Maria’s Guides

A few tips for WordPress.com bloggers interested in attracting more readers to their blogs.

I’ve been doing a lot of work with WordPress.com lately, preparing some new training material to cover the new features and revised administrator interface. Part of my new material is a list of tips for WordPress.com bloggers who want to attract more readers. Here’s the list:

• Create original, well-written content. Too many blogs just rehash what’s already out there on the Web. But if your content is new and original, you’re more likely to attract readers who want fresh information or a different, independent point of view.
• Blog regularly. If you’re serious about attracting readers, you’ll need to post new content at least a few times a week. Be committed and you’ll be rewarded with a strong following.
• Stay focused. Studies have shown that popular blogs have one thing in common: they focus on a limited number of topics. Readers find this attractive because they know that if one of your posts interests them, they’re likely to find other posts that also interest them. This simply isn’t true if your blog covers a very wide range of topics.
• Comment on other people’s blogs. When you comment, you often have the opportunity to include a link to your site. If your comment is thoughtful and appropriate, you might encourage others to come visit your site.
• Share your blog URL everywhere you can. Three good places is on business cards, letterhead, and your e-mail signature. I bet you can think of a few more places if you try hard enough.
• Use appropriate keywords in your blog posts. Key words are picked up by WordPress.com. If you apply an appropriate keyword, WordPress.com visitors may discover your blog when exploring a keyword.
• Enable the Related Links extras feature of WordPress. This includes your blog among those blogs that can appear in related posts list on other WordPress.com blogs.

What do you think? Can you apply these tips to your blogging activity?

One of the great new features of WordPress 2.5.

One of the challenges of keeping a WordPress blog running smoothly is making sure all installed plugins are updated promptly when new versions become available. WordPress 2.5 makes this easier than ever by adding an Automatic Upgrade feature.

As shown in the following illustration, the a note in the Plugin Management administration panel indicates that the Bad Behavior plugin (which I rely on to keep the spambots off my blogs) has been updated.

I have two options for bringing my blog up to date:

• Download version takes me to the Bad Behavior page on the WordPress.org’s Plugin Directory so I can read about and download the update. This functionality has been around for a while — at least since WordPress 2.3 — with all plugins that support it.
• Upgrade automatically takes the update process a step further. When I click this link, WordPress automatically downloads, uncompresses and installs the new version of the plugin for me. It displays its progress as it works, as shown here, and confirms that the upgrade has been successful.

I’ve been using this new feature for a few weeks now and it’s worked like a charm. It’s a heck of a lot easier than upgrading the old fashioned way.

Displaying a list of your recent Viddler videos in your WordPress blog.

If you start using Viddler regularly — either to create video blog entries as discussed in the previous article of this series or to simply get video content online — you might want to make those videos accessible from within your WordPress blog. Fortunately, there’s a WordPress plugin that makes this very easy: viddlerRSS.

The ViddlerRSS plugin works like most other WordPress plugins. Drop it in your plugins folder and activate it. (You can learn more about how to do that in our WordPress book, so don’t expect to find details here.) Then open your WordPress dashboard and choose Options > viddlerRSS. Enter your Username in the appropriate box, select the number of videos to display and, if desired, enter the HTML code you want before and after each video thumbnail. Then click Update viddlerRSS.

Now roll up your sleeves and open the template file where you want to insert the Viddler video thumbnails. (Need help modifying theme files? You can learn about that to do that in our WordPress book, too.) In most cases, this will be your sidebar.php template. Insert the following code into the file where you want the thumbnails to appear: <?php get_viddlerrss(); ?>

Or you can get fancy like I did and put some intelligence into it, in case you ever need to disable the viddlerRSS plugin. Here’s the code I use, which includes a heading and other formatting settings:

<?php if (function_exists('get_viddlerrss')) { ?>
<li>
<h2>My Latest Viddler Videos</h2>
<?php get_viddlerrss(); ?>
</li>
<?php } ?>

Save the changes to your template file.

Now check your blog to see the results of your efforts. As shown here, I’ve got viddlerRSS set up to display thumbnails for my most recent three videos in my blog’s sidebar. Pointing to a video’s thumbnail displays the title of the video, which can help people decide whether they want to view it. Clicking a thumbnail image opens the video on the Viddler site.

Easy enough, right?

The next (and last) article in this series will explain how you can include a video commenting feature in your WordPress blog. Stay tuned!

New article on Peachpit.com.

Just a quick note to let you know that my most recent article for Peachpit’s Web site, “How to Embed a QuickTime Movie in a Web Page or Blog Post” is now online. The article is free and illustrated. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Recording and posting a video.

If you have a camera — like a built-in iSight, WebCam, or DV camera connected via a cable — you can record video using tools on the Viddler site. This is probably the fastest and easiest way to get a video blog entry recorded and online.

