Keith Goodrum

Found out about a cool plugin for Wordpress today from The 30 Day Challenge. It’s really cool you can add video comments to your blog. It’s from Seesmic.com, and adds a great way to expand the interaction with readers.

I’ve been playing around with it today, and have already posted a comment on the 30 Day Challenge blog. It’s easy to post a comment with this plugin. I also found it easy to setup in the blog.

There is a nice feature to this option. Video blog comments get added to the Seesmic public time line. That means you could grab some traffic from people searching Seesmic. Cool beans.

One thing I like about this plugin is you don’t have to have an account with Seesmic. Anyone can post anonymously. Of course to prevent morons from posting insulting or spam videos you can have them held for moderation. I’m doing that for the time being.

You can grab the plugin at Seesmic’s Wiki page. On the wiki page they show you how to install it & how it works.

I’ve added a video comment to this post, so you can see how it works.

How about posting a video comment yourself?

This past weekend was spent deleting or moderating comment spam. I couldn’t figure it out & it drove me crazy. All weekend long it was delete, moderate, delete, moderate…. on and on. Kept checking my settings, looking at my comment page in the admin section. Everything looked OK - it just didn’t make sense. How could so much spam be getting through?

Well sometimes I look so hard at the trees… I fail to see the forest!

Today I noticed while looking at the plugin directory that Akismet had been deleted. I did delete a few plugins Friday that I was no longer using, but I don’t recall deleting Akismet. Since no one else has access to the admin panel… theres’ no one to blame but me.

Bummer - It’s always funner to pass the buck.

Anyhow I reinstalled Akismet & made a few other changes to help combat comment spam. Akismet is a good comment spam plugin. However it does have one big drawback. It will occasionally mark as spam a legit comment. Therefore it requires me to go through the Akismet queue and make sure a legit one didn’t get caught.

There are some people who refuse to use Akismet for this reason. But like I said it hasn’t become that big of problem for me.

How to get Akismet

It simple… head over to Akismet, and download it. Unzip the file & upload it to your plugin folder. This is usually located in the wp-content/plugins folder.

Next you have to activate the plugin. Once you activate the plugin you should see a Akismet configuration. You will need to get an API Key from Wordpress.com. At Wordpress.com you will have to sign up for an account. Make sure you go to Wordpress.com & not Wordpress.org.

Once you are at Wordpress.com click on the sign up now button. Fill out the information, check the Just a username, please button, and click next. They will send you a confirmation email. Once you confirm your account you’ll get your API Key.

The last step is to take your API Key & add it to the Akismet configuration page on your blog. Hit update & Akismet takes over from there.

I like Akismet because for me it’s pretty low maintenance. Head on over & get if you’d like to get some relief from comment spam.

Happy birthday to Wordpress. This awesome blogging platform was started 5 years ago today. They are having a party tonight at 9pm…

WordPress Birthday Party — 3 days ago

On Tuesday, May 27th, WordPress will turn 5 years old. We’ve come a long way from that original 0.7 release. To celebrate we’re throwing a party in San Francisco at 111 Minna, starting at 9PM. You can get the full details and RSVP on Upcoming.org or on Facebook. I hope you see some of you there, should [...]

If we still lived in San Francisco we would attend. Hope they have a great time.