Behind The Blog

If you look at the bottom of any of the posts on any of the Voxeo blogs, including this post, you’ll see that there is now a “Related posts” section that promotes other blog posts that are deemed relevant to the topic of the post. The idea being, of course, that you can expose readers who land on a blog post as a result of search (or tweets or other links) to other posts you have on your site. Keep the readers on your site and learning about your content… and potentially then moving them to take some action or engage with you at a deeper level.

After evaluating a good number of WordPress plugins that provide this functionality, I wound up choosing Michael Erlewine’s Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP), based primarily on the number of recommendations I saw for it, the extensibility that it has (although I’m admittedly using hardly any of its power right now), and also the fact that it put relevant posts out to both the web page and the RSS feed. Here’s a view of what the RSS feed looks like for the same post as shown in the image to the right:

Now, I set the plugin to only show 3 related posts in RSS and 5 for the web site. ALL of that is configurable, including the text that appears above the related posts, the HTML used, styles, etc. There are so many options, in fact, that I could easily see burning up a chunk of time just experimenting with it all. Me? I’m using mostly the default settings right now and it’s working fine.

WordPress MU Issues

I installed the YARPP plugin in the “plugins” directory and then activated it site-wide. I chose “plugins” vs “mu-plugins” purely because I wanted the option to not use it on some blogs… I don’t actually know if it would work in mu-plugins. It all worked fine.

There are just two issues from a WPMU point-of-view:

• Related posts only from the SINGLE blog – The YARPP plugin works with only a single blog, which is probably what you want 99% of the time. However, in a tightly controlled WPMU environment like this corporate blog portal, it would be interesting to try seeing related posts from across ALL blogs on this site. I could see that helping send traffic across the different blogs.
• Related posts NOT appearing in the all-blogs RSS feed – As I mentioned earlier, YARPP nicely puts related posts into the RSS blog for each individual blog. However, we’re generating an “All Voxeo Blogs” RSS feed to which the majority of people subscribe. That feed also goes out to our Facebook page and is delivered by email to subscribers. YARPP does not add posts to this AllVoxeoBlogs feed, largely because we’re generating this feed using another WPMU plugin. At some point I need to look into how I can add in hooks or somehow get related posts there.

Given that YARPP isn’t targeted at WPMU, I wouldn’t expect it to do these things, but they would be wonderful enhancements… or a reason to have a YARPP-MU plugin.

Those issues aside, I’ve been very pleased with the plugin thus far and have to really applaud Michael Erlewine for his great work and for making the plugin available.

Have any of you reading this tried other “related posts” plugins with WPMU?

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Way back in late 2007 when I launched blogs.voxeo.com, one of my very first problems was in trying to figure out how to include snippets of VoiceXML, CCXML and CallXML code. I wrote about trying a number of different WordPress plugins back in March 2008 and at the time didn’t have much luck. When we have been including source code in blog posts, it has admittedly been using the über-kludgey way of converting all the XML tag syntax into HTML character entities, inserting non-breaking spaces, etc. A serious kludge.

Over the weekend I saw the recent post on the WordPress.com blog about posting source code which pointed me to the excellent “SyntaxHighlighter Evolved” plugin from “Alex / Viper007Bond” (view his plugin page) that is in turned based on the JavaScript SyntaxHighlighter package from Alex Gorbatchev. I installed it in WordPress MU, tested it out on an experimental blog I use for testing and then activated it sitewide.

Now, when I simply bracket VoiceXML code with “[ xml ]” and “[ /xml ]” (without the spaces), it comes out looking great. Here is an example:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<vxml version = "2.1" >

  <form>
    <block>
    <prompt>
      Hello World. This is my first telephone application.
    </prompt>
    </block>
  </form>
</vxml>

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It is, of course, not limited to merely XML. There are 20+ languages listed on the SyntaxHighlighter ’syntax files’ page. I expect that we’ll be using it now to be able to better write about the Tropo.com languages over on the Tropo blog.

One aspect I quite like about the plugin is the menu you get when you move your mouse over the source code. As shown in the image to right, you can easily:

• view the source code in a pop-up window
• copy the code to your clipboard
• print the code

Given that we’re planning to make more tutorials available, having the ability to copy and paste the code easily directly from the blog post is a great feature.

Many kudos to the two Alex’s for making both the underlying JavaScript library and also the WordPress plugin. And if you run a WordPress or WordPress MU site, you can download the SyntaxHighlighter plugin and install it in your site, too.

P.S. I should in fairness point out that a couple of colleagues have mentioned SyntaxHighlighter to me over the past few months… I just never had a chance to check it out until now.

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UPDATE #1, a few minutes after posting: So it seems I still need to work out a kink in my own process. I almost always write my posts offline using the MarsEdit editor and then publish them to the blogs.voxeo.com site. However, when I did that with this post, I wound up with code that had tags escaped as HTML character entities:

I had to go back into the WPMU editor on the website and paste in the correct VoiceXML code.

