I had to drop to a weekly posting schedule to make room for a book and new baby, but 548,083 unique visitors still managed to drop by here in 2009. Even though that was down from 1.3 million visitors in 2008, I still feel the same awe that I felt in early 2002 when there were twenty-nine people a day reading along: I still wonder who those other twenty-six people are.

So, Thank You (Yes, You)!

The blogsphere is now packed with leaner, funnier, and better marketed blogs than this one, so I want you to know that I appreciate you spending some of your time here sifting through the literary rubble for something amusing to pocket week after week. I really do. So even though I can’t pay you in money, when you die, on your deathbed, you’ll receive total consciousness. So you got that going for you…which is nice.

Whether your one of the site’s 400 subscribers or just someone who checks in once and a while, thanks for helping to make this another great year.

Gunga galunga…gunga — Gunga galunga.

-Jon Dyer

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Two main updates went into Better Blogroll 3.0. First, the plugin now includes the ability to display link ratings as defined in your WordPress Links Manager.

More and more people have been using the plugin as a replacement for the default WordPress links widget, and many have been asking that the plugin be available without the link randomization that Better Blogroll was originally written for.

Randomization is still available, but now the links can be sorted by title or rating as well. With the addition of category groupings introduced in version 2.9, the plugin can act like a very configurable version of the basic WordPress Links widget.

For more information about Better Blogroll, head on over to my Better Blogroll Widget for Wordpress Page.

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Instead of testing my widgets live, I test the underlying PHP in a designated test area that his hidden from regular readers. That way, if PHP barks at me for missing an underscore, it’s more of a private message to me, and not a public broadcast to all of my readers.

Creating a WordPress test area is a simple addition of a page template and test page to your WordPress theme files. Any PHP that you put in the test template can be executed by refreshing a draft preview of the page assigned to it. Because the test page is never actually published, there’s no possibility of it reaching your readers and interrupting the flow of your site.

Want to set up your own Wordpress PHP test area?

Using A WordPress Page Template As A PHP Test Area

1. Put the following into a text file and save it as phptest.php:

   <?php
   /*
   Template Name: PHP Test Template
   */
   ?>
   
   <?php get_header(); ?>
   
   <div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">
   <h2>This is a test File</h2>
   
   <?php
   //PHP test area
   ?>
   </div>
   
   <?php get_sidebar(); ?>
   
   <?php get_footer(); ?>

2. Upload the file into your current theme. These are typically located in /wp-content /themes/ [theme-name]/ under your WordPress installation directory.
3. Go into your WordPress admin panel and click Editor from the Appearance menu on the left. Make sure that you can see the PHP Test Template listed on the in the template list on the right hand side. If it’s not there, you might’ve uploaded the file to the wrong theme directory.
4. From the Pages menu in the left side column of your WordPress admin panel, click Add New.
5. Title the page something like “PHP Test Page” and leave the post area blank.
6. On the right hand side, under Attributes / Template, Select PHP Test Template from the drop down menu.
7. Click Save Draft.
8. Click Preview.
9. Now go back to the PHP Test template in your theme by clicking Editor from the Appearance menu on the left side of the admin panel.
10. From the list on the right, click PHP Test Template.
11. Add your PHP code to the line of the test template that reads //PHP test area.
12. When you’re done, click Update File.
13. When you refresh the preview of your draft PHP test page (that you opened in step 8), any PHP that you put in the template will execute.

Once you’re satisfied that the PHP has been tested, it can be moved out of the test template and into a production template or widget with the confidence that it’s going to behave within the WordPress framework. You can clear your test template and leave the test page dormant until your next idea comes along.

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Around 150,000 unique visitors stop by here every month, and the most visitors I’ve had storm the castle in a single day was 85,424. That’s just shy of the population of the city of Quincy, Massachusetts. I wish it was because I’m extremely clever or a master of internet marketing, but the truth is that I don’t know why people show up here.

I’m really, really glad you do, though. The blogsphere is so crowded that attention has become a precious resource, and I appreciate you stopping by to spend a little of yours on me. Without you reading this nonsense, I’d probably end up shouting it on a street corner or on top of a desk, and that tends to freak people out a little.

Thanks!

Thanks to the thousands and thousands of people behind the sites who have linked here over the years, and a big, fat thanks to Dave Masters and Louise Brown for putting my beardsanity into three major newspapers. I really spend a lot of time trying to keep track of you all because each link is a small gift that can lead to some interesting relationships.

