Blogging Tips
I know… I came back from vacation with a good ten or fifteen ideas to blog about from that wonderful trip. Not to mention I need to get over on eligius.org and write a few blogs there as well – though to be honest most of those readers are on vacation in Pennsylvania this week, so I will hold off on that one. The short of it though, is that I am easily distracted when I find new things or even remember something I meant to pursue a few weeks ago and forgot about. So, a couple of things that I have started here and on my other blogs both before and after vacation deserve a little mention and some explanation.
It goes without saying, based on what I have said before, I have become quite the minimalist in regards to the plugins that I have on my blogs these days. There are several reasons for doing that, but three come mind immediately and easily. First, is the less plugins the faster your site is going to be – based on the very nature of things. This also impacts server CPU usage which becomes a big factor on most shared hosting plans these days (unlimited bandwidth and space – but not so much on the CPU cycles). Second is the fact that about one-third or maybe even half of the plugins out there duplicate function already in WordPress or that came in a new version since the plugin was made. I counted five that I was using at one point that all fall in such a listing. Lastly, and with no offense to the coders, but so many have written with sloppy code. I like to see how it working and examine just what they are doing and I have not the time to do that with very many in kind of depth.
So with all that being said, when I say you need SI-Captcha as a plug-in you know I must be serious. It has a few options and will help you fight a bit of spam if you prefer to use it that. I personally think the anti-spam tools are more than adequate and I am willing to live with the occasional one that slips through for the less hassle for readers to post comments (maybe that would change if I got several hundred spam to hit through, but that is not happening). So that brings to mind where do I use it?
I have had about ten thousand users register to mephistos since its inception. I suspect, that on a good day two to four hundred are legitimate users, especially based on user names. You do not have to be a registered user to post a comment to my blog mind you, though it could by-pass some spam checking. I suppose that is the intent, but rarely do those post comments and when they do they are marked as spam. However, I was growing a database of bogus users and getting that trickle of email notices about each new user on a daily basis. By turning Captcha on for user registration, apparently only legit users have registered (which has not been many). Now, if there were just some way to clean out the user list of all the bogus ones… <sigh>.
The next thing is not a plug-in, but rather an option I had purposefully resisted. Tags. I think it is because when tagging started to catch like fire on the blogs, everyone started turning on the tag clouds (no offense to anyone has them, they are interesting, but they are just not me). Worse, everyone that was even thinking of being sophisticated in their web usage starting talking about tags and tag clouds. I just resisted. After all, couldn’t I accomplish most of what a tag did with carefully selected categories for directing readership to post they would possibly find interesting? And honestly, with careful usage of categories and certain keywords both in the post and excerpt was I really missing that much on the role tags could possibly gain me on SEO?
Fast forward a few years and I am now finding a few places that I starting to share my blog posts with have limited or no function without the forwarding of tags or metadata that contains tag information. And while, I manually can insert words in the SEO plug-in I use, if I use tags in conjunction with my categories it is magically taken care of for me without effort on my part. So finally, I am convinced to adopt the use of tags and have been including them on the posts made in the last week and I am just so looking forward to the free time I have to go back to previous blog entries and insert tags.
** – Image from wikimedia.org and very likely the only tag cloud to ever be seen on this blog!