I’m not sure if the issue is with MarsEdit, my WPMU config or the SyntaxHighlighter plugin… but obviously I can’t really write posts with code in them offline until I figure it out…

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Back in June, I asked about what people thought the best plugin was for publishing updates to Twitter when there are new blog posts posted here in WordPress MU/WPMU. I was then and have been using Alex King’s excellent Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress, but it was a bit like using a screwdriver to bang in a nail. The Twitter Tools plugin is primarily designed to capture your tweets in a blog post so that you can have occasional posts on your blog site that include all your tweets. The plugin can also publish tweets when you have a new blog post, but it’s real strength seems to be in pulling your tweets into your blog.

All I want to do is publish new tweets… I don’t want to create blog posts with tweets. So I’ve known for quite some time that I’ve been using the wrong plugin for the job… but it’s worked okay, so I continued. I tried a different plugin over on the VoiceObjects Developer Blog, but I haven’t been as happy with it because it tended to shorten the titles of blog posts too much when posting to Twitter.

However, recently my colleague Ron Blaisdell pointed me to WordTwit from BraveNewCode and I have to say that it is outstanding at what I need it to do. Once you install the plugin, there is a very simple configuration screen where you enter your username, password and can change the format of what gets tweeted out:

In our case, I chose to edit the message to be “[title] - [link]” so that there is no prefix on any of the tweets.

You then can choose which URL shortener you want to use – I chose bit.ly:

After you save the configuration options, you then can go back in and enter your Bit.ly login and API key:

This makes it so that all of your shortened URLs then show up in your bit.ly account where you can see statistics around who has clicked on them, etc.

Because we use Google Analytics, I also checked off an option to add UTM tracking codes to URLs so that I can find any inbound traffic in GA easily.

I’ve been using WordTwit here on blogs.voxeo.com for a bit now and have been very pleased with how well it works. I haven’t yet installed it on the VO Developer Blog but will be doing so soon. Kudos (and thanks!) to the folks at BraveNewCode for developing such a great plugin.

Have you tried WordTwit? Or what plugin do you use for updating Twitter?

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I was delighted to learn by way of an Orlando Sentinel article that WordCamp Orlando will be happening this Saturday at Rollins College in our home town of Orlando, Florida. If you haven’t figured it out, we’re big fans of WordPress and run this blogs.voxeo.com site on WordPress MU. The WordPress community is a great one to be a part of… and, as demonstrated yesterday, can be of great help!

Anyway, if you have some time, the WordCamp Orlando schedule and speaker list are outstanding and include among others Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress!

Definitely worth checking out, in my mind… registration is only $15 and you get a cool T-shirt out of the deal as well!

P.S. And no, I personally won’t be attending because I’m 1,000 miles north in New Hampshire, but some Voxeons in Orlando may head over…

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UPDATE: Outstanding! Within minutes of posting this post, Brajesh (@sbrajesh) and Andrew Rogers (@acedrew) on Twitter both suggested something about permalinks and Brajesh suggested I resave the permalink in Settings->Permalinks.

That did it! I just went into the Permalinks screen in the admin menu, chose a different setting and pressed “Save”. Right then the single-entry views started working again. I then changed it back to the previous “Day and name” setting, saved it again, and it was back to normal.

Many thanks again to both Brajesh and Andrew Rogers for their quick responses. This is a great part of what makes the WordPress community so great to be a part of!

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I am experiencing a truly bizarre issue here on blogs.voxeo.com. If you go to our Voxeo Developers Corner blog at:

http://blogs.voxeo.com/voxeodeveloperscorner/

you see all the posts. Scroll down the page and you can see the various posts. Everything looks great.

But try clicking on any of the titles!

Oops.

404

But here is what I find so bizarre… it is ONLY this one blog that is affected!

All of the other blogs work perfectly fine… this Behind the Blog one, Voxeo Talks, Speaking of Standards… and all the rest. Even our newest Unified Self-Service blog. Viewing single posts works fine on all the other blogs.

As can be seen on the main VDC page, the blog posts are definitely there. When I login to the admin interface, I can see all the posts, I can edit them, I can update them. I can add new posts like the one I put up there today indicating there was this problem. But they just… won’t… display…

I’ve checked the WordPress MU Forums to no avail… I think my next step may be to post this issue over there.

Anyone reading this have any great ideas of what I should check next?

P.S. And yes, I’m running the latest WPMU 2.8.6 – but the issue was also there prior to the upgrade. I hoped the upgrade might fix it, but it didn’t.

