1FPS|by David Chartier

I’ve posted thoughts about a blognundrum I consider myself to be stuck in over at my Tumblr blog, sometimes also referred to as my linkblog. Mind sharing your thoughts on my predicament over there?

It’s about darn time. The new WordPress themes directory is great, and is a much more trustworthy place to find themes. Should also serve as a beacon for theme authors now that it’s coming from the lion’s mouth.

Just be sure to click through to a theme you’re interested in if you want to see a preview before downloading. A “preview” button isn’t linked on this main page, but each individual theme page has one.

From Technosailor’s 10 things you need to know about WordPress 2.6, a new “Press This” bookmarklet will arrive that makes it much easier to blog photos, quotes, and videos you find around the web. This is one of Tumblr’s killer features, and it’s about damn time WordPress tackles something like this.

The other 10 things are certainly worth reading, including a new compromise to the ridiculous disabling of external blog editor access (by default) that MarsEdit developer Daniel Jalkut rightfully called BS on.

Best iPhone WordPress admin plug-in I’ve seen. Be sure to check out the rest of the screenshots. WPhone works across all the essential areas, but there’s no telling what it’ll do to plug-in-specific pages.

Disqus is an interesting new hosted comment solution for blogs and websites. I’m trying it out here at 1FPS because of some unique features, such as threaded and more interactive comments than you get with WordPress and many of its plug-ins.

A definite downside for users of WordPress and similar platforms is that you no longer get your commenter’s e-mail address sent in comment notifications. If you require those for off-the-record correspondence with readers, you may need to find a workaround or bug the company to add this feature. Off the top of my head, I think a reasonable solution would be to enable this as an option for publishers (probably by default, since it’s the default of every CMS I’ve ever tried), but also allow registered commenters to control whether their e-mail address is sent in Disqus comment notifications to publishers.

Speaking of new features, though, Disqus has been busy. Users can now enable trackbacks, and the company added support for logging in via OpenID (for registered users/commenters at the main website, not logging in at just anyone’s site—yet). There are also now easy-breezy Disqus plug-ins for Joomla and Drupal as well.

If you want to learn more about Disqus you can of course visit the site, but a recent post on the company’s blog titled A Commenter’s Rights also explains more of the philosophy behind the company’s hosted comment approach.

Update: Guillermo Esteves says you actually can see a commenter’s e-mail address in your Disqus dashboard. It may not be as convenient as getting them via e-mail for some users, but at least they’re there if you need them.

Daniel Jalkut, developer behind the popular OS X blogging app MarsEdit, on WordPress’ decision to disable remote access by default in version 2.6 and beyond:

WordPress’s decision to shut off remote access by default is analogous to a bank offering unrestricted drive-through access to its cash machines, while requiring pedestrians to ring a bell and wait for a security guard to open the door to the machines.

I don’t know if a new crew has taken the reigns of WordPress recently, but some really, really poor design and functionality decisions have been made since that $29 million VC score. Jalkut nailed this one.

Mark Jaquith, one of the lead WordPress developers, had the same trouble many users did when trying to figure out how to edit comments in WordPress 2.5. Turns out that, like clicking a post’s name to edit, you click the commenter’s name:

This sort of mirrors how post edit links work. To edit a post (or a page), you just click the name of the post. That is quite intuitive. I learned that behavior in about a day, and now the old way of clicking the “Edit” link seems strange. I’ve not had the same experience with comments. I think the problem is that comments don’t have a title, like posts do.

I agree, this really isn’t intuitive. I get the line of thinking that led to this decision, but it still just doesn’t feel right. Perhaps a simple “(edit)” link next to each commenter’s name would do the trick.

The FriendFeed Comments plug-in for WordPress watches FriendFeed for comments on your blog posts, then displays them alongside comments on the actual posts at your blog.

This is a brilliant idea for including external discussions about your posts on the posts themselves. There’s a bit of a debate going on in blogging about the fact that “the discussion” is quickly moving into “the cloud” (or perhaps it’s there already). Nowadays, your post can wind up at FriendFeed, digg, Twitter, and countless other social venues where the discussion takes on a mind and a medium of its own, but none of that great stuff comes back home to the original content.

Naturally, this new “cloud discussion” is arguably both good and bad in various ways. Plug-ins like this one, however, are a great way to help lay a sort of social breadcrumb trail for the original content on your blog.

I think this plug-in has a lot of potential, but it highlights the need for something even grander in scale. I’d love to see a more robust plug-in that combs the major social hubs and brings all the comments back to the original post, or perhaps just links or some other snippet visualization of the external discussion.

This plugin will integrate the Mint Statistics app with your WordPress Administration. You can set it to have a Panel that shows an iframe of Mint or have it open in it’s own window, or if you don’t want to see it in the WP Admin, you can just use it to embed the Mint Javascript needed to log your traffic.

Minty Fresh « WordPress Plugins

Update: After installing this and poking around, it appears that the plug-in expects Mint to be installed in a subdirectory of your WordPress blog. While this probably won’t be an issue for many people, my Mint and WordPress installations are in separate directories, so this plug-in doesn’t work for me yet.

So glad I found this QuickPost plug-in:

Inspired by the tumblr.com’s bookmarklet which allows users to quickly and easily post to their Tumblr blog, This [sic] plugin allows you to quickly post text, images, photos, quotes, and videos to your Wordpress implementation.

I’ve been testing it with WordPress 2.5 and it seems to work pretty well so far, though the current (0.7) version uses what looks like the editor from WordPress 2.3. It’s also missing a few essentials, such as a blockquote button, which is why I used ecto3 to post this instead of the QuickPost plug-in. Thankfully, there’s always 0.8 and 1.0 releases to look forward to—and donate for.

Still, this should make it much easier for people to use WordPress as a linkblog, as it’s pretty smart about automatically sniffing out video embed codes or images from most sites. Combine QuickPost with some of the “sideblog” or “asides” plug-ins that can segregate specific categories of posts to a widget, an individual page, and even a separate RSS feed, and there’s a lot of potential with this plug-in.