photo credit: EricGjerde

Flattr Target Audience

What I’d like to think about is the target audience of such a service like Flattr. Sadly, its model only motivates content-producers to sign up, as they’re the only ones who can (potentially) profit from this. Potentially because it seldomly gets in enough money to pay the flattering back, unless you have a very popular blog – but potentially is enough of an incentive to get bloggers to sign up … it’s like a lottery, where you could get lucky and maybe get some money in.

Everyone else can of course freely choose to do good to those content producers if they wish but – let’s be clear about this – nearly noone will sign up with a service, and transfer money to it, without a real incentive to do that besides of a good feeling and a clear conciousness. Becoming a content-producer so you maybe sign up for flattr isn’t all too easy. I don’t know many people that have a blog or post to it very often. And if they do, they often don’t want to have the hassle to sign up with flattr or to install plugins or even write code to include the necessary Flattr buttons. Therefore, I think people should get an incentive to use flattr with the easiest possible means, just to get them to use this service.

• The flattr-comments plugin does a first step into that direction. It makes it possible that users commenting on a blog post can enter their flattr-id and receive flattrs if some one likes their comment. I just put this plugin into place on this blog and hope that I can try out if it works if there’s some people out there who would post a comment here … hope it works. Every blogger should include this!
• Other means could maybe be put into place by a popular service like Favstar. Favstar is a Twitter-related service that will show you the best tweets – this means the most retweeted tweets and the tweets that were favourited the most – even sorted by categories. I really recommend using that thing for everyone who likes twitter! If they would implement the means to enter a Flattr ID for you and automatically Flattr the top users you retweeted or faved once a month, normal twitterers could see the potential profit in Flattr that might them make sign up with the service.
• Same thing with Stack Overflow and Quora. Let users flattr answers – please!
• One more thing I would like to see is the concept of a Flattr-Lottery. I guess there’s a lot of money that gets to be distributed to good causes (and maybe also pay Flattr’s bills). If you would take half of that money and redistribute it lottery-like under everyone who is active and Flattr’ed at least one item this month (maybe with a main prize and several small ones), I bet it would be another incentive to make usual people to use the service.

Flattr gives us the tools, and we all should extend them to make the service work better. What do you think? More ideas?

photo credit: Jose Téllez

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So, if you’re using these plugins and know how to contact the authors, please drop them a line. I fixed the Photo Dropper and the shadows-plugins here, but don’t really have the energy to go after the flattr-plugin, as the fixes get overridden with new plugin versions, and flattr keeps them coming each month…

It’s bugging me that plugins are the reason my site doesn’t validate.

photo credit: Jesper Rønn-Jensen

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photo credit: bloody marty mix

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So, just use the following plugins, and you’ll be fine:

• Efficient Related Posts (doesn’t steal your time like some other related posts plugins do)
• jQuery lazy load plugin (important if you use pictures, you’ll not want to load all images the user won’t scroll to anyways)
• TweetMeme Retweet Button (this is the fastest retweet button I found, usually those things make your site dog slow – if someone knows a faster one, please give me a hint, as this still drags me down)
• WP-Optimize (optimize your database very easily, so the dataconnection is faster)
• WP HTTP Compression (just use it)
• WP Minify (big time speedup – just use it)
• WP Super Cache (you don’t want processors calculate what HTML to output everytime someone enters your site, caching lets you store that)

photo credit: Éole

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Twitter Plugins

First, there were the plugins. I wanted Twitter, but I had to acknowledge that all Twitter-plugins I tried were incredibly slow. Sad, as there were some nifty functions and nice styles included, but I wouldn’t want my pages to load 5 seconds longer because of that. So I ended up with the really nice and fast Tweetmeme-Button and the not so nice but fast and easily customizeable Xhanch – My Twitter plugin to show my lastest tweets. Xhanch needed some customization, and I’ll likely make it look a little fancier by jQuery when there’s time.

Must Have Plugins

Then there’re some must-have plugins: Google XML Sitemaps thats unbelievably important for the pagerank. Gurken Subscribe to Comments, as you just need as subscribe-to-comments-plugins anyways, and this one does double-opt-in, which is sadly a law-enforced necessity here in germany.

Akismet is included into WordPress anyways, and your Blog wouldn’t survive without it anyway. I wanted to install the Math Comment Spam Protection plugin too, but forgot that you need to include code into the pages to show the mathematical question (like “type in the sum of 2 and 6″), so I deactivated it for now. Maybe it will already be active when you read this post.

The All in One SEO Pack plugin is a no-brainer too – it optimizes META-tags, generates descriptions of your post if you’re too lazy to write one and generally is a good thing.