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Testing out posting to WordPress MU from the new “WordPress 2.0″ iPhone app. More info here:

http://iPhone.wordpress.org/2009/11/06/20000-downloads

So far, so good…

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A few days ago, someone wrote to ask me about what I consider “best practices” in managing user accounts on a WordPress MU installation. Recently this person had set up a new WPMU server with a number of different blogs. In the rush to get it operational the system administrator had just set up a single user account with rights to all the blogs and given the username and password out to something like ten different people who published posts.

I got the impression that the person who contacted me wasn’t sure this was the best plan and was looking for any confirmation of that. I wrote back but then thought I’d share my reasons here as well.

For starters, no, it’s definitely NOT a good idea to have a bunch of people using the same WPMU user account.

Definitely.

Not.

Several reasons:

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1. SECURITY – If one of the authors leaves the company, or you decide to terminate one of them, that person will know the username/password. You’ll need to change the password and then get the new password out to all the other posters. Much easier if you give everyone their own username and password. Then if you need to part ways with someone, you just disable that one account from being able to login and you are done.

2. AUDITING – What happens if a post goes up that was not supposed to? Or was offensive or plagarized? How do you know WHO was the one who published that post? With a group of people sharing the login you don’t have an easy way of finding out who published the post in question. Perhaps you can try to correlate IP addresses with login sessions or something like that, but it’s hard to get right. If everyone has their own account, you know who published any particular post because a name is associated with it.

3. AVAILABILITY – What happens if one of the group resets the password? Or what if there is some database problem and the single account gets disabled? Suddenly no one can access the blog site. Far better to have the multiple accounts so that authors can still get into the site if there is a problem with one of the accounts.

4. APPEARANCE – If you have a community of blogs with one user account, all posts are going to be from that one user, which would certainly give me the perception that it’s not really that big of a “community” of blogs. With multiple accounts publishing the posts, your sites will look like they have more contributors to the individual blogs – which, in fact, they do. There is also a transparency/authenticity element to this, too, in that people can come to understand more easily that there are different authors on your site with different writing styles.

5. OWNERSHIP – Sort of going along with #2, if everyone publishes posts under their own name, I would believe that there is a bit more of an incentive for them to be sure that the posts are accurate with regard to spelling, etc. If it’s under “someone’s” name, there isn’t as strong a sense of ownership – but if it is your name, even just your first name, there is a bit more ownership at a psychological level.

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For me personally, point #1 alone carries the day and is why I assign individual user accounts to everyone who writes on this site. I don’t expect anyone to leave (but do we ever?)… I expect them to be here a long time… but if I want to disable someone’s access to this server, I want to be able to do it on an individual basis. My point #2 is big for me, too, as I want to be able to know who makes what changes to the site.

Sure, if you have a network of blogs, it may take a few more minutes to set up new user accounts and assign them to each of the blogs… but we’re talking minutes, not hours or days. A small investment that can have a big payoff later.

What about you? Do you assign everyone individual user accounts? For the same reasons I outline? Or do you have additional reasons?

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For those interested in plugins to your WordPress install, I found this very lengthy review of 43 plugins that are apparently finalists in the “WordPress Plugin Competition 2009″:

http://planetozh.com/blog/2009/09/wordpress-plugin-competition-2009-43-reviews/

I don’t know how many of those plugins are WordPress MU-compatible – and I have just started reading through all the reviews, but thought I’d pass it along to others interested. Looks like some really interesting ones in the mix. Thanks to “Ozh” for providing such detailed reviews.

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Here’s the next thing I want to do to this blog site – see that graphic over at the top of the far right sidebar? The one that is currently announcing Voxeo Labs? We’re building up a group of similar graphics as we make more announcements.

So here’s what I want to do – when we have a major announcement out, I obviously want to have that image be a static image that points to the announcement blog post. However, between major announcements, I want to dynamically cycle through those graphics so that visitors see the links to different announcements we’ve had in the past.

In my ideal world, I want a plugin that lets me configure a table like this:

Image URL	Link URL
http://blogs.voxeo.com/voxeotalks/files/2009/05/imifed-button.png	http://blogs.voxeo.com/voxeotalks/2009/05/27/voxeo-acquires-imified-and-gains-ivr-type-self-service-for-im/
http://blogs.voxeo.com/files/2009/07/VoxeoLabs_button.png	http://blogs.voxeo.com/voxeolabs/2009/07/22/adhearsion-and-voxeo-join-to-create-voxeo-labs

and then just cycles through those graphics on an ongoing basis.

I figure there must be a WordPress plugin out there that will do this… it seems like something people would want to do for incorporating rotating ads into a site. I just haven’t yet done the research… and figured out which of the plugins then work with WPMU.

That, though, is one of the next things I’ll be looking into for this site…

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The slides are now available on SlideShare for the talk I gave last Thursday at O’Reilly’s OSCON entitled “Building a Corporate Blog Portal using WordPress MU“. The presentation went well and I had some great interaction with those attending. I did record the session on video so I am aiming to get that video out this week.

In the meantime, enjoy the slides…

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