Recording a Video

Here are the steps to record a video:

1. Log into your Viddler account at http://www.viddler.com/.
2. Click the Record button in the green navigation bar (or elsewhere, wherever you see it).
3. The Record from WebCam screen appears with an Adobe Flash Player Settings dialog atop it. Click the Allow button so Flash can access your audio and video input devices.
   
4. In the Select Quality dialog, choose an option suited to your connection speed. I usually choose Medium because I have a relatively slow (512 Kbps) Internet connection. Then click Okay.The screen should show an image of whatever your connected camera is looking at. In my case, I’m using a built-in iSight Camera on my 24-inch iMac, so it’s looking at me:
   
5. Check the Audio, Video, and Quality settings. In the illustration above, it’s using my externally connected iSight for audio, which is wrong. I want it to use the Built-in Microphone, so I select it from the pop-up menu. My built-in iSight camera is identified as a USB Video Class Video — it works, so I won’t argue. I believe the external iSight connected to my computer does not appear in the menu because it’s being used by other software (Evocam, which produces my WebCam).
6. When you’re ready to record, click the red Record button. The status bar animates with a diagonal red stripe as you record. When you’re finished, click the Red button again.
7. Wait while Viddler saves your video. It’ll display a status arrow thingie as it works. When it’s finished, it shows the poster frame of the video. If you wait long enough, it’ll play back to you:
   
8. If you like what you see, click the Save button. If you don’t, hit that red Record button again to discard the video and record a new one.

Please remember that I simply cannot provide details about every single camera that you might be using with your computer and I can’t offer troubleshooting assistance if you can’t get this to work. If you have problems, consult Viddler’s online support options. Although you can post a question in this post’s Comments, be aware that I won’t reply if I don’t have an answer. Someone else, however, may have the information you seek.

Setting Video Options

When you save a video, it appears in a Recorded video window:

There are a few things you should set for it:

• Click the Edit link beside the name of the video (”Recorded video”) and enter a more appropriate name for the video. Don’t forget to click the Save link beneath the new name to save it.
• If desired, enter tags in the Tags field on the right side of the video. You’ll need to enter each tag separately and click the Add Tag button after each one. (I’m not big on tagging, so I don’t usually do this.)
• Under Sharing Options, choose Everyone. After all, if you’re going to put this on your blog, you want everyone to be able to see it, right? If a Save Changes button appears there, be sure to click it.

Posting the Video on Your Blog

This is where the setup covered in Part II of this series pays off.

1. Click the Blog This button under the video.
2. In the list of blogs that appears beneath the video, click the link for the blog you want to add it to.
3. Fill in the blog post form that appears:
   
   The title will be the title of the blog post. The Post is the text that will appear in the post with the video. (I got fancy with some HTML to link to the first blog post in this series.) You can select a radio button at the bottom of the form to determine whether the video should appear above or below the post text. (I usually choose below.)
4. Click the Send button. A message should confirm that the video has been successfully posted to your blog. Here’s what mine looks like:
   

Now wasn’t that easy?

I should note here that you can use the Blog This button under any public video you see on the Viddler site. So if another Viddler user creates a cool video you want to share with your blog’s readers, you can add it to your blog, along with some comments, as discussed here.

Next up: Displaying an archive of your recent Viddler videos in your WordPress blog.

Setting blog options on Viddler.

Once you’ve set up your Viddler account, you’re ready to set a few options that’ll make blogging from it easy.

1. Log into your Viddler account at http://www.viddler.com/.
2. Click the Options button near the top of the page, under the “Hello, yourname” greeting.
3. In the Account Options screen, click the Blog Settings link. You should see something like this, although there won’t be any blogs listed for you.
   
4. Click the + Add Blog button to display configuration fields.
5. Enter your blog’s name in the Blog Name box and select the type of blog from the Blog Type drop-down list. The entry area expands to offer options applicable to your type of blog. Here’s what it looks like for a WordPress blog:
   
6. Fill in the rest of the fields. The Blog API Endpoint is the URL to your blog’s Home page followed by /xmlrpc.php. You should know the Username and Password.
7. To prevent having to enter your password every time you send a Viddler video to your blog, turn on the Remember Password button.
8. Click Submit.
9. Viddler checks the information you entered. If it is correct and provides access to your blog, a green “Success!” message appears. Click the Awesome button. The blog is added to a list under Your Blogs.

You can repeat this process for as many blogs as you have access to. And, as you may have noticed, Viddler supports many different blog types, including TypePad, Blogger, Movable Type, Manilla, and Vox. So even if you’re not a WordPress user, you can use this feature. And yes, it does work with WordPress.com based blogs — not just the server install blogs.

What does this do for you? It sets up your account so that whenever you see a Viddler video that you want to embed in your blog, your account information is already provided and you’re good to go.

Next up: Recording a video on Viddler.