WordCamp–Lorelle’s Blogging Tips (Make ’em weep!) and Book plus Microformats

Lorelle VanFossen, WordPress blogger and author of Blogging Tips: What bloggers won’t tell you about blogging (Splashpress 2007), and her alter-evil Lorraine gave a whirlwind of a  presentation at the WordPress Blogging Conference,  WordCamp 2008 in San Francisco last weekend.

While her book provides very basic yet substantial advice on how to structure, administer and maintain a blog, how to write engaging blog posts, how to develop and keep an audience, and how to deal with rights, copyrights and comments, her presentation at WordCamp was much more sophisticated and definitely fast-paced.

She started with details from a post written by her alter-evil Lorraine which I recall reading on her blog, Lorelle on WordPress. Her main points were how to work around limitations on WordPress.com regarding plugins. However, lots of workarounds and options for plugins can be found at:

http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

She also discussed at length how to deal with comments, including spam comments. While these comments typically end up in an akismet spam folder, most conscientious bloggers review their spam to make sure legitimate comments are stuck in the spam filter. This can be a real drag, especially if you’re dealing with lots of comments like she does. And, she admitted, she edits legitimate comments, cleaning up excess code and making them more readable. She also admitted that while she and the rest of us like to reply to comments, it can be challenging to do so in a sincere, authentic way.

She challenges developers to continue to find solutions to problems dealing with comments, spam and legitimate ones, and she shared several solutions available on greasemonkeys on firefox that are available now or will be soon.  For example, she suggests checking out:

absolute comment http://planetozh (.com? .org? sorry)

A few other blogs she suggest we stay up on include:  internet ductape (on my blogroll) and auntie akismet.

There was also something about google reader preview enhanced greasemonkey script http://userscripts but that’s all I got; maybe it makes sense to you.

She encourages–no berates!—developers to come up with more work arounds but also more themes and to share work. She suggests organizing WordPress meet ups to exchange ideas on a regular basis.

She also talked a lot about something called “woopra” and gave many of us (including me) the passcode to test the beta version. I think that was something that helps you deal with comments or maybe that was the next thing: There’s also a WordPress plug in called something like “liz strauss comment” by oz which she’s really excited about.

One session which flew over my head and was taken off-line before I could get a gander on it was on microformats.org. Contek showed H calendar, and discussed semantic publishing: linkmanager, address book, access yahoo email, calendar events, and BuddyPress use as an about page for a company.

Social network hub, personal hub, profile syndication–Getting satisfaction combats social network fatigue, he pointed out. Make it easy to sign up new users, so they don’t have to go through all the rigamorale time and again.

He showed us some wild stuff using DiSo plugins which support WordPress and some site: DiSo polysyngpro? Where you can see where you are all over the net, and who’s in your network.