Basically, in contrast to previous editions of Drupal, comments are now configured by content type – allowing you to permit comments on blog entries, but not on image nodes.

Finding The Configuration Pages

To find the configuration page for each content type, browse to Admin -> Content Management -> Content Types and click Edit on the content type you want to set up comments on.

My reason for wanting to configure comments was to allow comments on my blog and image content types (on my personal blog), and to allow people to enter contact information. I’m also testing Drupal’s new anti-spam system called Mollom, which seems to be similar in concept to Akismet, the anti-blog spam system from Automattic.

If you want some pointers on how to set up comment configuration there are some good comments and discussions over on Lullabot.

Hopefully this post reflects my goals from blogging – which are writing quality content, generating traffic and making money from my blogs.

This post is also a part of the ProBlogger group writing project.

1. ProBlogger – Darren is the original problogger. He has covered all aspects of blogging over the last couple of years – from monetization of blogs through to search engine optimization and copywriting, he’s placed himself at the centre of the blogging industry. ProBlogger is an essential destination for anyone serious about blogging.
2. Performancing – The first of two communities on my list, Performancing has been completely reinvigorated in recent months by the efforts of Ryan Caldwell and Raj Dash. Both write from direct experience and participate to a fantastic extend in the Performancing community. Because it’s geared toward bloggers (the motto is “Helping Bloggers Succeed”), it’s easy to get involved in discussions in the forum or share your expertise through a personal blog entry.
3. John Chow – John will love this double-linkbaiting idea for evilness! Get a link from Darren’s writing project and a link from Chow! Seriously though, John Chow has some great ideas for how to make money online. From clever tricks with AdWords to affiliate marketing, there are loads of alternative methods of monetization for bloggers to explore. Also, if you do a review of his blog, he’ll link to it and send you a ton of traffic. Apparently.
4. Copyblogger – I initially underestimated Brian Clarke’s blog, Copyblogger, because at one point all he seemed to write about was the importance of writing titles. While Brian has a unique talent for taking a topic and beating it to death, he also writes one of the most focused blogs on the importance of writing quality content. Brian’s posting frequency is easy to keep up with, and provides plenty of food for thought.
5. SEOmoz – SEOmoz is a blog, an SEO company and an SEO community hub, all in one. Serious bloggers realise that to get traffic to your website organic SEO is crucial. SEOmoz is a fun place to participate in search engine discussions, and the bloggers (Rand and Rebecca mainly) make the topic fun and interesting with their comics and GoogleBot illustrations.

Those are my Top 5 blogging sites. If you can think of other resources, drop a link to them in the comments.

Smart webmasters know that by getting their sites listed on the ‘popular’ lists means a major influx of traffic, which can result in:

• Increases in RSS subscribers. A number of sites have documented a rise in subscribers after a post becomes popular on a social media site.
• Increased links back to your site. Many bloggers find things to write about on social media sites. If you’re popular, expect lots of nice links back from other blogs.
• Google Juice. The increased backlinks will ultimately result in better PageRank with Google and therefore higher placement in search engine listings.
• Reputation. As all these factors come into play, your site has the potential to become a trusted resource and this can all reinforce your reputation as an expert in your niche.
• Better advertising revenue. Maybe not immediately – social media users are an ad-blind crowd. But increased traffic and better SERP placement is likely to see better advertising opportunities over time.

As you can see, there is a lot to gain from leveraging social media sites. Note that I didn’t say ‘exploiting’ social media sites.

Seeding

Seeding is the practice of submitting links to social media and bookmarking services like Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Reddit. There are countless others, although the impact of seeding is less if the service is less popular. Which explains why attaining the Digg front page is the goal for many bloggers!

Seeding becomes controversial when you’re only promoting your own site, or you’re seen to be submitting stuff purely to gain traffic. This is frowned upon by the users and moderators of social bookmarking services for a very good reason – it’s considered to be spamming. And everybody hates spammers.

The only exception to this rule is if you’re creating quality content and otherwise participating in the community. If you’ve created a unique article or post that will offer real value to visitors, then there’s nothing wrong with seeding your own pages. Nicer if someone else submits it for you though.

