Ajah Comments - Cap the number of comments shown
I hate when I go to a blog post on a large blog such as John Chow dot Com and there are tons and tons of comments. I REALLY WISH he would install Ajah Comments. It doesn’t keep visitors from commenting once it reaches 50 comments but when the page loads it will only show the latest 50 comments.
Ajah Comments is a great plugin to keep large blogs from having extremely long load times. The first time I have a post on either one of my blogs that has 50 or more comments I’ll install this plugin.
Here is an example of it in action:
One down side that would really annoy me is sometimes a lot of people will be commenting on a post and referencing a comment that is more then 50 comments above it. The creator of this plugin thought about that though, there is a link above the comments that allows you to see all of the comments on the post instead of just the 50.
If you have a large blog go ahead and pick up Ajah Comments.
A Blog Scrutinized - Kyle’s Cove dot Com
On Kyle’s Cove dot Com, Kyle Eslick gives his thoughts on technology, blogging, WordPress, SEO, and making money online. Sounds interesting, let’s move onto the regular blog review format, Likes, Dislikes and an addition, suggested posts.
Likes:
- Original and interesting posts that I don’t see anywhere else (some examples listed under my favorite posts)
- A great about page. Sounds really stupid but it fascinates me how many blogs don’t have a good about page telling you what the blog is about and most importantly who is writing it.
- Lively comments. A lot of readers voicing there opinions on each post.
- The blog has everything that most blog tips sites tell you to have.
Dislikes:
- Too many ads, I know you like to make money but it wouldn’t hurt to cut down a little bit or even add a 3rd column to spread things out a bit.
- Another note on the ads, please get rid of Kontera. I personally don’t think that anyone should use kontera, it is just too obtrusive.
- Why do you need a completely seperate page for your blogroll? oh, yea, its because you have so many things in your sidebar (TOO MANY).
And finally the addition to the blog review format:
Suggested Posts:
So there you have it, Kyle’s Cove dot Com. I read it every day and hope you do as well. Keep it simple and just subscribe to Kyle’s RSS feed.
Retro MacOS WordPress Theme
This is a great WordPress theme. It looks like System 6 except its for WordPress. This is suprisingly Stuart Brown’s first WordPres theme and he did a great job on it. This theme was being shown off all over Delicious and Digg and I thought I would show it to my readers.
I don’t think that anyone should use it because it is a little silly and not exactly the best looking theme by far however if you are feeling nostalgic and write about Macs a lot in your blog I’m sure you will have fun with it.
Retro MacOS WordPress Theme [live demo]
Quit With the Clutter!
Along with my post about bloggers putting Adsense within posts I am also going to talk about ad cluttered blogs. I read a lot of blogs throughout the day, I currently read 151 RSS feeds and probably 95% of them are blogs. There is something that I have noticed through the years that I have been paying attention to the blogosphere, the amount of blogs that are cluttered with ads. I’m talking mostly about blogs that are relatively successful for the most part. When you have 10 or more ads on every single page of your blog that is a little rediculous.
I’m happy to say that I have never had a page on any of my blogs that have more then 3 ads. When I read blogs like Techcrunch I am fascinated by the fact that it has 13 ads on the homepage, 6 of which are above the fold. Now at least most of those are in the sidebar and there is only one banner ad but I think that because of how large Techcrunch is it would be able to get away with having a smaller amount of high paying ads instead of having a lot of lesser paying ads. Ads are ugly and they personally cause me to pay less attention to a blog. For some reason though I seem to think that others are under the impression that if you have a lot of ads you must be someone they can trust because advertisers trust you. I’m not saying you shouldn’t trust Techcrunch I’m just saying that Techcrunch shouldn’t have so many ads and small blogs with a lot of ads should be held up to higher scrutiny.
New bloggers, wait a little while before you put ads on your site. I don’t plan on putting ads on this site until I am around for 3 months or until I start seeing much higher numbers when it comes to page views. At that point I won’t put 5 banner ads on my blog, oh no no, I will most likely put one 468×60 unit at the top of post pages or between posts and comments. I want to keep it simple, keep it clean, and keep my readers happy.
Two Themes I Dislike and One I Love
Let’s start with the theme I love just to get it out of the way so I can talk about the themes I don’t like.
First Theme - I Do Like - Blue Green [live demo]
A great looking 3 column WordPres theme that has a great style to it. The theme has a similar color scheme to the first WordPress theme that I ever used Light 1.0. That may be why I like it so much. I love how the theme handles the recent comments widget (visit the live demo to see it).
Second Theme - I Don’t Like - BlueSands [live demo]
I’m not going to say much about this theme except that it looks very similar to the WordPress admin panel and I don’t have to tell you that the WordPress admin panel is ugly.
Third Theme - I Don’t Like - Morning Mountain [live demo]
Although the theme has 3 columns which I love, a simple color scheme, which I love. The header image looks like a default Windows wallpaper and the post date look terrible. If you use this theme please get a new header image and change the background image for the post date, PLEASE.
