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.
Subscribe to Comments - Remarks from the Creator
I wrote a post 4 days ago talking about how bloggers should have the Subscribe to Comments plugin unchecked by default. I emailed the maker of the plugin to find out why he put the option in to have it checked by default.
Here is what I said:
“I am writing a post about your subscribe to comments plugin. I was wondering why you make it available to have the box checked by default?
I hope to hear back from you soon and thank you for your time”
Mark Jaquith emailed back saying:
“Some people wanted that option. But I’m probably going to drop it now that there is per-user preference retention. That is, when you submit a comment, it gives you a cookie that remembers whether the box was checked or unchecked… and the next comment form you visit on that site will have the same status.”
That sounds great, I can’t wait until that comes out!
Well 11 minutes after he sent the first email he sent this one:
“There we go. All done:
That was awesome. I love it when people actually take the time to reply and take what you said seriously instead of just giving you lip service.
Subscribe to Comments - UNCHECK BY DEFAULT
One of the most popular plugins for WordPress is subscribe to comments and for good reason it is a great plugin. For those of you who have been living under a rock (why do people use that saying? no one lives under a rock) Subscribe to comments allows you to add a checkbox to your comments form so that people can get notified via email when a new comment has been made. There are a couple of problems with the plugin however.
For one thing if you are a larger site then you may become blacklisted as a spammer if tons of people check the box and a ton of emails go out simultaneously to all of them at once. That is obviously not good. The other reason I don’t like this plugin is all of those freaking annoying sites that seem to think leaving the box checked by default is a good idea. WELL IT ISN’T A GOOD IDEA! Don’t do that, I just got an email last night from a blog who does this very thing. I didn’t want to be notified by email of follow up comments and my biggest annoyance is that the post was from 2 months ago!
Please all of you bloggers leave the box unchecked by default otherwise I hope no one comments on your stupid blog.
Semiologic Terms2Post - Related Entries Plugin
I do not use any related entries plugin here at Blog Scrutiny because I don’t really have enough posts for it to add any value to the blog. But, on my other blog CyberSurge, I do use one called Semiologic Terms2Post.
Example:
The Terms2Post plugin is bundled with a few other plugins that I would like to mention, Related Entries for Feeds, Related Searches, and Related Tags. I only use the related I do not use any of the plugins bundled with it but I figured I would mention them anyway.
The plugin is extremely simple to install, just like every other plugin in you throw it in to your plugins folder with an ftp client and then you activate it. After that is done you just add some code into your wordrpress theme files, simple as that. The plugin uses Yahoo’s term extraction web service to find the related entries on your blog which means if it doesn’t work right then you have too much traffic, your server’s IP is beating its 5,000 calls per 24h limit to Yahoo’s web services.
Alright now I’m going to compare it to other related entries plugins, oh, wait, I can’t because none of the other plugins seem to work AT ALL. I have never been able to get another related entries plugin to work on the blog. To be brutally honest it is completely ridiculous that a plugin doesn’t work and I can’t seem to find any reason for it not to.
Anyway I suggest trying it out if you can’t get the others working, if for some strange reason you weren’t waving the rubber chicken around correctly while trying to install this one and it doesn’t work you can head over to TechZilo where Sumesh has done a great roundup of alternatives.
Terms2Post
Extract Terms (Terms2Post is bundled in this plugin)