msdanielle - just another ego blog site

Every week or so I get an email from someone saying something like, “Hi, just wanted to let you know your sidebar looks messed up in IE6. Let me know if you need help fixing it.” Or, “Hey Danielle, I see you’re not using Top Commentators. Do you need the code for MistyLook?” (Since been resolved…) This is what bloggers do for each other. We see little things we can help out with when your site is messed up, and let you know about it! Or if you get to know those around you, they are very willing to give some very practical help. I just wanted to give a shout out and say “Thanks!” in addition to providing you guys with a few specific tips that I’ve been given.

A Few Good Bloggers

I was very frustrated last night when I was working on updating pinkdeals‘ new theme. (Yes, I worked on pinkdeals on a Saturday night! ) I was trying to find a plugin that would list my “most popular tags” in a list form. Since I’m no programmer, I wasn’t able to create one or find one that suited my needs. Ultimate Tag Warrior wasn’t very intuitive and the latest version of Jerome’s Keywords is still in “beta.” The other plugins weren’t what I needed — just a simple list of tags for my sidebar, which would appear as “categories” (there is a non-arbitrary SEO reason for why we chose to do this). Finally I resorted to contacting Jon Lee who also happened to be online at that very moment.

I asked Jon if he knew of a plugin that would create what I needed. He replied back with, “You can use the built in tagging support.” Huh? And he comes back with the following code:

<?php wp_tag_cloud(’smallest=10&largest=10&unit=pt&number=20
&orderby=count&format=list&order=DESC’); ?>

Wow. Are you serious? That’s it? How the heck would I have found that? I wanted to high five him through my AIM! With that said, Jon helped me from tearing my hair out last night and therefore I wanted to say thank you.

If any of you need to display your tags as a sidebar list, use the above code. 10 = font size, 20 = max number of listings, and DESC can be changed to ASC if you need to arrange them in either descending or ascending order of popularity. Thanks, Jon!

Another helpful blogger is JerkyBeef of the Beef Jerky Blog. Awhile back I implemented the post and comment count that you see in my right sidebar. For some reason I thought that was a really cool feature since you can see that someone’s blog is interactive. One thing I love about my blog is that people interact and react to my articles, and interact with each other. Why not let others know that there’s some discussion going on here??

If you want to implement this feature, here’s the code:

<?php global $numposts; echo $numposts ;?> POSTS & <?php global $numcmnts; echo $numcmnts ;?> COMMENTS

Thanks, JerkyBeef!

One last helpful blogger I wanted to mention is Derek Semmler. Derek and I, as some of you know, share a blog birthday. We began our blogs on the exact same day so we cheer each other on and celebrate with each other whenever we can. Derek helped me figure out how to retrieve a list of Top Commentators for any given month. If you’re tired of waiting until midnight on the last day of the month to get a screen shot of your total Top Commentator count, then this will help. Sometimes it’s great to give a shout out to those who’ve helped build the most discussion for that month, and here’s how you can retrieve this list from a phpMyAdmin SQL query:

SELECT comment_author, COUNT( comment_id ) AS comment_count
FROM wp_comments
WHERE comment_date LIKE ‘2007-09%’
GROUP BY comment_author
ORDER BY comment_count DESC

Derek adds, “Just change the date string to be the month you want the totals. For instance, this was the query that I used to get me the top commentators for September.” For a full tutorial explaining how to do this, check out Derek’s post here.

Hope some of you can find these tips from these helpful bloggers useful. Thanks, guys, for the help!

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