My Suggestions For Ethical Bookmarking

• Limit your activity. Not all social networking services will yield a result, and some are barely used at all. Why waste time with multiple submissions – you could be creating great content!
• Participate in the community. There’s a reason they call it Social Bookmarking – it’s all about people and connections. Find people with similar interests, comment where you can and build a solid friend list. You might actually enjoy it…
• Don’t just seed your own stuff. Share the resources you find interesting, particularly in your niche. It’ll vary your submission list and it’s a great way to reward other bloggers whose writing you admire. If you only seed your own stuff, you’ll look like a spammer.
• Be inspired by the community. Lots of bloggers get their inspiration from their social bookmarking tool of choice. They can also discover great writing in their area that they might never have found before. All this can generate ideas for you to write about and experiments to try on your own website.
• Above all, don’t spam. Not every post is worth submitting to a social bookmarking service. Shorter posts, or link posts that point out a resource but don’t offer any real insight are examples of this.
• Hope that people start to seed your pages. The Holy Grail of Ethical Bookmarking – in my opinion – is when people start watching your blog or website and seed your links for you. Word of mouth is better than self-promotion any day of the week!
• Seed other people’s pages. Reward websites and writers that you enjoy by bookmarking their work. It’ll give them all the benefits listed above, and your Digg account won’t look quite so spammy!

Start Your Ethics Engines

Creating an account on every social bookmarking service available is counter productive, spammy and a waste of time. I believe that you’ll really only see benefits from social bookmarking if you’re participating in the community. That means seeding other people’s pages, commenting on posts and building up a network of friends.

Also, by focussing on one or two particular sites, you stand a greater chance of success with your bookmarking. And it’s long accepted knowledge that when you become popular at one site, it won’t be long before your content gets seeded to other bookmarking services. For instance, if you hit the front page of Digg, you stand a shot at getting popular on del.icio.us or reddit.

Self-promotion fuels hostility in social bookmarking users. Do it too much and you can expect a backlash. Let’s push to drop mercenary linkbaiting in favour of participation and fair use of social bookmarking services.

Well, a few weeks ago we formally launched two new blogs under the Unreality banner – Unreality Music (my baby) and Unreality Primetime (Lisa’s baby). Comparing our strategies last night, we realised we were taking extremely different approaches.

The Challenge

Over the course of the next twelve months, we will be battling each other to see who can build the most successful blog. We’ll measure success on a number of criteria, which I’ll reveal in a forthcoming post.

The Strategy

Lisa’s approach is primarily about content-building. She’ll watch the latest TV news and blog about it rapid-fire. I’ve never seen someone compile content so efficiently. Better still, she’s now got contacts in TV publicity, so she gets a lot of the inside scoop on shows. I joked with her at the weekend that there’s no point reading the TV guide anymore, because she’s usually two days ahead.

My approach to writing is much more methodical. I’ll be writing about music, so I research the band in advance. I’m a slower writer by nature anyway. On the music blog, I’ll be working on a link building strategy and possibly trying to use social media to gain backlinks to the blog, which Lisa isn’t too worried about – she built Unreality TV up mostly on organic SEO!

The Outcome

The Blog Battle will end on 1 May 2008. Along the way, we’ll compare readership, traffic stats and how our strategies are working. Hopefully we’ll have two fairly successful blogs by the end of the year. Posts in this series will be tagged Blog Battle.

More importantly, we’ll be able to tell you which approach works best for a blog – pure content building and organic SEO, or less content but more focused on link building and social media promotion.

The goal here is to establish two top quality blogs using different methods and see how they perform over time. Although monetisation will be involved, the main motivation is to have fun building two great sites.

Anyway, we hope that other bloggers out there will follow our experiment and chip in with their thoughts and advice along the way. May the best (music) blog win!

For whatever reason, some people took a dislike to Kathy and started singling her out for abusive comments on other blogs and forums. Some disturbing pictures appeared with Kathy’s head pasted on to them, and her personal details were leaked on the Internet.

Kathy is a high-profile example of how someone can be abused on the Internet. In a digital culture it’s easy to forget that there’s a real-life person on the other end of the screen. In the absence of human contact and direct accountability, some people think they can say or do anything online.

Recently, Tim O’Reilly published a draft Blogger’s Code of Conduct. It’s an attempt to lay down some basic principles for interaction on the web. I have a problem with it though. I don’t think it’ll work.

Why a blogger’s code of conduct won’t work:

No Enforcing Authority
In an opt-in system like this, the people who will adopt a code of conduct are probably fairly ethical already. What about the trolls? Well, they’ll just continue character assassination as before – why should they care about a code of conduct that has no authority to back it up?

Unclear Legal Jurisdiction
So, what if a blogger in Australia threatens a blogger in the UK? What if they make the threat in the comments section of an American blog? Supposing that sufficient evidence can be gathered, can it be brought to court, and if so in what country? It’s these gaping legal issues that make it so easy to post anonymous stuff online.

Limited To Bloggers – What’s That About?
I don’t understand why a code of conduct applies ONLY to bloggers. Bloggers only form a small part of the fabric of the Internet. What about forums, social networking sites and good old-fashioned email? I’m sure there are other methods of interaction that don’t necessarily involve bloggers.

