This mainly covers WordPress – if you are on another platform, find a geek that uses it to try to do the equivalent, but I doubt this is possible on Blogger.

I should point out there are already implementations out in the wild that are significantly better in some ways, though might not meet all the goals of the Twitter developers.

As an example, in my comments on the last post one of the goals of the Twitter button was for it to work even with javascript switched off. Some existing sharing solutions use an empty anchor link href=”#” – from a SEO perspective that is better – for usability maybe not.

Here is some default code generated by the official Twitter button generator – the data-url is optional if you are using canonical tags and don’t have lots of buttons on the home page of a blog, or within archives – otherwise it is best to be specific.

<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="http://andybeard.eu/2902/7-reasons-not-to-use-the-new-tweet-buttons.html" data-text="7 Reasons Not To Use The New Tweet Buttons" data-count="vertical" data-via="AndyBeard" data-related="seodojo:SEO Training">Tweet</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

We are going to try to solve a number of issues

Twitter decided to use “data” attributes that are in the HTML5 spec. On one project I am using data attributes with spans which are not in the spec.
What some share widget developers are using is an empty anchor link with no destination.

If Twitter wanted the link to function as well as a defined button if Javascript is turned off, they should have opted to use their implmentation which uses URL parameters.

In my last post criticising the tweet buttons, I have added some test implementations of what is discussed here. Test the 3rd one “With Nothing Defined” – that is a text link as implemented by Twitter, it doesn’t pick up the title.

I should also note that Google have used HTML5 data for their buttons by default, so they suck just as much.

This is their current static text link for sharing

http://twitter.com/share

It picks up the referring URL, but it doesn’t seem to pick up the page title as it is meant to when using a text link (it works with Javascript), and you would somehow need to work out defining rel=”me” in the header which is something I have never even heard of before.

So that is the page you are sending “link love” or “Google Juice” to – a crappy form on a social network – this is going back to 2006 when I was first moaning about plugins doing this.

I was then compelled to make my own version of the Socialble plugin “Antisocial” as the original author refused to add nofollow, and eventually Yoast took the Sociable project over and one of the first official things he did was add nofollow to the links.

If they want the link, there needs to be some content of value on the page.

However we can do something about the link formatting to ensure it passes some useful data.

http://twitter.com/share?url=http://andybeard.eu/2902/7-reasons-not-to-use-the-new-tweet-buttons.html&text=7%20Reasons%20Not%20To%20Use%20The%20New%20Tweet%20Buttons&count=vertical&via=AndyBeard&related=seodojo:SEO%20Training

All those parameters have been added to the URL, which has a benefit with W3C validation & content syndication, and when someone clicks through to the form, it has the data filled out.

Whoopie!

So lets take that link code and slap it into the original

<a href="http://twitter.com/share?url=http://andybeard.eu/2902/7-reasons-not-to-use-the-new-tweet-buttons.html&text=7%20Reasons%20Not%20To%20Use%20The%20New%20Tweet%20Buttons&count=vertical&via=AndyBeard&related=seodojo:SEO%20Training" class="twitter-share-button" rel="nofollow">You should Tweet This Post</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

I also added a nofollow to the link, but even then it still means Google could opt to take juice away from other links on the same page. Sucks doesn’t it.
However Twitter are also gaining nothing of value to them, and even without it they possibly wouldn’t because of how they messed up their Robots.txt

Part of me still wants to believe that Twitter added this Robots.txt just to block indexation of search results, and had no intention of holding my content to ransom by preventing Google crawling it.

http://twitter.com/robots.txt

#Google Search Engine Robot
User-agent: Googlebot
# Crawl-delay: 10 — Googlebot ignores crawl-delay ftl
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*/with_friends

#Yahoo! Search Engine Robot
User-Agent: Slurp
Crawl-delay: 1
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*/with_friends

#Microsoft Search Engine Robot
User-Agent: msnbot
Crawl-delay: 10
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*/with_friends

# Every bot that might possibly read and respect this file.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*/with_friends
Disallow: /oauth
Disallow: /1/oauth

The 4th line down blocks any URL which has a parameter in it. It is a side effect of messing it up or being greedy (or incompetent) – various SEOs would describe it different ways.

