Going over the topics related to WP.com blogs we have covered so far, it would seem that we would have covered most of the main concerns of our WP.com bloggers. We will be posting new articles, albeit short, on this site relating to WP.org blogs or the so-called self-hosted WordPress blogs to address queries hitting our mailbox.

That said, we would still be covering topics related to WP.com blogs but we would first pass it through our WP.com page before re-posting them here. That way, we would be able to sort out any issues with the WordPress.com developers before getting them bedded on this site.

In an earlier post, How to customize your blog with widgets, leanpearl asked: “How do I put text widget in my header? I wanna use it for social networking sites’ icons.”

I thought I use my response to that question as a separate post so it wouldn’t get lost as we progress.

Here is my response:

That’s a very interesting question. Unfortunately, I don’t think I have an expert answer to that.

But here are some thoughts and observations:

1. The widgets in a WP blog are dependent on (a) the plugins installed and active in a site, and (b) the structure of the blog theme, ie, whether the theme had been coded to allow widgets in the header, sidebar or footer.

2. As we all know, most WP themes display widgets in the sidebar, and some themes also display widgets in the footer. I have checked the more than 70 themes in WordPress.com, and I have not found a theme with the options you have in mind.

That said, you may wish to check your theme options including its Custom Header, if any.

For example, this theme I am currently using has several options to customize its header. I can insert a standard 468×60 banner to the right of my site name (which obviously I did not do). The banner can be replaced with other displays like SNS icons using HTML, or anything within the TOS of WordPress.com.

In short, the key to customizing your header is to look for a theme that gives you that option – to change the image, to change the color, to change the text or to insert other objects.

Hope this helps.

This is me, of course. Others may have differing views or ways of customizing a blog header.

Let us hear from you.

When a WP blog shows off on its sidebar the following:

or worse,

without any additional information, I start asking: “What exactly does that mean?”

If a blog stats are presented in this fashion, the numbers look like a block of meaningless information.

Blog Stats widget dialog box

I know this may be hard to swallow, but that is the truth.

Let me just backtrack a little bit and elaborate before someone starts calling me names.

1. Currently, there is no method which can claim to produce web statistics with 100% accuracy. And the resulting numbers are dependent on what methodology is applied to generate those numbers. The fact that even Google has to explain the terms used in its analytics and how the Google numbers are calculated shows the difficulty in coming up with commonly accepted standards. You may wish to check out this page as an additional background.

2. Without being critical, WordPress.com in its Support page provided not enough information as to what the Blog Stats numbers are. Perhaps, to others the numbers need no explanation? Or perhaps there is another related Support page which I missed? I certainly don’t have the answer to that.

3. Again, without being critical, the same WordPress.com Support page says that we, the bloggers, can choose which word to use in describing the numbers. The two popular words, according to WP, are: “hits” (which is the default label in the Blog Stats widget dialog box), and “views”, the label “views” being more consistent with the label “Total Views”, used in the Blog Stats Dashboard | Summary Table.

4. The use of “hits” was okay, and even a buzzword, many many years ago. Is it still okay to use “hits” these days without defining what you mean by “hits”?

5. In technical terms, “hits” is not “visits” nor “views”. “Hits” are the number of files served when a web page (no distinction here between WP “post” and “page”) is requested from a server. A graphic, an icon, a banner and all sorts of files that make up a page are, technically, “hits”. For example, when you opened this page, the server’s log should have recorded at least 40 “hits” just on the bullets, icons and images alone displayed on this page.

Given this background, where does that leave us if we want to show off our WP blogs stats?

You may have other ideas, but right now I can think of only two things we can do to correctly show off our WP blog stats:

1. Stick to using “Views” to label those numbers. I will not use labels like “hits” or “visits” if I were you. In the absence of additional information from WP, these labels may be inaccurate information. You may be describing the numbers something that they are not. In the Blog Stats dashboard, the numbers are labeled “views”, remember?

2. Disclose the period covered by the stats. Again, the numbers are pretty much meaningless unless the period to which they relate is described. Here is an example to show how futile and frustrating it is to read blog stats crafted using the Blog Stats widget:

If you are the owner of this blog and you know that your blog stats are for 12 months, no problem. You know what your stats stand for. But if you are a visitor of this blog and you don’t have that same information, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? What do these 3,000 views represent? Are these yesterday’s views? Or perhaps, last week’s? Or last month’s? Or, last 12 months’? And how do I compare the “popularity” of this blog with another blog with only 1,500 views but I know that this other blog has been online for only 2 months?

