An online notebook
This looks very exciting.
Thanks to Nick for the tip off.
Edit: More via TechCrunch:
It is easy to dismiss this as completely unnecessary given the abundance of social networks already out there, as well as application development platforms like OpenSocial. But an open-source social network does present some intriguing possibilities. New apps and features could be added simply by creating new plugins. And there would be no lock-in to any proprietary code or development environment.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that while WordPress.com is probably the best place to start for beginner bloggers, it also isn’t the most customisable of environments. In other words, if you want total control of what your blog looks like, you need to host it yourself using the download from WordPress.org.
[It’s often said that you can’t run adverts on a WP.com blog. This is true, although Automattic, the company behind WP.com (and which drives the development of the open source WordPress project), do run ads on every WP.com blog. This may surprise you, but ads are served to not-logged in readers of WP.com blogs when they visit it via a search engine (if my memory serves me correctly). If you don’t believe me see here – and if you really don’t want ads on your WP blog at all, move away onto a self hosted solution, and likewise if you want to run your own ads on your blog.]
Anyhow, there is still stuff you can do for free on WP.com to make yor site look a little more groovy. Obviously there is the ever-growing number of themes which you can use to give your site a cool look and feel, but more interesting are the WordPress widgets. These are gobbets of code which make your blog do interesting thing in the sidebar(s) of your theme. In this post, I am going to run through the various widgets that are available, what they do and how you can use them to make your blog more interesting.
Akismet
All WordPress.com blogs have Akismet running as standard, and as I have mentioned elsewhere on this blog, it really is the best of breed in blog spam prevention. This widgets lets you display on your blog just how many comments Akismet has put into the spam bin for you as a kind of badge of honour. After all, if people are spamming you, you must be good, right?
Archives
Pretty basic this, it displays a chronological list of months and years which people can use to find content from your dim and distant past.
Authors
If you are using your WordPress.com blog as a group effort, you can use this widget to list the contributors, with their avatars and links to their archive of posts. You can also list up to their latest 10 posts too.
Blog Stats
Shows a little badge on yout blog displaying the numbers of hits you have received, based on the stats in your WordPress.com dashboard. Probably not a good one to use in your first week of blogging.
Box.net File Sharing
Box.net is a wicked cool site which lets you upload files to their server, for backup and sharing purposes. It’s a really nice looking site and one of the leaders in this particular field. This widget allows you to display the files you have chosen to make public in your blog sidebar.
Calendar
Lets people find posts by clicking on dates in a calendar. These were very popular a few years ago, but these days are pretty much a waste of screen real estate, in my opinion.
Categories
Another way of helping readers navigate around your content. WordPress.com allows you to present your list of categories as a straight list, a dropdown or with the numbers of posts within each category displayed. Nice.
del.icio.us
Show your latest bookmarks in del.icio.us with your blog readers. These are good for sharing stuff that you don’t necessarily want to comment on in too much depth. The alternative is to do what I do and have an automated daily posting of the sites I have bookmarked to my blog.
Flickr
As easy way to display your flickr photos in your sidebar. Alternatively, if your photos are rubbish or irrelevant, you can display anyone’s public photos with a certain tag, say. Brightens things up no end.
Links
Shows the links you have put in your blogroll on the WP admin panel in your sidebar. Nice for building some link-love.
Platial Mapkit
Platial is a service which allows you to create and share ‘social’ maps. If you’ve heard of Frappr, well, that’s a part of Platial – it’s the bit that deals with mapping where people are. This widget lets you easily embed the maps you have created into your blog. More here.
Meebo
Meebo is a great service that lets you have converstions cross many instant messaging protocols (like AIM, Jabber, MSN, Yahoo! etc) using a web page rather than a client application (it’s a good way of using IM at work, folks). This let’s you have a little window in your sidebar that let’s people chat with you on your own site! Could be annoying. Anyhow, the WP.com blog post about this is here.
Meta
Provides a bunch of links, such as to your control panel and RSS feeds which is sometimes handy to have available. One of the first to disappear when you want exciting, shiny things.
Pages
Shows a list of all the static pages you have created on your blog. Handy for navigation.
Recent Comments
Show how amazingly popular your blog posts are with commenters by showing the latest additions to the conversations you’ve started.
Recent Posts
Shows your recent posts in a little list in the sidebar. Useful if your posts are VERY long, and so it takes ages to scroll down through them, or if you theme only displays one or two on the home page.
RSS
RSS widgets are cool as they let you add all sorts of extra content into your sidebar. You can be really creative with these widgets if you put your mind to it: think Yahoo! Pipes and that sort of thing. Anyway, if you bog elsewhere or have any other kind of RSS feed, you can regurgitate it onto your WP.com blog sidebar with as many of these babies as you like – just scroll down a bit on the Widgets screen to see the dropdown where you can select how many you want.