My thanks also go out to folks like N0ia, M-shel, Keidra, Brian, Tankboy, Sarah Veale, BonzoGal, KF Chud, Macoosh, Digitaldarryl, M, V, JR, Jo Jo Monkey Man, Jo, Pablo, Doles, Erin, Joyce, Palsh, Svalka, Tara, The Finetunettes, and the entire cast of The MaBeGroMo Beardos for keeping the discussion lively and validating the unique brand of crazy around here.

And my most hugest thanks goes out to #1GF! for editing all of my stupid misteaks and giving me all the encouragement that I couldn’t give myself.

And thank you. Yes, you. Just because I don’t know your name, don’t think that I feel that you’re any less important. I know you’re out there, and I’m glad you stopped by.

Thanks for not making me look as crazy as I feel.

-Jon

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With the Best Foot Forward widget, you simply tag your top posts with a specific keyword (like “favorite-september-08″ or whatever you prefer) and then tell the plugin to show all posts tagged with your keyword. When you want to add a post to the list, you simply add your keyword to the post’s tags. This means you can create “best of” lists on the fly without wasting time creating and formatting lists of links.

WordPress 2.6.X now saves multiple revisions of posts, and Best Foot Forward was updated to version 1.2 to stop those revisions from showing up in your sidebar.

For more information, head over to my Best Foot Forward WordPress Widget Page.

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No More 200 Friend Limit

Most people will be really happy about this because they can have more friends, but I have mixed feelings. I regularly bumped off the limit, and would have to make room for new stumblers by weeding out inactive stumblers or those who no longer focused on content that I was interested in. The constant revision was a pain, but it made sure that I got the most relevant content for me. Removing the limit certainly creates less work, but it also removes the reminder to let go of stumblers who have moved on to other topics.

How Similar Are You?

Normally, when someone visits my StumbleUpon page, I go through a few of their pages to see if they stumble the same geeky humor that I’m into. If I laugh a couple of times, I find a place for them on my friends list. StumbleUpon will now save me some of the legwork by calculating exactly how similar users are in the form of a percentage score.

The feature not only gives me a single number to gauge how similar my stumbles are to someone else, but it shows what stumble categories we have in common. If the score is relatively accurate and is used as a guide and not as a hard rule, this could save me from looking through pages and pages of stumbles that ultimately have no relevance to what I like.

Friends and Subscribers Are Now Different

StumbleUpon wanted to separate out the social networking portion of the site from the content subscription portion, so now when you follow someone, you are no longer a “fan” of them, but a “subscriber” to their stumbles. If you know them personally, you also have the option of adding them as a friend.

Separating the content from the people allows me to keep connected to good people who stumble topics that I have absolutely no interest in, but I have to ask whether a system that is so easy to use needs another layer of complexity. When should someone go from being a subscriber to being a friend? Is there some sort of criteria for that jump? And why do they have to be notified of my intention to be their friend and wait for confirmation? It seems to add a FaceSpace level of complexity to the whole process that doesn’t need to be there. I mean, do I really know the 400 people on my friends list? I probably haven’t even met one of them, so are they friends? Are they just subscribers? Should there be an acquaintance category?

I sort of liked the old idea that you’re only as good as your last stumble and that I had a bunch of “fans”. Don’t get me wrong: I like subscribers, but having “fans” was sort of like being a rock star without all the practice and smelly leather pants. With this new differentiation between what you do and who you are, I’m concerned that people are going to figure out that I’m just some nerd who has some funny stumbles and not the rock star that I make myself out to be.

What do you think? Do you like the new system or do you have mixed feelings about it? Let me know in the comments.

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Version 2.8 was written in response to a user request for the inclusion of XFN data in the blogroll links. XFN stands for “XHTML Friends Network”, and it’s a way site owners can specify what type of relationship they have (such as friend, co-worker, neighbor) with the people they’re linking to. The format is built into the WordPress link manager, but I never included it in Better Blogroll because I didn’t think people used it.

If you specify XFN data in the WordPress links manager, Better Blogroll will now display it. If you don’t use XFN, your links will look the same as they did before. Because “nofollow” and XFN both use the rel tag, setting links to “nofollow” in the plugin will override XFN data.

If you’d like to know more about XFN in WordPress, check out the WordPress XFN page. For more information about Better Blogroll, head on over to my Better Blogroll Widget for Wordpress Page.

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If you have this issue, you can eliminate it by forcing search results to open in a new tab. It’s like a built in safety mechanism for absent-minded bloggers, and it’s really easy to implement through a simple change to the Firefox configuration page.