Any suggested wordings?

By the way, I am not fond of showing off my site’s stats whether here at WP or in my company’s websites. We also do not display in my company’s websites any stats counter or meter. But if I were to show off my blog stats on the sidebar, I would probably disclose the numbers this way:

or something like:

A little bit long, you think? But no one will argue the suggested wordings are not misleading. And they are easy to understand.

Again, in a worst-case scenario too, you can present a screenshot of your blog stats dashboard plus some other information about your blog to prove that the blog stats you are claiming are factual. That is, if someone starts questioning your numbers and you need to show proof. About your friends being very pleased? I am sure your friends would be happy to come to your rescue and say they are pleased with your blog!

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End Notes: The WP Blog Stats inside my blog’s dashboard is an excellent tracking and management tool. With the Blog Stats, I learn a lot about my blog. But when used as a widget and without additional information about the numbers displayed on the sidebar, the stats are meaningless. Did I step on sensitive toes with this post? I hope not. But if I did, that’s a risk I take.
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After seven weeks, I have written more than 20 articles including How to customize your blog with widgets. When I had only 15 or less articles, I did not have any problem listing all my articles on the sidebar using the Recent Posts widget since the widget allows 15 for linking.

But what if you have articles much older than post number 15 which you want to promote and get the most out of those posts? How do you promote them?

I am not sure about others, but I have looked at widgets like Top Rated or Top Posts, and they may not be the answer to my quest. After all, if the posts we want to promote are already top rated or most visited, there is really no point highlighting them for our visitors to notice, is there?

The other approach is to configure your blog Settings > Reading to whatever number of posts you want displayed on your main page. The default is 10 posts. The downside of this method (aside from it being an indirect method) is that your visitors would have to scroll all the way down and may not even notice the article you want them to see. And worst, what if the post you want to show is, for example, post number 75?

Activate the Tag Cloud widget? Again, this is very indirect, and does not immediately display the results you want.

Why not simply be straightforward? As they say, be bold. Stake your claim.

Use the Text widget.

All you really need is insert your promotion text and a little knowledge of HTML coding to direct your visitors straight to your target posts. The top sidebar of this blog is created using the Text widget. See also Personal and more… in my personal website for another demo.

In the hands of an HTML writer, the Text widget is the easiest and most effective method. With the Text widget, you also have better control on how to display your promotion messages.

To me, the Text widget is a powerful tool. Are you going to leave it idle?

By way of background, below entry was meant to be posted at my WordPress.com blogsite to conclude my seven weeks of blogging there. Instead, I decided to post it to this site. Hopefully, this will explain why most of my posts and articles in this site refer to WordPress.com.

I am using the same title I have at WordPress.com for this blog, Working and WordPress-ing. In my seven weeks of blogging at WordPress.com, I have posted more than 20 entries mainly dealing with “how-to’s” which made available in this site.

***

On day 1 when I started this blog, I mentioned that I am here at WordPress.com to gain insight into how it is to blog at WordPress.com.

Now running into my seventh week into this WP blogging journey and after 24 posts, I think I can say that I have achieved my objective. I’ve learned a lot, and I thought I was able to return the favour by sharing with you what I learned plus my experience as a self-hosted blogger.

We have covered various topics by way of posts and comments including the following :

• A PollDaddy poll outside your WP blog
• A simple solution to tweet and retweet your WP posts
• How to embed a Vimeo video
• How to embed a video in your WordPress.com-hosted blog
• How to blog spam-free at WordPress.com
• The role of internet service providers in curbing spams
• Displaying photos in a gallery as an instructional aid
• If you want to customize your tweets from your WP posts, do not ignore the developer’s Support page
• Revisiting PicApp images and embed codes
• Experimenting with PollDaddy in my blog
• How to encourage audience response
• Experimenting with PicApp images in my blog
• How to customize your blog with widgets
• How to post by email (an experiment)
• How reliable is Alexa in measuring your site’s traffic rank?
• How to upgrade your WordPress theme
• How to start a blog at WordPress.com (A quick digression)
• How to XHTML validate a WordPress theme
How to select a WordPress theme
• How to blog at WordPress.com

The above articles are available on this site as well as in my WordPress.com blog.