Search
Whacks a simple search box on your blog sidebar wherever you want it. Somewhere near the top is good.
Sonific Songspot
This widget lets you post songs into your sidebar using the Sonific service. See here for more information on how it works.
Category Cloud
Presents your categories as a cloud rather than a boring old list. Groovy.
Text
Almost as much fun as the RSS widgets, you can dollop all the text or HTML code you like in these, which makes them handy for customising your sidebar with images, links, text and stuff. As with the RSS ones, you can have loads of these.
Top Clicks
Lets people know what the most popular outbound links are on your blog.
Top Posts
Shows the most popular posts on your blog in terms of the number of views they have received. Again, this is driven by the WordPress stats.
Vodpod videos
VodPod is a cool service that lets you collected videos from around the various online video sharing services and have them in one place. You can then build communities around them, or just have a widget on your blog’s sidebar showing the latest ones to have been added to your ‘Pod’. And that’s what this widget does. More here, if you want it.
Tag Cloud
It’s a cloud. With your blog’s tags in it.
So that’s widgets on WordPress.com. There are other things you can do to make your WP.com blog more exciting, and I’ll cover those in another post. I’m knackered now.
WordPress is the best, we all know this. As well as the amazing free themes that are available, there are also tonnes of plugins which make your blog do interesting and cool stuff that it can’t do out of the box.
The other great thing about WP plugins is that they are so easy to install – just FTP the files into the right spot on your server, then hit the ‘activate’ link in the plugin screen of the admin panel. Even I rarely get this wrong, it’s so simple!
Here’s a list of the plugins I use here. Anybody got any suggestions for stuff I really ought to be using?
1. Akismet
Akismet is spam blocking par excellence. There isn’t anything to touch it, in my opinion.
Make setting your blog up on Google analytics a breeze with this plugin. All you have to do is supply it with your Analytics code and it places it in the best spot on your blog for you.
3. Democracy
A cool way of putting little polls into your sidebar, and even on individual pages. You can also create an archives page of past polls too!
Pipes all your RSS traffic to FeedBurner. This means you can use FB’s feed tracking stats, which isn’t currently available with other WordPress stats systems.
Gives your site and everyone of your posts accurate meta-data, from tags and categories. Watch your blog shoot up in the rankings once this plugin starts to work its magic.
Mega useful for both you and your readers, this lets folk get email updates when people respond to their comments on your blog. You can also examine the stats, see who is subscribed to what and who is subscribed to the most posts.
7. MyBlogLog
More of a sidebar widget than a proper plugin, this enables you to display who the recent visitors were to your site with an avatar. Nice to see who’s reading your blog.
8. Easytube
WordPress isn’t great at handling embed code, even in HTML view editing. This plugin takes the pain out of posting YouTube videos.
Creates a sitemap for your blog that meets the Google standards, making it more search engine friendly.
10. Sphere
Allows you to present a link next to your posts which readers can click to find content on similar lines elsewhere. I haven’t yet added this to my new template on DavePress, but keep your eyes peeled…
11. Twitter tools
This is a cool plugin that does a number of things: posts to Twitter when you publish a new blog post; add your latest tweets to your sidebar, post tweets from your admin panel; and post a daily log of your tweets. You can turn on different bits of functionality as you please. Great stuff.
12. Slideshare
See EasyTube, this does the same for Slideshare embeds.
My favouritest plugin ever. I am addicted to this. It gives the same stats as WordPress.com users get: how many visits you get, which posts are most popular, what people are searching on Google to find you, which links people are using to get away from your blog.
14. ShareThis
Another great one, this provides a handy javascript pop up thing allowing people to bookmark your posts on a number of services, like Digg, Reddit and del.icio.us to name just three. Like Sphere, I haven’t worked this into my template yet, but will be here soon!
Every day, WordPress and the community around it manages to surprise and delight me more. I have mentioned how it can be used to consult before, specifically by using the amazing CommentPress theme. But you can also create small polls to run on your site too, whether on a page of their own or by running in the sidebar.
This is done using the Democracy plugin, which is really easy to set up and deploy. It allows you to set the options, or give voters the ability to add their own. IP addresses can be logged to stop multiple votes, and you can store an archive of polls on a page.
I am running a quick example on this site asking readers how they access the content on this blog. OK, so it probably isn’t very scientific, but it’s fun, and another great example of the flexibility, and sheer genius, that is WordPress and the people that use it.
Simon Dickson points to a new theme that turns WordPress into a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. This confirms to me something that I have been thinking for a while that WordPress is no longer a blogging system, nor a content management system, but actually a platform upon which applications can be built.
Let’s take the evidence:
This is the advantage of open source software, of course, that because people have access to the innards of the system, they can understand how it works and put it to innovative uses. Of course, the flexibility of WordPress certainly helps, with themes and plugins being used to achieve much of these innovations.
It will be interesting to see what other applications based on WP start to emerge.