1. Open a new tab and type about:config into your browser’s address bar as if you were trying to go to a web page. If you’ve never seen the configuration page before, this is where you can make all the custom tweaks that can make Firefox into your own personal browsing machine.
2. There are a lot of properties, so type browser.search.openintab into the filter box to filter out everything except the property that we’re going to modify.
3. Double click anywhere on the line that shows up, and the line will became bold and the value will be set to true.

That’s it. Modifications to about:config are instantaneous, so you will no longer have to worry about losing whatever you’re working on to search results. If you ever give up blogging and want search results to show up in the current tab, just find and double click the property again to set it back to false.

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The RSS widget doesn’t include the option to set links to nofollow, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t add it. This is going to require a hack to one of the Wordpress core files, widgets.php, which you can find in your wp-includes directory. Because you’re hacking a core file, you will lose these changes every time you upgrade WordPress.

Ready for a little WordPress hackin’? Well, let’s get to it.

How To Hack Widgets.php To Set The RSS Widget To Nofollow

These instructions were written for Wordpress version 2.5.1, so if you’re using another version, your mileage may vary.

1. This is a really simple hack, but humor me and save a backup copy of widgets.php as widgets.old, so that you don’t spend the next four hours on a four minute hack because you missed an apostrophe somewhere.
2. Open widgets.php in your favorite editor and on line 1029, you will find function wp_widget_rss. This is the start of the RSS widget section. You don’t need to do anything with this line, but I wanted to include it as a reference in case future WordPress versions move things around.
3. On line 1069, you’ll find:

   $title = "<a class='rsswidget' href='$url' title='" . attribute_escape(__('Syndicate this content')) ."'><img style='background:orange;color:white;border:none;' width='14' height='14' src='$icon' alt='RSS' /></a> <a class='rsswidget' href='$link' title='$desc'>$title</a>";

If you want to get rid of the RSS icon and the linking title so that the RSS widget blends in with your other sidebar sections, you can either delete the entire line or comment it out by putting a // at the beginning of the line. If you like the way it looks, simply add rel='nofollow' to 2 places to the line so that it ends up looking like this:

$title = "<a class='rsswidget' rel='nofollow' href='$url' title='" . attribute_escape(__('Syndicate this content')) ."'><img style='background:orange;color:white;border:none;' width='14' height='14' src='$icon' alt='RSS' /></a> <a class='rsswidget' rel='nofollow' href='$link' title='$desc'>$title</a>";

4. On line 1079, you’ll find function wp_widget_rss_output. The next line we’re going to modify is under the section. Again, the mention of this line is only provided for reference.
5. On line 1157, you’ll find:

   echo "<li><a class='rsswidget' href='$link' title='$desc'>$title</a>{$date}{$summary}{$author}</li>";

   Add the nofollow attribute to this line by inserting it like so:

   echo "<li><a class='rsswidget' rel='nofollow' href='$link' title='$desc'>$title</a>{$date}{$summary}{$author}</li>";

6. Save the file and upload it to your server.

All your RSS links should now be set to nofollow. Remember that because you just hacked a WordPress core file, you will have to implement his hack the next time you upgrade. The only way to avoid this is to stop hacking core files or use a plugin such as Buddy Love that includes the nofollow option.

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If you’re running Wordpress, you have probably seen the “Incoming Links” panel on your dashboard that lists people who are linking to you. With Wordpress 2.3 and above, that data is simply an RSS feed from Google blogs. Because that same RSS feed can be added to your sidebar through an RSS widget, giving a link back to people who link to you is a snap.

Adding Your Incoming Links To Your Sidebar

Note: These instructions were written for Wordpress 2.5.1 The idea is the same if you are running a different version, but the exact instructions may need to be adjusted.

1. Open your Wordpress dashboard.
2. On your Incoming Links section, right click on RSS and copy the link by Clicking “Copy Link Location” in Firefox, “Copy Shortcut” in IE, or the appropriate link copying command for your web browser.
3. Now Click Design and then Widgets to go to your widgets page.
4. Scroll down and click Add next to the RSS widget to add it to your sidebar. It will then appear on the right side.
5. On the right side, Click Edit next to RSS.
6. Paste the feed you copied in step 2 into the box titled: Enter the RSS feed URL here:”
7. Add a title such as “People Who Link To Me” and set any other options you prefer.
8. Click Change and then Save Changes. You should now see a list of your incoming links in your sidebar.

Benefits and Drawbacks

The benefit of this is that as soon Google knows that someone gives you a link, they show up on this list with no effort on your part. That not only gives credit to those who already link to you, but encourages others because they know that you try to give back to people who are good to you.

Because the process is automatic, the major drawback is that you lose the ability to filter out links based on your personal preferences. As long as most people are linking to you because they like you and not just for the return link, this really shouldn’t be a problem, but it is something to think about.

