there are many analytics packages available that make reading and understanding your site’s stats pretty simple.  You shouldn’t need to be a geek to just pick out the basics.

Here are 5 analytics packages that are easy to understand and mostly free.

Clicky – Free to $20/month

Clicky

Great user interface with graphs, bar charts and color coded %s to make understanding the information quick and visual.

Clicky also integrates Twiter and FeedBurner stats to monitor the growth of those services.

Paid accounts get a few more features, but the free account is very nice.

WordPress Stats – Free

WordPress

WordPress only, this plugin integrates stats right into the dashboard of your blog.  You get a quick and simple overview of what’s happening on your site, but not really any in-depth information.

W3Counter – Free to $10/month

W3Counter

With the release of WordPress 2.7 paged comments became a built in feature. By default, they are enabled on both new installs and upgrades.  Where it may be good for usability, it may not be good for SEO.

From a usability standpoint, paged comments are good for posts that get a lot of comments.  By default, WordPress cuts them off at 50 comments per page.  Users then don’t have to wait for over 100, or even 1,000, comments to load.  Yes I have seen posts with over 1,000 comments.  The time it takes for a page with lots of comments to load can be much longer than the user is willing to wait.  Breaking them into pages speeds up page loading time and makes the site more user friendly.

From an SEO standpoint, paged comments can hinder the post.  With paged comments, each page has a separate URL and the post itself is duplicated across each page.  This can cause duplicate content issues and visitors could be entering your site on comment page 3 of a post.  Ideally, they’d all enter on the main post page.

Better Feed is a WordPress plugin that allows the blog owner to add a custom footer to the end of each post in their feed.  This a great way to customize what your readers see when they only read your feed, and don’t click through to your site.

Here are a few things you can do with Better Feed:

• Add a copyright line.
• Add text and links back to your site or blog.
• Add announcements.
• Add an advertisement, promotion or other call to action (CTA).
• Add in tags, categories, comments, author and other post specific items.
• Design it as you want.
• Do pretty much anything.

This is a great solution to the issue of other sites scraping your content and re-posting it as well.  You can ensure that after each post they scrape, it links back to the source. If the scraper site pulls out all the clickable links, you can put the post URL into the feed footer and it’ll still display.

Here are a few examples of feed footers from other sites.

Twitter seems to be taking over the web.  Everyone seems to have a Twitter account, or two, even President Obama.

With all the fanfare surrounding Twitter, there are many ways to integrate Twitter even more into your blog.  Here are a few tools get you started.

Tweet This – Tweet This is simply a link integrated into your blog posts that make it easy for users to click on and post your post to Twitter.  Think of it like a social bookmark icon, only for updating Twitter instead.  You may already even have this integration via a ShareThis or AddThis button.  It’s quick and simple and every blog should have this.

TwitterFeed – TwitterFeed can take your blogs feed and automatically post an update to your Twitter account when you make a new blog post.  This is handy when keeping your Twitter followers up-to-date on your blog.

Twittar – Twittar matches up your commenter with their Twitter account and pulls their Twitter icon into your comments.  This is much like the Gravatar service, only specific to just Twitter.  Personally, I think it’d be much better if Twitter integrated with Gravatar.

Some web hosts do not allow for plugins such as Akismet to function properly. This is because they turn off the PHP function fsockopen for security reasons.  When they do this, any plugin that connects to an outside source doesn’t function correctly.  The biggest issue then is the inflow of spam.

I’ve found two plugins that seem to help take control of spam comments and trackbacks when Akismet isn’t available.  Neither are perfect, but together they make a world of difference in the fight against spam.

The first is Cookies for Comments.  This plugin places a cookie into the visitors browser when they arrive at your site.  Once they leave a comment, the plugin checks to see if that cookie exists.  If there is no cookie, then it’s marked as spam.  From my testing, it works quite well.

The second is Simple Trackback Validation.  This plugin checks the site that is supposedly leaving the trackback and ensures that the IP is good and that the site is actually linking to yours.

The downside to both plugins is that they either pull all questionable comments & trackbacks into moderation or they delete them.  This means that you’ll continue to get flooded with moderation requests or they’ll just be deleted and, if something is marked spam accidentally, you’ll never know.

I didn’t know WordPress could cause such a headache, but it did today.  I got the white screen of death and was left with lots of admin side issues.

What happens is you can’t login, or, if you were previously logged in, you can’t mange plugins. All you can do is get a blank white screen.  Even the WYSIWYG editor would not load.

I think what it had to do with automatically updating pugins in WordPress 2.6  I don’t know why, but it made WordPress very unhappy.

Lucky for me, I had all the plugins backed up and was able to delete all my plugin files and re-upload the old ones.  Yes they are all begging to be upgraded again, but the blog is working and that’s much more important.

Thanks to Get Found Now for writing about the issue.  Their article lead me to my own conclusion that worked.

You can’t deny that Apple is re-defining the mobile web. The iPhone and iPod Touch are full fledged web browsers and there are lots of people using them. So, why don’t you take 5 minutes and optimize your WordPress blog for the iPhone and iPod Touch?

Step 1 – Install iWPhone. This plugin and theme combo automatically detects the iPhone or iPod Touch and serves up a specific theme optimized just for those screens. All you have to do is install it and activate it. When an an iPhone or iPod stops by, your site will be ready.

Step 2 – Install iPhone Mobile Admin. This plugin re-works the admin side of your blog specifically for the iPhone or iPod Touch. It makes it quite handy if you have one of these devices and want to login and post or manage your blog on the go. It should work with other mobile phones too if you don’t have an iPhone. There is also WPhone if iPhone Mobile Admin doesn’t fit your needs.