Speed Plugins

Sadly, Worpress was developed on PHP. This means, WordPress is pretty slow. You want to add some plugins, that help you with the speed as the visitor’s time is very valuable – don’t agrue with me here. To speed things up, you could install a lot of plugins, that help you.

First said, loading pictures is a pain for the browser, especially if you have a lot of tiny pictures for all the soicla networks you want the visitor to share your post – each of these usually uses another HTTP request, and those are damn slow. The jQuery lazy load plugin helps you A LOT here. It basically makes the browser only load pictures that your visitors can see, loading other pictures when the visitor is browsing down the site and reaches the point where the pictures are shown. One Gotcha here: the sidebar pictures were only loaded when you scrolled to the bottom, as the HTML code for that is below all the other stuff. But you can define a CSS class within the plugin, that get loaded the usual way. Putting this class in your image-tags will help you here.

For the same reason as above, the WP CSS plugin is pretty nice, as it includes all your CSS import into one file (meaning there’s only one HTTP-request for the CSS-files) and even gzips them, so they use up fewer space while getting downloaded to the visitor’s browser. Neat. (Update: Does not work with the @font-face CSS-stuff needed to embed a webfont – as that used on this site.)

Another plugin that strips out whitespace and compressed the generated HTML is WP HTTP Compression. No configuration needed — this just works, so use it.

The speed-bazooka after all is WP Super Cache of course. This plugin makes everything superb – the site that goes out to your visitors will be stored, and should another visitor want to see the same page, he will just get the stored copy, so PHP doesn’t need to use its slow braincells for putting the site together again. This one’s just perfect, I would only advise to disable it while you’re working on the design of your blog, because *deleted for obviousness*.

Then you can just Google for “improving wordpress performance” or “speeding up wordpress”, there are a lot more hints out there for stuff you can do without plugins. Like modifying your .htaccess file to stop hotlinking or keep spambots and other unwanted crawlers out.

Other Plugins

Efficient Related Posts is like the best plugin I wished everyone was using – so put it into your blog NOW. It uses the tags you put under your posts to look for similarities and puts the “related posts” part under the post. I often read a lot more that I wanted on other blogs, just because of me thinking “well, that post could really be nice too”. You can watch it in action if you’re on the posts single page below.

Zero Conf Mail is just the most simple solution to putting a feedback-form on your blog, in case someone wants to ask you something directly. I put mine in the about-page, in case you want to use or see  it.

Shadows is a plugin that will underlay all pictures on your site that you add a certain CSS-class to with some sort of shadow. I’m still experimenting with this one. If you want to use it with Zemanta (as I clearly want to), you’ll maybe have to hack a bit in your CSS files, as Zemanta adds some CSS that interferes with the picture’s shado and makes it look weird. If you want to see it in action with another picture I included, you can see that in the post What is Viral Marketing? for example.

When I have some more nice stuff to show off, I’ll post another one. Hope you like this post.

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The Problem

But powering out so much stuff makes me think if people might want to read that much from a small and unworthy blog like mine. Nobody knows. But I only know one blog with content thats interesting enough, is able to power out one post per day and not some stupid watchblog (thats only reposting stuff it finds on the interwebs): the blog of Seth Godin. But even for me (who really likes that blog) its hard enough to keep up with the posts, even when they’re usually not too long. This leads to reading many of them in a short amount of time – which let them not sink in as deep as they could.

Collateral Damage

Another point is, that I often want to write something new that needs to fit in between some other posts to make sense or that need to be release ASAP, which usually means the next day (as I don’t want to post two times a day). So, I write a post, and try to fit it in, and that makes me reschedule a lot of other posts, taking up some time that would better be used to write more.

Consequences

If you identify a problem, you should try to solve it. As my reservoir of drafts slowly comes to an end anyways, I think of planning ahead posts every two days. This way, all the problems mentioned above seem to be discarded, and I can make sure that my flow of ideas and posts I usually draft on the iPhone or write as a bulk-writing on weekends doesn’t come to an end – this blog will be very active. I’ll try to sum up whyin one of my following articles, where I reflect about Creativity – how to become and stay creative.

So from now on, I’ll publish a post every two days, whenever there’s more than that I just had to stuff something in between.

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• An admin plugin that makes it easy for me to crosslink to my other posts. I always need to search on my own site to find a post I want to link to , and always need to type the title and copy paste the link. This would be much nicer if there was some tool for this in the “new post”-section.
• A nice share-everywhere plugin that doesn’t lead to ages-long loading times (as usual).
• One of those plugins that loads more entries on the main page of the blog (or in a tag or category view) when the user has scolled down the the “previous posts”-link. Using this, it should be possible to display only two or three posts and reloading the rest when the user really scrolls down so far.

Just can’t seem to find anything like this. Any recommendations would be greatly appreaciated!

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