If people are constantly linking to you from ad filled porn pages, or you feel the need to manually filter your links, you can always manually add links to your WordPress blogroll and use a plugin like Buddy Love to display them for you.

Note: Links in the RSS widget are dofollow by default. If you want to set them to nofollow, it requires a simple hack to a Wordpress core file. See How To Set The WordPress RSS Widget To NoFollow for more information.

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Why Would You Want That?

A picture is worth a thousand words, really. As a commenter, having gravatar allows you to create a more recognizable online identity that spans across sites. As a site owner, allowing a commenter to have a picture next to their comment makes them infinitely more recognizable when you run across them in your surfing. Unfortunately, gravatars only show up on sites that have gravatar support enabled.

Since Gravatar.com is run by Automattic, the same company that runs WordPress, gravatar.com support was rolled into WordPress 2.5. If you have a WordPress blog, you can easily add support for gravatars by adding a few lines of code to your current Wordpress theme. If this is something you’d like to do, the complete instructions are below.

There are four basic steps:

1. Backup your stylesheet and your comments.php just in case.
2. Turn on Avatar support in your dashboard
3. Add one line of code to your comments.php file
4. Add a section to your stylesheet to get the avatar looking the way you want.

1. Backup Your Files

Whether you simply copy the contents and paste them to a text file, or back up your entire site, backing up takes only a couple of minutes and could be the difference between 15 minutes of quick, happy little edits and 2 hours of chasing down a misplaced semicolon. I suggest backing up your comments.php and stylesheet before you edit them, but I leave this step up to you.

2. Turning On Avatar Support

1. Log into WordPress and click on Settings then Discussion
2. Scroll down to the bottom to Avatar Support and select Show Avatars
3. Set the Maximum Rating
4. Click Save Changes.

3. Add The Code To Comments.php

Click on Design and then Theme Editor, and under Theme Files (on the right) click Comments (comments.php)

When you find a section that looks something like the following, you’re seeing the start of the comment loop:

<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>
  <li <?php echo $oddcomment; ?>id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">
    <cite><?php comment_author_link() ?></cite> Says:

Insert a line before the line that starts with <cite>, and insert this line:

<?php echo get_avatar($comment,'50','' ); ?>

50 is the size of the avatar in pixels, and if you’d want to specify your own default avatar (as I did), add its URL between the final ''. If you choose not to include the 50 or specify a default avatar, the function will pull a default avatar from gravatar.com at 96 by 96 pixels.

You should now have something like this:

<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>
  <li <?php echo $oddcomment; ?>id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">
    <?php echo get_avatar($comment,'50','http://mysite.com/default.png' ); ?>
    <cite><?php comment_author_link() ?></cite> Says:

That’s it. Now click Update File to save your changes.

4. Style Your New Avatars

Now that avatars are enabled in your theme, we’re going to add a border to them to make it more like a photographs and set the comment text so that it lines up a little nicer.

Click Design, then Theme Editor and then scroll to the bottom and click on Stylesheet.

If you have a section called .commentlist li .avatar, then you just need to add in what's between the brackets to that section. If you can't find that section, find the .commentlist li section and insert the following section below it.

.commentlist li .avatar {
	float:left; 
	background: #fff; 
	border: 1px solid #bbb; 
	padding:5px;
	margin: 0px 15px 0px 5px;
}

Now that the avatars have a nice border and lined up, we have to make one more edit to stop longer comments from wrapping under them. Find margin: 10px 5px 10px 82px; in the .commentlist p section of your stylesheet, and change the fourth value (the left margin) to push the comment text out from under the avatar. For this site, I had to set it to 82px, but you might have to play with that number until yours lines up.

Now click Update File to save your changes.

You're Done!

Avatars should be working on your site now, but if you run into snags, you can check the WordPress Gravatar documentation, or drop me a comment and I'll do what I can to help out.

Wait Wait Wait! Where Do I Get An Avatar Of My Own?

Go to Gravatar.com and signup with the e-mail address that you usually leave comments with. Once you upload a picture, whenever you leave a comment on a site that supports avatars, your picture should show up next to your comment.

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With Best Foot Forward, you simply tag your top posts with a specific keyword (like “favorite” or whatever you prefer) and then tell the plugin to show anything marked with your keyword. When you want to add a post to the list, you simply add your keyword to the post’s tags. This means you can create “best of” lists on the fly without wasting time copying and formatting.

The plugin was updated to version 1.1 to fix a bug that created incorrect links for certain users, so if you had a problem with version 1.0, it’s time to upgrade.

