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Web advertising company Chitika recently released a WordPress plugin, named “Chitika|Premium”, to make it even easier for webmasters to publish their ads on their blogs.

The startup company — whose name, according to their website, comes from the Telugu language and means “snap of the fingers”, referring to the speed at which webmasters would be able to deploy their advertisement services on their websites — was founded in May 2003 by Chief Executive Officer Venkat Kolluri and Chief Technology Officer Alden DoRosario, both former Terra Lycos data mining engineers.

An example of a Chitika|Premium ad on a WordPress blog

In June 2005, the company launched the company’s flagship product “Chitika eMiniMalls”, an interactive ad unit featuring relevant content and comparative shopping information without the visitor needing to leave the original website. EMiniMalls soon gained popularity among webmasters thanks to the company’s vast product repository, and opened the road to one of today’s best-known web advertising companies.

Launched in May, “Chitika|Premium” is the company’s latest product and, like many other company creations, targets specifically users who have found a given WordPress site via a search engine and modifies its behavior accordingly.

As illustrated in the WP Plugin Directory, in fact, the ads are only being displayed for visitors who have reached the site via a search engine and, if so, searches Chitika’s vast product repository for the same keyword the user has used to reach the site, displaying ads of products that satisfy the search query.

Ads are, by default, displayed at the top of the page, in a format that vaguely resembles that of Google AdSense, except it also features small pictures of the product next to its description. The ad unit generates revenues based on the number of clicks by visitors and, as explained on the WordPress site, its admin interface allows webmasters to personalize a wide range of features such as ad size, link text and colors, display position (above or below the post), and channel (for tracking purposes).

The description page also claims Chitika is AdSense compatible, meaning that Premium ads can be displayed on the same page as AdSense, unlike most contextual advertisement platforms. The ads specifically target traffic coming from either US or Canada and are available in a variety of different sizes — over 20 — to fit the specific webmasters’ needs.

Social bookmarking has been considerably growing in importance in the latest years as an effective tool to feature interesting news and pages that visitors find on your site. Luckily, WordPress offers a variety of plugins which allow you to automatically display all sorts of social bookmarking links and help promote your website with nearly no effort.

Sociable

Sociable admin interface

Sociable is a great plugin, compatible with WordPress installations 2.2 to 2.5.1 in its current version, that allows you to select which social bookmarking links to display at the end of each blog post. You can select among 65+ bookmarking sites, both generic and topic-specific, simply by ticking a box in the admin interface.

On the plugin website, it is explained that the original developer, Peter Harkins, hasn’t been updating the tool for about eight months, and that the project has therefore been maintained by a second developer, who also recently added some interesting features to it.

While displaying the bookmark links at the bottom of the page is the default behavior, that can be easily changed by embedding a code snippet into the code of your WordPress theme. You can also use a snippet to display only a portion of the links, overriding the admin settings. Finally, adding a new bookmarking site to Sociable is also relatively easy and can be done by following the instructions you will find on the plugin homepage.

ShareThis

ShareThis is yet another useful tool to share your posts with the rest of the world. Apart from the usual social bookmarking sites, it also allows you to send your post link via email, AIM, Facebook, MySpace and much more.

According to the statistics hosted on the WordPress website, ShareThis is also among the most downloaded social bookmarking plugins, with peaks of 2,000 daily hits. The tool is being developed by a company which offers additional integration allowing you to store all your bookmarks on a remote server for easy access.

I Love Social Bookmarking

“I Love Social Bookmarking” (ILSB) is another complete and easy to manage tool for your social bookmarking needs. Just like with Sociable, you are able to add and remove websites from the list with a single mouse click from an intuitive admin interface.

While the features and functionality are very similar to those of Sociable, the main difference lays in the layout: instead of simply listing the links, you can use a scroll-down menu to display the list of websites you want to feature on your site, which might turn out useful especially if you don’t want to use much of your page space. Other options in the admin interface also include the background color in the dropdown menu and other minor details.