Now that we have covered most of the basics in WP blogging, it’s time to move on. ( Note: I exported my WP posts to this site today.)

I will still be writing articles on WordPress-related topics, but these will be posted in my self-hosted blog and if allowed, distributed here.

What makes a self-hosted WordPress blog attractive to me? Conversely, what makes a WordPress-hosted blog unattractive to me?

Here are four reasons:

Themes. I like to experiment with themes, their layout, their architecture, their CSS, etc. This, I can not do here at WordPress.com unless I upgrade my account. Currently, WordPress.com has 77 themes. They are good themes, I admit, but most of them do not meet my requirements. (Like this theme I am using right now is not among the 77 themes.)

Plugins. I am restricted from installing plugins or scripts.

Inbound Traffic. Whilst a WP-hosted blog can leverage on the traffic coming from the traffic of other WP blogs flowing from “Possibly related-posts” linked at the bottom of every post, the traffic that I generate for my blog is “credited” to WordPress.com. Should I decide later to blog in a self-hosted blog (like this one), the traffic ranking I generated for my WP-hosted blog remain with WordPress.com. It is not portable.

Revenue. On paper, there are restrictions from running third-party ads in a WP blog. This is covered by point #5 / Item 2 of WP’s Terms of Service (see part of the provision which I styled in bold, below):

the Content is not spam, is not machine- or randomly-generated, and does not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites, or to further unlawful acts (such as phishing) or mislead recipients as to the source of the material (such as spoofing);

Setting up a self-hosted WordPress blog is not that difficult. If you need help, please do not hesitate to contact me. Our group offers web hosting which includes WordPress and other blogging platforms.

I mentioned in my earlier PollDaddy post, I am not a great fan of polls, but here is an opportunity to have another demo of a poll created using PollDaddy.

Someone asked me if a poll created in my WP blog can be displayed outside WordPress.com.

Yes, you can. I don’t think there is a restriction as to where you can display a PollDaddy as long as you use the correct embedding code.

To display the poll outside your WP blog, in your Polls > Edit control page, click HTML code link, then highlight and copy the poll’s javascript, and paste it to where you want to position your poll on your external page.

I am currently running in my personal site a very simple poll (see image on left).

No, the question asked in the poll is not earth-shattering. The question is very simple, and can be answered in less than one minute. I also wrote a brief background story about the poll with invitation to my readers to use the Comments to share their thoughts on the issue.

Poll results? The poll is generating good responses from my website followers.

Why not visit the poll and let me know what you think.

Our post two weeks ago on Publicize: Twitter is about automating the process of sending an update to a Twitter account each time a new post is published in your blog.

But what if others want to tweet and retweet your posts?

One simple solution: Place a Twitter sharing code at the bottom, or anywhere else, on your post.

A sharing code comprises the Twitter grabber, a teaser which normally is the title of the post, and optionally, the permalink of the post or its equivalent shortlink. A shortlink is the “tiny URL” version of your post’s permalink generated by and stored in WP ~ very useful to get around the 140-character limit of a Twitter update.

Here is a sample structure of a Twitter sharer:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/home/?status=This+is+the+post+title+OR+Create+another+teaser+http://wp.me/Get-Shortlink”>Tweet it</a>

End Note: I acknowledge currently there are social bookmark applications which automate this process taking into account the scripting limitations imposed by WP. At this time though, I don’t think I am ready to use them, particularly if these are run in a local drive. I will just wait until their scripts are taken on board by WP.

Feel like designing your own “tweet me” icon? Why not create your own special Twitter graphics and store it in your Media library. Try googling out “Twitter icons” or similar search terms to pick up Twitter icons for use as-is or for customization.

Here is a sample Twitter icon customized for this blog:

Following a tip in Comments to a WP’s support page on how to embed a Vimeo video, here’s a demo:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The above video was embedded using this shortcode (no space after [ and before ] ):

[ vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/7243598 ]

How to resize

The above video can be resized from the standard 400×300 to a larger 600×450 by inserting the width and height parameters in the shortcode:

[ vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/7243598 w=600&h=450 ]

This is the resized video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hmmm, that was easy too.

Thanks T3CK for the tip. And thanks Ileane for the prompt.

More resizing and formatting

Using a DIV tag and CSS, you can easily position a smaller video (left or right) and wrap text around it.