For more information, head over to my Best Foot Forward WordPress Widget Page.

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1. Pick a subject that people are drawn to but have no expertise in like “How To Score a Porn Star Girlfriend In 5 minutes” or “5 Ways To Rake In Easy Money On The Web”. Who’s going to dispute you? Tommy Lee? Darren Rowse? Fuck no. Those guys are too busy banging porn stars and stuffing mattresses full of money to find the time to debunk your claims. And the average person wouldn’t be reading your list if they had any idea if you were right or wrong, so picking that obscure but interesting subject will allow you to kick back and snort a line of that ever increasing pile of stats that are at the heart of your very existence.

2. Make sure that your points are very general. Research and testing are for scientists and nerds. Do you have a lab coat or a twelve sided die there, Bilbo? Hell no. Being ambiguous will make it seem like you know what you’re talking about, while letting you spend less time writing, and more time compulsively checking your stats. The trick is to make statements that seem like good advice, but are really nothing more than logical generalities like “write good content” and “don’t forget to breathe”.

3. Have! An Awesome! Title! Write the best title that you possibly can, because most of the time, it’s the only thing people are going to see. If it over promises more than a pushup bra on Paris Hilton, so what? The web is powered by lies and promises. By the time people figure out that you’re full of shit, they’ve moved on and left you with another visitor to validate your obsessive stat counting.

4. Bold your points Here’s a secret for you: The modern world is a very busy place. Most modern web surfers skim through sites and bookmark things that they hope to have time to read later. The reality is that the only words that they will read before your post is forgotten in their ever-increasing list of bookmarks are the ones that are in bold. This isn’t to say that you should avoid plain text altogether, but if the general reader isn’t going to waste time on it, neither should you. Write only enough plain text to make it look like there’s more information to the average skimmer, but if you repeat yourself or use nonsense words like finchcrupper, who’s going to know? Who has time to read plain text? Not me, or any of my finchcrupping friends, that’s for sure.

5. Don’t go over 5 items People don’t become gurus by jabbering on and on there, Maharishi. Gurus attain their status by being very brief and stealing the credit when people figure things out for themselves. If you start getting into longer lists, a majority of your audience may figure out just how full of shit you are, and stop inviting you on their band retreats. Keeping things short will add an air of mystery that could keep people from publicly debunking your whole finchcrupping operation.

Consider bookmarking this post if you’re tired of list writers who think that it’s perfectly acceptable to intentionally over promise, consistently under deliver, and habitually waste your time.

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Version 2.7 was written in response to a couple of user requests. Ed Brady requested that links with multiple categories only be displayed once, and Ness asked that the plugin be modified so that she could display links from every category but one.

This version contains those changes, and I also threw in the ability to be super picky about which link categories get displayed on your blogroll. You can now display links from all categories, specify a subset of categories, or even go in the other direction and show all categories except the ones that you specify.

If you want more information about Better Blogroll or have your own development suggestions, head on over to my Better Blogroll Widget for Wordpress Page.

Give it a try and get more bang from your blogroll.

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Whether you create your list manually or don’t have a “Best Of” list yet, the Best Foot Forward Wordpress plugin can make creating that post list a little easier. The plugin works in conjunction with the WordPress tagging system to display posts that are tagged with a certain word (or words) of your choice. For example, by tagging your favorite posts with the word “favorite” and then tell the plugin to display anything tagged with “favorite”, your best of list is automatically created. To add other posts, simply tag them with “favorite”. To remove a post from the list, just delete the tag from your post.

You can use any tags that you choose, so if you want to get really fancy, you could tag your March favorites with “favMarch2008″ and then tag April’s with “favApril2008″, and then tell the plugin to display both, so that you could easily create a cumulative list of your best posts without having to delete any tags from older favorites. That could make year end “Best of” lists very easy to compile.

For more information about this plugin, head over to my Best Foot Forward WordPress Widget Page.

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This is a hack, so you’re going to have to get a little dirty to make it work. In the end, you’ll have a random blogroll, but the widget will ignore the “number of items to show” and “sort” options in the widget because those will be controlled from within the new code.

If you’re interested in creating a random links list on your own Blogger/Blogspot blog, read on for the complete instructions.