Tell a Friend

Tell a Friend allows you to add a “Share this post” button after each post using the service provided by FreeTellAFriend.com, which also has e-mail address book and favorite capabilities.

Tell a Friend Plugin

When clicking on the button, a non-intrusive popup will open asking you what you wish to do: visitors can in fact use their email address books and share the item with their entire contact list once logged once logged into their webmail service, enter the emails of friends manually, favorite the site or simply submit the item to a traditional bookmarking site.

Of all the social bookmarking tools for WordPress encountered so far, Tell a Friend is certainly the most flexible one. Of course, there are minor issues arising from its approach, such as the choice of using popups, which might get blocked by some browsers, or even the possibility to remotely access your webmail server, which means your visitors have to trust that the service won’t collect their login data.

… and many others

Those features in this article are a small part of the plugins listed in the WordPress website. If none of the tools described here fit your specific needs, you can simply make a search to find the right tool for you.

According to a news item recently appeared on the Washington Post, Automattic, the company behind the blogging giant WordPress, recently acquired the Irish company PollDaddy, market leader in poll and survey services currently used by 350,000+ high-profile websites, for an undisclosed sum.

As Matt Mullenweg explained in one of his blog posts, the acquisition is motivated by the fact that WordPress users seem to be engaged by polls and surveys in particular, since they provide an effective way of interacting with their visitors and get feedback in an easy way.

Mullenweg jokingly describes his obsessions with polls and surveys in his blog as follows:

“For a year or two now, I’ve been minorly obsessed with polls and surveys as a method of lightweight interaction that engages casual users of your website [...]

I took a secret trip to Sligo and put back a few pints with the team and we decided to make things work. They went to bed every night and woke up every morning thinking about polls and surveys, and were iterating at a great pace.”

On Wednesday, WordPress finalized the acquisition and immediately enabled PollDaddy integration with 4.4 million websites running the CMS on WordPress.com, also releasing the first version of a WordPress plugin for all externally hosted websites.

Current clients of PollDaddy include highly reputed media sites such as RTÉ, Fox News, Wired Magazine and PC World, which the company will continue to serve. Due to its nature, the software is best versed to serve social media sites such as MySpace, Ning, Blogger, Typepad, Hi5, Orkut, Piczo, where it has already been integrated for some time bringing a good revenue for the company, even if David Lehenan, PollDaddy CEO, stated that around 96 percent of their user accounts are actually free to use.

In an interview released by SiliconRepublic.com back in April, Lenehan also discussed the company’s monetization strategy at the time:

“Our professional accounts with SMEs and big business take in enough money to keep us moving. In the long term, we intend to keep it going as a free service for individuals. We’re looking at new ways to bring in revenue, but want a different route than using advertising, which is too obvious.”

Lenehan also stated that the company’s fortune was in producing a high quality product that webmasters were looking for, making them come to the company rather than the other way around, which eliminated much of the need for advertising the product itself in the first place.

With the acquisition, the data centers have now moved to Automattic, which means the polls will be loading faster and the servers will be even more reliable than before, now supported by a 30-person team.

The first version of the WordPress PollDaddy plugin, available for download here, integrates very well with the administrative interface — particularly with the post editing page — since it adds a button in the “Add Media” section to easily embed and/or edit polls within your posts.

After clicking on the button, you will be asked to either login or create a new, free PollDaddy account: the process is painless and only takes a couple minutes.

To many analysts, this latest acquisition is just part of a bigger strategy from Automattic to embed in its company some of the best startups in the blog publishing market, to make the process of adding core features even easier for their end users.

In fact, Automattic recently purchased other startups such as Intense Debate, a small company working on an advanced commenting platform, Buddy Press, a project for layering social networking features onto WordPress, and Gravatar, a universal avatar system, all of which have or will introduce new features for the WordPress platform in the coming months.

