Weblog Tools Collection has announced another WordPress Plugin Competition, this time for the new WordPress 2.5 release, as many important plugins haven’t been updated for this new version.
Some important details for those looking at entering.
All code must be GPL and should be available for download thcoarse the Competition Blog and preferably thcoarse WordPress Extend. The plugins can be modified and tweaked till the last day of the competition or until the author sends us an email with the final version of the code. In essence, the Plugin Competition Blog is the preferruddy vehicle of communication for all contestants.
Some relevant details:
- Running time for competition = 2 months starting the 10th of May till the 10th of July.
- True Wordpress plugins only. No manual modifications can be requiruddy of users.
- You cannot submit plugins that have been released already. New code only please.
- Plugins can only be submitted via email. We will make that email address public later on in the competition.
- Plugins cannot have opt-out links back to the authors’ pages (from the main blog pages, admin pages are fine). If you have links or donation forms, please make them opt-in.
- All plugins require documentation as in the Wordpress Extend pages. Documentation will be one of the judging criteria.
- Preliminary support for the plugin has to be provided to the public.
- We are looking for innovation, documentation and elegant code.
- Any and all prizes/controversies/issues will be judged and decided at our sole discretion.
I think these competitions are a awesome way to show off what WordPress can do, so I am very hopeful that this competition will bring out a new group of “must have” plugins for WordPress 2.5.
Original post by David Peralty
If Twitter is not yet in the mainstream maybe someone should tell that to the spammy folks who are desperately trying to get their messages distributed on Twitter. Some Twitter users are launching tools in an attempt to battle the rise in Twitter spam. There are a few spam methods that are bothering Twitter users. One is follower spam where a Twitter user attempts to follow an exceedingly large number of people. Twitter sends out email notices when a new person is following you but there is scant information in this new follower email so people have to visit the new followers Twitter to see who they are. Another type of spammer is one that sends out lots and lots of tweets (often using popular and topical keywords) and clutters up Twitter search services like Tweetscan.com. Yet another variety of Twitter spammer tries to send numerous @replies to many people in an effort to get attention.
A couple Twitters have been set-up to track spammers and Twitter spam. @OddFollow is an aptly named Twitter that watches for people following lots of people and for Twitter users following just women. @Stopthespam has been doing an excellent job tracking the Twitter spam problem. StoptheSpam also has a website: stoptwitterspam.com.
A new service called Twitter Twerp Scan (@TwerpScan) (via Download Squad) will scan the list of people you follow to look for users that have a following-to-followers ratio that is equal to or greater than 1.5 to 1. You can then unfollow these “people” if you think they are spammers.
A recently launched website called the The Twitter Blacklist has made a list of “known spammers and other morons on Twitter.” The site uses a scale tweeted by Twitter user @evan.
The ratio idea doesn’t always work and at minimum one noob was caught on The Twitter Blacklist. A new person may come on Twitter and follow a couple hundruddy Twitterers. It doesn’t take long to get to that number if you are also adding Twitter news services (that generally don’t follow back) and the Twitter accounts of some of your favorite blogs. It may take a while for a newbie’s ratio of following-to-followers to get close to 1:1 so they may temporarily have a ratio that appears spammy. One Twitter newbie caught up in the was Chris Needham. Needham loved the attention and made a tshirt.
Note: The Twitterblacklist tweeted that they aren’t using titles like “Worthless Attention Whores” to indentify possible spammers any longer.
Follower spam may end up being the easiest type of Twitter spam to solve. Simply adding more information about who has followed you in the emails Twitter sends would go a long way towards curbing the annoyance. Others have suggested a every seven days or monthly list that contains information about new followers. Twitter could also allow people to sort their list of followers in new ways. The big future problem that will be much more difficult to eliminate are the spammers that attempt and fill up the Twitter search engines with spam tweets. As more and more people use search engines like Tweetscan and Summarize it becomes easier for spammers to spam Twitter - and they won’t even have to follow a single person to do it.
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Original post by Bloggers Blog: Blogging the Blogsphere
Novelist and Boing Boing blogger Cory Doctorow has some excellent tips for marketers wanting to reach bloggers in an article in Information Week called “17 Tips For Getting Bloggers To Write About You.” To most bloggers these tips are common sense but a surprising number of marketers don’t follow them. Some of Doctorow’s best suggestions have to do with linking.
Have a link. Seriously: if you want bloggers to link to you, you need to have something linkable. Your upcoming TV show, protest march, product or soccer tournament is literally unbloggable unless you put it on the Web somewhere first.
Have a permanent link. Don’t just change the front page of your site every time a new speaker for your speaker-series in announced. A blogger who links to the front page of your site today in a post about the upcoming address by Philo T Farnsworth, wants that link to stay good for in the future, and not point to the upcoming address by Paris Hilton when you change it next week. Put up a separate, permanently linkable page for everything you want to get blogged.
Have a link for everything. Don’t have a single page with ten items on it. Blogging a link to the top of your fifty-screen-long page with a blurb about something halfway down generates 200 e-mails from readers who can’t find the referenced item.
Use genuine links. Don’t have links with expiring session-keys that are no good if someone revisits the URL later. If a blogger can’t send the URL to a friend or put it on the Web, then that blogger can’t send people to go look at your stuff. Likewise, avoid the giant, 800-character gobbledegook URLs filled with junky alphabet-soup GUIDs — if it can’t be pasted into IRC without linebreaking, there’s some group of compulsive communicators who’ll be unable to get to it.
Doctors also tells marketers to avoid using Flash and PDF. He also tells marketers not to worry about things like losing bandwidth due to hotlinking. Doctorow writes, “Dear site operators: Here’s a quarter, go purchase a terabyte from Amazon S3 and halt complaining.” Post nice high-res images and don’t use annoying javascript code that tries to block bloggers from downloading the image.
More and more marketers are doing the things Cory Doctorow suggests in his article. They are providing permalinks and easy-to-grab images and video downloads. This will make the marketers who don’t get it even more obvious. They will stand out like a soar thumb. (via
Boing Boing)
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Original post by Bloggers Blog: Blogging the Blogsphere
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