How To Show Random Links On Your Blogspot Blog

1. Go to the Layout Tab and click Add Page Element.
2. Find Links List and click Add To Blog.
3. Type in a title and click Save Changes.
4. Go to the top of the Layout page and click Edit HTML
5. Click Download Full Template, so that if you mess this up, you’ll have a backup of your template.
6. Put a check in the checkbox that reads Expand Widget Templates.
7. Search for the line in the template that contains the title you input. It should look something like this:

   <b:widget id='LinkList1' locked='false' title='MyListTitle' type='LinkList'>

   This is the start of the widget you created. Don’t touch this line, but delete all the lines below it until you reach </b:widget>. This is the end of the link list widget. Now you have an empty links widget. Your code should look something like this:

<b:widget id='LinkList1' locked='false' title='MyListTitle' type='LinkList'>

<--NEW CODE WILL GO HERE-->

</b:widget>

8. What you’ve done is gutted the Links widget, and now you’re going to fill the space with the new random blogroll guts. Take the following code and insert it into the section above that reads “NEW CODE WILL GO HERE”. Please don’t make me tell you that “<--NEW CODE WILL GO HERE-->” should NOT be in your code. You knew that already.

<b:includable id='main'>
<b:if cond='data:title'><h2><data:title/></h2></b:if>
 <div class='widget-content'>
  <ul>
  <script type='text/javascript'>
  var maxlinks = 10;
  var linksarray = new Array();
  var linksarray2 = new Array();
  <b:loop values='data:links' var='link'>
    linksarray.push(&quot;<a expr:href='data:link.target'><data:link.name/></a>&quot;); 
  </b:loop>
  if (maxlinks&gt;linksarray.length){maxlinks=linksarray.length;}
  for (var i=1;i&lt;=maxlinks;i++)
  {
    linknum = Math.floor(Math.random()*linksarray.length); 
    linksarray2.push(linksarray[linknum]);
    linksarray.splice(linknum,1);
  } 
  for (x in linksarray2.sort())
  {
    document.write(&#39;<li>&#39;+ linksarray2[x] + &#39;</li>&#39;);
  }
  </script>
  </ul>
  <b:include name='quickedit'/>
 </div>
</b:includable>

9. Well, Dr. Frankenblogger, you’re almost there. The widget defaults to 10 random links. If you want to change that, change the number on this line: var maxlinks = 10; to the number of links that you’d prefer.
10. Click Save Template.
11. Click on the Layout Tab.
12. Click Edit on the Links Widget and add some links to your blogroll.

As always, if you run into problems implementing this, let me know.

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Yesterday, I spent the entire day working on the issue that stood between me and blogroll full of fresh, categorized links. While I know that it’s bad form to edit core WordPress files, the result of my effort is a hacked version of link-import.php that makes WordPress (v. 2.3.3) recognize categories when importing an OPML file. I tested it with a few variations exported from both Google Reader and Thunderbird, and it seems to work pretty well.

What This Hack Will Do

• If you only have one category of links in your feed reader, everything should work the same as it did before.
• If you keep your feeds in multiple folders in your feed reader, the importer will check to see if each folder name is an existing category in the WordPress Links Manager. If it is, all the links from that folder get imported into the corresponding category. If there is no identically named link category, the links get dropped in the default category.
• When it’s finished, the importer notifies you of which folder names were not found so you can either create the missing categories, or check your spelling.

What This Hack Will Not Do:

• Anything secretive or nefarious. That is not my thing.
• It will not create new categories based on the folders from your feed reader automatically, because I thought that it would be safer to keep control over category creation as a manual process.
• It does not correct bad spellres. The category / folder match is case and space sensitive.
• It doesn’t handle anything beyond one level of folders. If you break down your feeds into more than one level of folders, the importer isn’t going to recognize them.
• It won’t hang around after you upgrade WordPress. This is a hack and not an official WordPress file, so it will get overwritten the next time you upgrade.
• It will not give you nunchuck or bow hunting skills, nor make you more attractive to the opposite sex.

How To Use This Hack:

1. Download and unzip the hacked link-import.php
2. Go to [WordPress install folder]\wp-admin\
3. Rename link-import.php to link-import.old
4. Upload the new link-import.php into the directory.

How to Remove This Hack:

1. Go to [WordPress install folder]\wp-admin\
2. Delete link-import.php
3. Rename link-import.old to link-import.php

How to Import Your Blogroll Into WordPress

1. Export your list of feeds from your favorite feed reader to an OPML file.
2. Go to Blogroll / Import Links in your WordPress admin panel.
3. Input the location of your OPML file into the input box.
4. Select a category from the dropdown menu to use as a default category. You may want to create a category called “uncategorized” to catch the missed links.
5. Click the Import OPML File button.
6. Check the results for any corrections that need to be made to your OPML file and re-import, if necessary.

If you have any suggestions or notice any bugs with the file, leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do to address them.