Dashboardzone.com, in partnership with InfoCaptor, recently released an interesting free WordPress plugin allowing webmasters to set and monitor their website goals and make the progress bars available for everyone to see through an eye-catching user interface, increasing the overall user experience and interactivity.

The Importance of Setting Goals for Your Site

As noted in the plugin description page, converting visitors into regular readers should be every webmaster’s priority right after reaching a critical mass of daily hits. While this tool won’t quite be enough to do the trick, when used correctly it will help putting your visitors in the right state of mind to contribute to the growth of your website.

DashboardZone plugin

The idea behind this plugin is to apply progress indicators, which are now mainly used for money donation purposes, to a wider spectrum of site objectives. There are currently several sites enabling webmasters to collect money from their websites via PayPal, the best known being probably ChipIn.

According to the ChipIn FAQ section, setting a progress bar with a predefined objective in mind is a great way of encouraging users to contribute and interact with the site: DashboardZone developers are now trying to apply the very same piece of knowledge to webmaster goals, hoping to see a similar boost in visitor interaction.

DashboardZone Plugin Overview

The new plugin by Dashboardzone, which hasn’t been assigned a name yet, has a set of five pre-defined metrics for the popularity of your blog that you can choose from which make use of SQL queries to automatically keep track of progress:

• Total posts;
• Average comments/post;
• Average posts/month;
• Current month posts;
• Comments for current article.

As you’ll have noticed, some of the metrics encourage user interaction and contribution, while others refer to the number of posts and could be seen as either a way for you, the webmaster, to make sure you’re keeping the pace you first set for your site, or, even better, as a way to show your visitors an effective metric of how often your site is being updated with fresh content.

While five metrics are certainly not a lot, the good news is that the tool is being released under the terms of the GPL2 license, which means you are free to download a copy of the plugin and, if you have the necessary PHP/SQL programming knowledge, edit the few lines that will enable you to add the specific functionality you’re looking for — a task made trivial by the large number of comments in the plugin files.

To configure the plugin, you’ll need to set a series of attributes associated to every chart you want to create, such as width, height, and the green/yellow/red zones thresholds. While a more user-friendly interface would be best appreciated here, the configuration process is still relatively easy and smooth. Other secondary options include the chart link, action, and of course the title.

A final word

While originating from a very simple idea, the plugin certainly has the potential to become an effective user interaction booster: because of its nature, however, our first impression is that this tool would probably be best suited for personal blogs or small to medium size websites rather than very high-traffic or feature sites.

Lastly, webmasters who choose to try out this plugin should take great care in setting the green/yellow/red zone thresholds for each of the dashboards they will create: in fact, very high thresholds are likely never to be reached, conveying the image of an “underachieving” site. Conversely, setting them to near-zero levels is not likely to be an effective strategy either although, as usual, much will depend on a case-by-case basis.

Every webmasters knows about the importance of  their site to its maximum: however, finding a way to profit from your website content while not overwhelming your visitors can become a daunting task at times. Publishers and Internet advertising companies are therefore constantly looking for new and non-intrusive solutions.

Stripe Ads on Your Website

One of the latest trends seems to be that of the so-called “Stripe ads”, a one-line text that is featured at the top of your pages and can be closed at the user request, a mechanism which to many will recall the ActiveX controls on Internet Explorer.

Because of their position, these ads are very easy to spot without being necessarily intrusive for the reader, which in turn means a typically higher click-through and conversion rate. As one can easily imagine, different implementations of stripe ads might bring to radically different results: as with the rest of the advertising banners, it becomes extremely important to be able to adequately personalize color scheme as well as the general appearance of the ad.

Although there are often many factors involved in measuring an ad general performance, stripe ads are reportedly more effective when they promote special offers, contests or other internal content instead of endorsing a third party website or product. Many advertising professionals will also tell you that it is generally advisable to put the emphasis on actions instead of products, and this seems to be especially valid for this form of advertising.