Maybe I’m being too cynical about Tim’s intentions, but this looks like an ill-conceived bit of bandwagon-hopping. As Darren said, the principles resonate with me, but I can’t see myself signing up to principles that cannot be universally upheld.

I heard the phrase “like herding cats” for the first time last week – I think it’s particularly appropriate for this situation.

The person behind WordPress is Matt Mullenweg. He mentioned on his blog this evening that he’d recently done an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald.

If you’re not familiar with Matt’s work, I suggest you give it a read. It’s easy to forget some of the amazing developments Matt’s had a hand in over the last few years:

1. He started up the WordPress project and turned it into possibly the most popular blogging platform on the planet. I would say that it’s the tool used by most serious bloggers out there today.
2. Along with Dougal Campbell, he developed “Ping-O-Matic, a tool that notifies search engines of blog updates.” This is a crucial component of what I cringingly call the blogosphere. It allows services like Technorati to know about new content on a website rather than having to crawl it periodically to discover it.
3. He’s been involved with the group that pioneered Microformats (I’ll write about these another time!).
4. As co-creator of Akismet, not only does he provide the best blogging software, but he helps prevent comment spam from making blogging a nightmare!

I’m writing this post for a couple of reasons. a) I was stunned at how much work this guy has done to advance blogging, b) I’m convinced he’s going to revolutionize blogging yet again, and c) I owe the guy a big thank you.

The thank you, Matt is for providing such a life-altering piece of software for free. Blogging provides people with a new means of connecting with a potentially limitless audience, allows them to clarify their thoughts and feelings in words and allows the professional bloggers among us to make a decent (some would say indecent) living! And having tried some of the alternatives, I honestly believe WordPress is synonymous with blogging.

So there you go.

Alister Cameron agrees, and he recently discovered a new plugin for WordPress that automatically thanks first time commenters by email. The plugin is called Comment Relish and was developed by Justin Shattuck.

The plugin allows you to send a configurable email to any new commenter on your blog, thanking them for their comment. It’s a small courtesy, but it makes people feel valued that you took the time to thank them.

Alister identified a few shortcomings with the original plugin, though and made a few changes that allow him to manually oversee the process:

• I dont want the email going directly to the commenter. I want the email sent to me, so I can check the wording, any weirdnesses (like changing the greeting from Hi Darren Jones back to just Hi Darren), and so I can add my own words to the template if their comment warrants it. Sometimes people also make obvious email address typos and I can check for these, this way.
• I dont want a comment sent the moment they submit the comment. Thats not natural. By sending me an email, a more organic and natural exchange occurs. It may be hours before I see that email to adjust it and pass it on, but thats more real to me.

That’s a sweet touch. With a bit more work, Justin (or Alister) could customise the plugin to have it’s own moderation panel in WordPress so that emails could be queued there for review and modification before being sent directly from the panel. That would reduce the need for Alister to route the emails to himself, and would also provide for a more natural delay in sending.

Of course, with my interest being primarily in web design, search engine optimisation and all that malarkey, I ended up writing semi-regularly to Interweb and neglecting the blog here at Scribble Designs.

Why was this a mistake?

Several reasons:

• The tech blogging market is severely overcrowded, unless you’ve got the time to create something really special.
• Unless you’re a field leader like Darren Rowse, your money making opportunities from a tech blog are severely limited.
• The themes of Scribble and Interweb were similar, yet I was doubling the effort to build content on both blogs instead of making one really great blog.
• Because the blogs were split, I had to market both blogs as well. Double the effort for everything. Leaving comments on other blogs, building backlinks to two blogs instead of one.

It was a blog post by Raj Dash over at Performancing that made me decide to concentrate the two blogs into one. And instead of trying to make money through advertising, I’m hoping the more focussed content here will serve to solidify my experience. It’s not all about Google AdSense, don’t you know!

What this means is that I’ll be slightly redesigning the Scribble Designs site to reflect the kind of work I’ve been doing for the last few years. I’ll be sharing my experiences of things that have worked for me in the past and things that haven’t. And, like my heroes over at SEOmoz, I’ll probably share a little more information than is commercially viable for a web designer!

Paul’s post is an excellent introduction and carries instructions on how to use RSS feeds in the real world, including help on setting up Bloglines, My Yahoo, Google’s personalised homepages and many more free RSS reader applications.

Definitely worth a look.

On a related note, RSS technology must be starting to infiltrate the business world to some degree. I read a blog this morning that actually used the phrase “feed management”. Only in the corporate world…..

Update: If you’re still having trouble understanding the concept of RSS, Colin at Uber Geeks has posted a good entry-level description of RSS or, Web Feeds as they’re likely to become known.