Here is a sample of the above video resized to 300×225 and text-wrapped:

Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah.

Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah.

Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah.

Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah.

I didn’t realize that embedding a video in a WordPress.com-hosted blog is so easy until I tried it. I guess my initial impression of not being able to install any plugin in my WP-hosted blog was mentally blocking me from even trying it.

In my company’s self-hosted WP sites, we have to install plugins to add video embedding functionalities.

Actually, I just accidentally hit the Add Video icon when adding a new post.  When pressed, the icon popped up a new window displaying the familiar (to me, anyway) shortcodes in embedding YouTube and Google videos.

Wow! I exclaimed. So, these video-embedding plugins are already built into my blog. Excitedly I searched YouTube for a test video clip which I could embed here. And I have this video titled “Sydney Sites” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3qY3pP1ARg which I am using here for the same reason that I want to help promote Sydney.

So, how do you embed a video? Here are the steps:

1. When in Add New / Edit Post mode, click on the Add Video icon to open an Add Video window.

2. Select the URL tab. On the Video URL, enter the video URL.

3. Click the Insert into Post button.

The video shortcode with the entered URL is generated and entered onto your post. The URL without the space after [ and before ] looks like this for a YouTube embedded video.

[ youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3qY3pP1ARg ]

Here is the video generated by the above steps:

Click here to view the embedded video.

How do you resize the video?

Just add the parameter &w= (w for width) and &h= (h for, you guessed it, height) to the shortcode like:

[ youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3qY3pP1ARg&w=600&h=425 ]

and you get a resized video like this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

or like this, if you want it smaller with w=200 and h=125:

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are tutorials found in WordPress.tv on how to embed YouTube videos. Search also “video embedding” in WordPress.com and you will find several posts where WP users narrate and share their experiences.

This is just one of them.

My last post about email spams was more for working than WordPress-ing. This time let me go back to the latter, albeit on the same subject, but focused on WordPress.com blogs.

You know of course I am referring to comment spams.

When you log in to your Dashboard, you are greeted with a note like:

Akismet has protected your site from xxx spam comments already, and there are xx comments in your spam queue right now.

In my calculation, more than 70 per-cent of comments posted to date on this blog are spams in the six weeks it has been online.

Big deal? No, not really. Akismet is a friend to WP bloggers. Well, at least to some.

So what is this Akismet?

It is a plugin or software that deletes or “kills spam” in comments and trackbacks. It is an “Automattic production” and native to WordPress.

As of this writing, 3:30pm AEST 27 Oct, Akismet reported that it had caught more than 13 billion spams since it started more than 3 years ago, and that 83 per-cent of all comments are spam, a fair estimate considering that for emails about 88 per-cent are spam according to reports.

Here’s a screenshot of an Akismet stats page (time-stamping is mine to jog my memory):

In its early years, I gather that Akismet had received a lot of complaints from WP users. Quite understandable, I think. The plugin was new, and it is the type of plugin that can only be perfected through actual practice. Akismet has to update its database and lexicon of words and phrases of words used in spamming.

The plugin also needed to learn from patterns of comment spams and feedback from users.

After more than 3 years, we could only expect Akismet to be more effective and more learned than when it started.

That said, it does not mean that you should leave Akismet totally on its own.

From time to time, you need to check your blog’s spam queue. There may be comments from friends mistakenly considered as spams by Akismet.

For example, today when I checked my blog’s spam queue, I found one comment posted about a week ago by another WP blogger. I guess the reason why that comment was caught was that in the comment was URL of the page I was being invited to visit. I am not sure here, I am only guessing.

Anyway, the point I am driving home is that we should not leave everything to Akismet. We still have to do some work.

Two things we can do:

1. As mentioned above, check your blog’s spam queue. If there are any comments which should not be considered as spams, you simply approve the comments to remove them from the spam queue. Just like with emails, from time to time we need to check our Spam folders. Sometimes, spam filters get so over-zealous and over-protective that even legit messages are being erroneously classified as spams.

2. Check your blog’s settings. On a WP blog’s Settings | Discussion page, there are two options you could configure to “teach” how Akismet should behave. These are the “Comment Moderation” and “Comment Blacklist” options. Why not put them to good use and fine-tune Akismet?

I hope this post helps. Here’s to a spam-free blogging.