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Well, the result was version 1.0 of Buddy Love. The plugin is a WordPress widget that will pull a configurable number of the latest headlines from sites listed in your WordPress blogroll and show them on your sidebar. It should let you show a little more love to your friends by pointing people to their latest content, and you can even configure a unique icon for each individual site. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the plugin is a bit slow because there is some overhead associated with going out and grabbing the latest headlines from your friends’ sites. If you experience slowness, I can only suggest cutting the number of headlines you show.

If you decide to take Buddy Love for a spin, be sure to let me know what you think.

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While I generally prefer a link back if someone is using images hosted here, I’m not adamant enough that I’d shut off hotlinking altogether. I generally don’t care if people leech off my bandwidth here and there, but when I find someone who is extensively hotlinking, instead of blocking them, I sometimes prank them with the old switcharoo.

Say for example, you are some N00b who enjoyed my Dimmu Burger icon so much that you not only hotlinked it, but you’re using it as your profile icon in a forum. That means every time you post something in the forum, it uses my bandwidth to show your profile. One of your normal forum posts might look like this:

Maybe it strikes me as funny that your profile lists your location as “Behind You…”, so I change the image on my site slightly just to see if you’re paying attention. Maybe your profile icon on all of your posts now looks something like this:

That way, even though you’re you’re sucking my bandwidth harder than your mother when the fleet is in town, I at least get a chuckle out of it.

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If RSS Feeds Were Sex, I’d Be

• A big, fat whore: 26%
• In a weekly gang bang: 33%
• A horny virgin: 18%
• A priest/nun: 23%

A while ago, I mentioned to #1GF! that the number of subscribers hasn’t really risen in proportion to the extra hours I’ve put into the site since I quit my job.

“Oh, honey,” she said, “those people are bloggers. Normal people don’t use RSS.”

I disagreed. “RSS is has been around for nearly a decade and the number of feed readers available makes it an invaluable for getting information. RSS isn’t just for bloggers.”

To settle the argument, this Smokin’ Poll was born.

The results? A whopping 62% of you use RSS feeds to get information from the web, with another 18% of you being interested, but not knowing how to get started.

While I would love to claim that #1GF! was wrong on this one, we all know that my readers are anything but normal.

To the Digital Whores And Syndicated Gang Bangers

Thanks for your support. I’m glad you’re along for the ride.

For the Horny Virgins

If you’re looking for information on how you can make things easier with RSS, head over to my subscription page. I explain RSS in easy to understand terms and list a few links on how you can get started.

Using RSS can cut your web searching time by making the updates come to you. If you still don’t get it, drop me a mail and I’ll help you as best I can.

For the Clergy

Almost a quarter of you are not interested in RSS at all. There’s nothing wrong with that. RSS isn’t for everybody.

If you’re in that camp, you can still save yourself time by having any new dyers.org posts sent to you in a daily e-mail. It’s never more than one e-mail a day, and because I’m as concerned about privacy as you are, I can assure you that your e-mail address is used only to send you a daily update. If you ever want to stop getting updates, you can easily unsubscribe at any time with a single click.

Where did you fall in the distribution? Are you an RSS tramp or virgin?

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Version 2.6 was written in response to a user request, and allows site owners to limit the display of links to a single category, if they so desire.

More information about the widget and how to download it can be found on my Better Blogroll Widget for Wordpress Page.

Take it for a test drive and get more out of your blogroll.

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“Another link? I’m so awesome. I deserved that link because I’m hotter than Hasselhoff and twice as entertaining. Sometimes I wish I were someone else just so that I could experience the awesome feeling that comes with linking to me. Wait. No, I’d cry if I were someone else. Other people are so lucky that I let them link to me. I’m remarkable, I’m amazing, and it’s no wonder that I’m huge in Scandinavia.“

Of course you don’t. For most of us, getting a link is like a getting an unexpected little gift.

If someone in the real world gave you a small token of their appreciation, would you put it in your pocket without saying a word, or would you thank them? Most of us would probably thank them automatically, and maybe even get them something in return. Even though links are the currency of the web, why aren’t people as appreciative when they’re given links?

Reach Out, Reach Out And Thank Someone

Maybe the web’s anonymous nature makes it too easy for us to ignore the fact that there are real people behind other sites. Maybe that same anonymity has made us pessimistic about the intentions of people who link to us. Despite what the marketers feed you, the web is not a series of billboards for target demographics. The web is a loose community of people.

While I won’t deny that some people create links for the sole intention of getting something back, most links are generated by real people for purely altruistic reasons. Generally, people link you because they like you. They’re not only dedicating their own time, energy, and web space to you, but they’re reaching out to you to give you as free token of their appreciation. Shouldn’t you find a way to thank them? If you treat each person who links to you like they have given you something valuable, then thanking them isn’t an extraordinary measure, but a matter of basic manners.

