Zwinkyness

Today, I discovered a fun little game entitled Miss Bimbo. The goal is to make your avatar as bimbo-like as possible. I don’t know if there is any sarcasm involved from the game maker’s part, but I find it a very cynical game, although quite fun. It’s easy to play and the clothes are really nice. It also only takes a couple of minutes each day and I find it to be quite addictive. So, join in the fun and become a real Bimbo!

(Although the site hardly sets the good example and prefers diets, skinny people and tanned skins. Do not try this at home, children!)

Well, this is just a short post to tell you that I am currently reading Charmed novels all day long, although the quality of the text is very poor and even the storyline leaves much to the expectations. They’re easy to read and I’m a tad bit lazy nowadays. Also, I’ve eaten more ice cream the past week than ever before in my life.

And I love everyone of my visitors. Nice, eh?

Also, the sidebar has been tugged with some little Adsense-love.

This is the first post in a ten part long series to a more popular (or better) weblog. We will discuss several features, as in how to make your blog more interactive, secure, user-friendly and accessible, but most of all: more popular. I’m almost a hundred percent certain that if you take my advice to the letter, your blog will have more visitors at the end of this series. Lets hope I’m right (because Zwinkyness could do with a visitor boost too).

Today we are going to discuss the values of interactivity. An interactive blog has the tendancy to be more popular than a rather static one, where visitors only have the option to comment. Rather than looking at your blog as an online diary, in which you as an owner state your opinion, and others can comment, it would be perhaps wisely to look at it from another point of view. Think of your weblog as an online discussion board, where you open the hype for discussions and others can join in, if you want. Articles would mean so much more if visitors could easily discuss about that, making your weblog have a more forum-like feel.

There are several steps one ought to take to turn the original comment platform provided by WordPress into a dynamic forum. Surely, one can hold active discussions now anyway, but nowadays when the Web 2.0 taking over, it’s all about making life easier for both webmasters as visitors. And that’s what most of the plugins listed below are meant to do. To show their effect on a weblog in real life, I have added them to Zwinkyness. They will certainly enable people to hold more fierce discussions.

One plugin definately needed if your comment number ever goes above ten, or in case you expect it to do that soon, is the Paged Comments Plugin. This automatically reverses the comments too, but you can undo that process, if you prefer. The plugin makes sure that, as soon as your comment number is above ten (or whatever number you choose), it breaks up into different pages. This is of course very nifty and makes your website look more structured and less cluttered.

Next, the Subscribe to Comments plugin gives a visitor the opportunity to be notified of follow-up comments by simply checking a small box. The advantage of this plugin is that it will keep a discussion going, users do not enjoy having to check back if they have had a response yet every hour, and when they are getting notified, they are more likely to come back sooner. It makes a visitor’s life much easier and spices about discussions.

Brian’s Threaded Comments is another plugin everyone who wants to make their blog atleast a bit interactive, should install. It gives a post a really forum-like feel by enabling someone to respond to one certain comment rather than do the post itself. This certainly makes discussions more dynamic. Another nifty way to make sure your visitors do not get confused by whom they are talking to or mix up names (since, we have to admit, names aren’t always easy to remember), is the WordPress Gravatar Plugin. Users don’t only distinguish themselves by their names, but also by their (gr)avatars, therefore making discussions a lot easier since the human brain easier remembers images than names. It will also give a personal feel to the comment on your weblog, and the best thing is that the images don’t have to be hosted on your site and thus, take up no bandwidth whatsoever.

By doing all of the above, we have succeeded to make our weblog a tad bit more interactive. But there are even more features that make life easier for visitors, especially when your blog gets a bit crowdy. The Author Highlight Plugin makes the comments posted by the webmaster (mostly responses to questions, I suppose) turn up in a different colour. This makes it easier for webmasters to remember what exactly they have reponded on and what not, rather than having to browse through all the comments. The Comment TimeOut Plugin enables the administrator to choose when comments are closed for a certain past (example: within a month, two months after the publish date), but it handles each post differently by the specific demands of the author. If the webmasters wants popular posts (perhaps articles, tutorials) to stay open for a longer period of time, the plugin will handle that too. It will also show the visitor when comments for a certain post will be closed permanently.

Now we have made the life of the weblog owner a bit easier, we can also do something to spice up the browsing experience of our visitors. Everyone can make mistakes and the typo monster is never far away…so why would you as an administrator go and fix all comment typos yourself when you can let your users do the job for you? WP Ajax Edit Comments Plugin enables commenters to edit their own comments, fixing spelling errors and so on, for a certain period of time specified by the administrator. This makes life easier for both sides. Also, the Ajax Comment Preview Plugin adds a button which users can click in order to preview their comment before actually adding it. This can help them spot spelling errors before they add the comment.

All in all, there are tons of plugins out there that will keep the conversation on your weblog going and that will help your comments feature really turn into an easy to use, fast discussion board. Most handy features I have already listed above, but there are still a few more I would like to mention that may help you gain more visitors by “interactifying” your blog. Quoter WordPress Plugin for one, makes it easier for comments to quote stuff said in other comments or mentioned in the blog post itself, hence making conversation even easier and more forum-like. The Ajax Comment Posting Plugin fastens up your weblog by submitting comments to it using Ajax, without having to reload the page. WP Grins adds clickable smilies to the comment form, making commenting a more fun experience for your visitors.  These are just a few out of a wide range of plugins, but they will all help your weblog to become more interactive and it will help the bonding between you as a webmaster and your visitors.