Behind The Blog

As noted over on our Voxeo Talks blog, I’ve now set up an email subscription option to our “All Voxeo Blogs” feed through Feedburner. For a reason I’ll discuss below, I’ve only enabled it for our all blogs feed.

However, given that this “Behind the Blog” blog is different from all of our other blogs, and also, quite frankly, because a reader requested it, I’ve also enabled the email subscription option for this particular blog. You can subscribe to just this blog via email by either entering your email address in the box in the far right sidebar - or by clicking this link. Follow the link in the confirmation email and, ta da, you’re done.

So why haven’t I done this for all of our individual blogs?

Simple. I can’t easily automate it and have it appear in the same place as the other subscription options.

Let me explain a bit more. If you go to our main portal page of blogs.voxeo.com you will see in the first sidebar under the heading “Subscribe” a link that says “Subscribe via email“. Click on that and a confirmation email later you are subscribed to the “all blogs” feed. Nice and easy.

We use Feedburner for all of our feeds mostly to get the stats and also because it provides nice options like this email subscription option.

Here’s the thing. That “portal” page uses its own unique WPMU “theme” (very creatively called “voxeo-home”) to deal with how we present entries across all blogs and other ways in which we want to make the portal page different from our regular blog pages. Because it is using its own unique theme, it’s trivial for me to add the “Subscribe via email” link. I just go into “sidebar1.php“, find the right place and add the link. Piece of cake.

However, all the actual blogs on the site use the same WPMU theme (”default”) and so they have the same sidebars by default. The problem, though, is this:

Each blog has a unique Feedburner email subscription URL.

So I can’t just add some magic to template sidebar and have this automagically work. As I’ve thought about this, I see a couple of choices:

1. Add only the All Blogs email subscription option - This is what I have done now. I’ve gone into the sidebar1.php file for the template and added the link to subscribe to the all blogs feed via email. This is simple and consistent with the other formatting. The problem of course is that it doesn’t let readers subscribe to only the blog they care about. Readers of this blog about WPMU may not care about all the other stuff we’re doing at Voxeo. Readers to “Speaking of Standards” may only be interested in our positions on standards. I’d like to offer the option. This choice doesn’t provide that option.
2. Manually add widgets to the blog sidebars - That’s what I’ve done here on this blog where I’ve added the widget over in sidebar 2 using the standard way to do so in the WP “Presentation->Widgets” menu. The good news is that I can offer the option, but the bad news is that it is off in a different area from the “Subscribe” options over in sidebar 1. (And for whatever reason, I can’t get the darn widget to say “Subscribe via email” on top, but that’s a different issue that I’m sure I’ll eventually sort out.)
3. Write some WP code to modify the template - I suspect the real answer is to write a WP function that grabs a URL from the database and inserts it in the relevant spot. In that way I’d enter the URL for the Feedburner email subscription for each individual blog into the database and then modify sidebar1.php in the theme to call the new WP function, which would pull the blog-specific URL from the database and insert it. Sounds cool… but I also don’t see me having the cycles to do that anytime soon.
4. Search for a plugin that does #3 - I suppose the other thing I can do is to search for a plugin that does what I described in #3. This involves searching through the various directories of plugins, trying out the code to see if it works with WPMU, etc. Maybe there’s one out there. (Heard of one?)

That’s why I haven’t yet rolled out email subscriptions for each individual blog. Have any of you out there solved this issue? What have you done? Is there a plugin you use for WPMU?

Technorati Tags: feeds, subscription, feedburner, wpmu, wordpress mu, wordpress, plugins

If you look down in the comments area of this - or any other blog post - you’ll now see a link that says you can add a video comment:

What’s going on? Well, I’ve added a new video plugin for Wordpress from the folks at Seesmic. Here’s brief video intro from me:

Adding Seesmic’s WP plugin to our WPMU site 

The plugin was announced yesterday on Techcrunch and also on (Seesmic founder) Loic LeMeur’s blog. The folks at Seesmic even nicely created a little YouTube tutorial about the plugin:

Adding the plugin to WordPress MU was very straightforward. I downloaded the code, unzipped it and copied the directory into the “plugins” directory (NOT mu-plugins). I then went into Site Administration -> Plugin Commander and clicked on the “Allow” link to allow individual blogs to have this capability. Next I went into the admin dashboard for this blog and enabled the plugin for this blog. Ta da… video comments and embeds into posts are now enabled.

Why didn’t I just enable it across all blogs? Well, I like the granularity of being able to enable or disable it on a per-blog basis. The reality is that I’ll probably enable it for all the blogs on this site that I primarily run. But we may have other blogs here that others run (as Chris does with the Voxeo Labs blog) where they don’t want to use video.

One note I should make. In the Seesmic plugin configuration (for each blog), I have opted to allow “anonymous” video comments, meaning that someone does not need to have a Seesmic account in order to leave a video comment. There’s a checkbox there that enables that kind of posting:

Now, the one down-side I’ve already discovered is that in order to use it to embed a video in a post like this, I have to use the WordPress web editor to write my post. However, I almost never use this web editor because I’ve gotten very addicted to doing all my blogging offline using MarsEdit. However, I think odds are that when I want to embed a video, I probably won’t want to write as much text, so I probably won’t need all the shortcuts that I’ve gotten used to in MarsEdit. (I may also be able to go into the web editor, record and embed the video, save it as a draft, and then pull it down into MarsEdit and do further editing there - I’ll have to try it.)

Outside of that, it seems like a cool way to add video into the blogging platform. Let me know what you think. Hey… if you have a webcam, you can leave me a video comment!

Technorati Tags: video, seesmic, wordpress, wordpressmu, wpmu, blogging

As I’ve had now several requests for more info about what we did on our main page to list the most recent posts across all blogs, I just thought I’d put up a note to say that I will be posting the plugin script and writing more about that soon. I just need to clean it up a bit more and create a page with more info. It’s almost there…. sometime in the next week or two, hopefully.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpress mu, wpmu

With WordPress 2.5 now out, we’ll be watching to see when WordPress MU gets updated. Of the long list of WP 2.5 features, the one that is honestly of most interest to me as the one running a blog site is of all things the improved editor:

Friendlier visual post editor — I’m not sure how to articulate this improvement except to say “it doesn’t mess with your code anymore.” We’re now using version 3.0 of TinyMCE, which means better compatibility with Safari, and we’ve paid particular attention this release to its integration and interaction with complex HTML. It also now has a “no-distractions” mode which is like Writeroom for your browser.

I don’t use the visual post editor myself - I do all my posting through the MarsEdit offline blog editor - but as I’ve been helping others post to this site, I’ve seen the existing editor as one of the things that sometimes causes challenges. So I’m looking forward to the new editor.

All the other features look good, too, so it should be an interesting release to get into place. Per a thread on the WordPress MU forums, though, it may be a little bit before WPMU comes out with a new release in sync with WP 2.5. As noted in that thread, WordPress.com needs to be updated first. We’ll see. This will be the first WordPress MU upgrade we’ll have done to this site, so it will be an interesting learning experience for us. Will the “upgrade” features of WPMU work as well as we would hope they will?

Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpress mu, wpmu