MaxBlogPress’ Stripe Ad WordPress Plugin

MaxBlogPress released a WP plugin to help you configure your stripe ad campaign in a quick and easy way and see if this is the right solution for your website.

Stripe Ads

As you can see from the screenshot, the bar is displayed at the very top of your blog, even before the content starts, but it can also be closed once and for all simply by clicking on the dedicated link on the right (not visible in this image).

But the features of this plugin go beyond the simple ability to display a bar with an arbitrary text. In fact, you can set advanced options such as rotating ads (even with different weight), customizable font, size, colors and alignment and much more.

Another interesting feature is the ability to set whether the ads should be displayed statically at the top of the page, or rather dynamically, hovering at the top while users scroll through the page, although this behavior can become somewhat annoying.

Finally, webmasters can take absolute control of when and how the ads are being displayed, offering advanced, visitor-centered settings such as the ability to choose after how many visits the ad should start or stop being displayed, how many times a day, and even how many days per week.

You can get a free version of the plugin, which however features a link to the creator site on the right, or get the paid version — which, of course, doesn’t display that link.

Because of the way this plugin works (by injecting code into your pages right after the HEAD tags of your website), we suggest you try out the free version before going on to buy the commercial one because, particularly on old WordPress versions or highly customized layouts, Stripe Ads might end up breaking the layout of your blog.

Every webmaster knows how much of a nuisance spam messages on your website can be. Luckily, WordPress users can rely on a wide variety of tools and plugins to help keep the junk out of their pages.

Askimet Plugin Review

The askimet plugin now comes by default with every 2.6 WordPress installation, and may well be the best spam-checking tool around for WP users: it checks comments against its own web server database to look for spam through a Bayesian filter, allowing you to review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin section, which integrates seamlessly with the administrative interface.

Askimet Download History

The general Askimet download trend shown here, which doesn’t include WP standard installations, is just one of the many indicators that webmasters are finding this a very valid and effective tool to prevent spam.

The plugin also allows you to display statistics on your blog. If you want to use this feature, you just need to embed this code:

<?php akismet_counter(); ?>

into your template, and it will display the number of spam messages which were correctly caught by the plugin.

As you can read in the official Askimet website, the plugin is completely free to use for personal purposes, but if you own a business site with high loads of traffic and revenue, you can also buy a commercial API key featuring higher priority, faster and more reliable service and no traffic limits whatsoever. The price of the key is very flexible and ranges from $5 (single website) up to $750 (1000 websites) a month.

WP-SpamFree Plugin

While not nearly as popular as Askimet, WP-SpamFree is certainly another very valid tool to protect your website from unwanted messages. According to the plugin homepage, the internal working mechanisms of SpamFree eliminate false positives, allowing for Trackback and Pingback protection and is not bandwidth-intensive.

WP-SpamFree Plugin Counter

Unlike Askimet, this plugin is completely free to use for everyone, but you are welcome to donate a small sum via PayPal to help with the future tool development.

It would be hard to assess which is the best plugin between the two, since they have very similar features, even to the smallest details: for instance, WP-SpamFree lets you, too, display a dynamically generated banner featuring the number of spam comments that were correctly caught by the system.

According to its creator, the beauty of SpamFree lays in its “early prevention” system which stops the spam at the door rather than performing database-intensive operations such as those a Bayesian filter would require.

The Geeky Spam Solution: Robots.txt

If you like to configure things manually and once and for all, editing the robots.txt in your root directory remains one of the most effective solutions to protect your website from spam. This is nothing but a simple text file with a syntax similar to the following:

User-agent: SpamBot1
User-Agent: SpamBot2
...
User-Agent: SpamBotN
Disallow: *

Since spam is most often automated, you can use the robots.txt file to explicitly prevent a bot from accessing your site, which means it won’t be able to publish comments on your pages. In the example above the “Spambots” won’t be able to access your site.

To get a comprehensive list of malicious bots, you can either take a look at this page or just perform a quick Google search.