But, is merely well-mannered enough?

Going Beyond Well-Mannered

Maybe I’m naive for still clinging to the idea that the web is more about giving than selling, but I try to give back more than I get. With the amount that I take from the web every day, we all know that this is nothing more than a wishful ideal, but I find that merely heading in that direction guides me toward being a happier and more open netizen.

I’ve made icon sets, I’ve created a WordPress widget, and written countless tutorials on various topics only to give them away because I think that people should get something for nothing once and a while. When someone gives me something for nothing in the form of a link, I try to go beyond sending a simple e-mail to thank them.

Imagine this: You give someone a dollar, and they thank you. Which of the following situations seems like it would potentially lead to the greatest benefit?

1. You both walk away.
2. Later, the person unexpectedly gives you a dollar.
3. Over the next few months, the person gives you several one dollar lottery tickets.

I can almost hear some of you out there pounding out “lot-te-ry, lot-te-ry” on your keyboards, and even though I’m not much of a gambler, I’d have to agree that the lottery tickets are potentially the most beneficial. Sure, not every ticket would win, but each ticket represents a potential win.

If we imagine that the dollars were links, the first scenario is the simple method of thanking someone for a link. Only one person really benefits from the exchange. The second scenario would be what is known as a link exchange. Everyone benefits, but the net gain is zero. Only in the third scenario does the response exceed the value of the original link. This third scenario is what I call “The Lottery Ticket Method” and it’s a remarkably easy and effective way to give back more to people who link to you by leveraging the power of social networks.

The Lottery Ticket Method Of Rewarding Fans

1. Know who is linking to you
   You can type link:http://www.yoursite.com into Google to see who is linking to you, but this can lag behind for smaller sites who may not be indexed very well (or at all). The best way to check who is linking to you is to comb through your referrer stats regularly in whatever stats tracking package you use.
2. Thank them
   When you find that someone has linked to you, send them an e-mail or leave a comment on their site thanking them for the link. If you don’t, your grandma will be ashamed of you and a cute puppy will grow up with a limp.
3. Keep an eye on them
   Create a special folder in your RSS reader called “Linkers” and add the RSS feeds of the sites that link to you into it. If you don’t use an RSS reader, I suppose you can bookmark the sites or chip the addresses out on a stone tablet. What’s important is that you find an easy way to track their posts.
4. Buy them lottery tickets
   Check the Linkers folder once a week and when you see a post you like, add it to one of your social networks such as StumbleUpon or Mixx.

By submitting people’s posts to social sites, you can potentially give them a a bigger rush of traffic than you could provide with a single link on your own site, making it better than a simple “thank you” or link exchange. By leveraging the traffic from social sites, you have offered them the same hopeful potential offered by giving lottery tickets.

The idea here is not to get people to link to you with the promise of a reward. The real idea is to give back to people for being nice on their own. It increases good feelings, makes the internet a better place, and takes no time at all. I’ve being championing people like this for a while, and I’ve found it to be the simplest, most effective way to reward people for taking time out to link to me.

Do you have tips on how to reward people who link to you?

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It’s true. I’ve never been good at deciphering human.

This became very clear this week as I was deciding on what topics to write about. I realized that even though I had some ideas that I could write about, I really have no idea what you want me to write about.

Some of you want WordPress hacks, others want to hear what a geek does after jettisoning the bosses of the corporate world, and some of you simply want web games, web games, and more web games. As I was trying to figure out what would be the most useful for the most readers, I thought, “Why not just ask the readers what they want?” And it seemed like an interesting idea. So,

What would you like to see more of, and what could you do without on dyers.org?

By letting me know what you really want (or don’t), you can be instrumental in making this blog more useful for everyone.

Be as brutal and honest as you want because, as I mentioned, the subtle hints will go right over my head.

Thanks, everyone!

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More information about the widget and how to download it can be found on my Better Blogroll Widget for Wordpress Page.

Take it for a test drive and get more out of your blogroll.

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From the explanation on Homeland Stupidity:

“Yesterday I moved all of my sites to a new dedicated server. In the process, I decommissioned an old blacklist I was running which I thought wasn’t being used, not realizing that Bad Behavior was still set to use it. Shortly afterward, I found myself locked out of my own blog, just as you all did..”

If you have a Wordpress blog and use Bad Behavior, you have to download the latest version of the software to avoid being locked out of your blog.

(Special thanks to N0ia for letting me know about my site’s bad behavior earlier this morning. Thanks, N0ia!)

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