Sometimes Google allows blocked URLs to accumulate PageRank – sometimes they don’t – in a case where that PageRank might end up somewhere that isn’t a benefit to Google depending on how they handle their “reset vector”, they may discount the juice.
I don’t know the order Google process the link graph – it is quite possible there would be a difference between linking to a page blocked with robots.txt, and linking to the same page using nofollow – that difference could be for both sites – Google has no intention of enlightening us on this.

This is especially so as the page has no unique or relevant content – the static text link does not display any of the information that is available from the widget, and neither does the connected page.

In my opinion the page should be merged with the search results for references to the URL – that would then be a worthwhile page to index especially if it also included all the threaded conversation.
There is no logical reason to have 2 actions from the same button – the destination page should have both the tweet form and the search.
If it was on a real permalink, that is something of value to be indexed.

I actually have no idea whether Twitter even care about SEO – the actions they take seem almost random – search other than on their own brand accounts for less than 2% of their web traffic according to Alexa.

The Javascript

The Next Web have posted some async javascript code. It makes sense to use it, but as you should have the javascript for the Twitter widgets loading at the bottom of all your pages, it doesn’t really make a huge amount of difference.
At this time Twitter are loading the javascript from a CDN, so it shouldn’t be affected by fail whale.
If Akamai dies, you might as well stop browsing as half the internet will die with it.

<script type="text/javascript">
//async script, twitter button fashiolista.com style
(function() {
var s = document.createElement('SCRIPT');
var c = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
s.type = 'text/javascript';
s.async = true;
s.src = 'http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';
c.parentNode.insertBefore(s, c);
})();
</script >

If you have this code in the footer of every page, then all you need to load a button is a static link, or one created using PHP if you are using WordPress.

I am not going to create a whole WordPress plugin here… so how about a quick WordPress shortcode.

There are tons of Tweet Button plugins appearing, but I haven’t seen any that do a decent link implementation which is essential for a shortcode – after all blog posts get syndicated… and javascript generally gets stripped out.

<?php
// Usage tweet rel="scobleizer:Tech Geek" or tweet rel="mashable:Tech Blog"
function mytweet($atts) {
extract(shortcode_atts(array(
		"rel" => 'seodojo:SEO Training'
	), $atts));
$via = "AndyBeard";
$url = urlencode(get_permalink());
// Different Themes & Plugins implement titles in different ways - find a way to code this that works for you
$tweettitle = urlencode(the_title("", "", false));
$related = urlencode($atts['rel']); // this should maybe be defined in some custom meta

$code = '<a href="http://twitter.com/share?url=' . $url . '&text=' . $tweettitle . '&count=vertical&via=' . $via . '&related=' . $related . '" class="twitter-share-button" rel="nofollow">You should Tweet This Post</a>';
return $code;
}
add_shortcode("tweet", "mytweet");
?>

To use this it would be something like

[tweet rel="seodojo:SEO training"]

That comes out like this

Really to be useful it should include a dynamic graphical image so when content gets syndicated there is some social proof with the link… but at least the link will now work when it is syndicated.

I still need to work out what data-counturl that I spotted on techcrunch is for. I am assuming that it can be used to set a canonical URL, while the URL used for each Tweet could be different (based on source, affiliate, membership status etc)

If you click this link, you will be taken to this same page, but residing at a slightly different URL. Tweetmeme makes a mess of URLs like this.
http://andybeard.eu/2907/better-twitter-tweet-button.html?mysource=12345

The new Twitter buttons and Topsy seem to get it right on the landing pages, I need to do more testing on tweeted URLs.

This post has now been updated with an official response from Tweetmeme – the features have now been added to the development timeline.

The Tweetmeme site is a useful content source, but this article is mainly about the Tweetmeme buttons.

Adding something to your blog, especially something that can encourage viral behavior and add social proof is highly beneficial, and doing it correctly, without asking for passwords offers huge advantages.

Twitter is also a medium that is marketing content tollerant, as long as the people following you are marketers, unlike Digg, Reddit, and to a lesser extent Stumbleupon. 

Thus I have spent some time delving into the code and API for Tweetmeme and the existing WordPress plugin. It has just been updated, thus if you download the Tweetmeme plugin, it will be the latest version.

Important New Features

• Cleaned up cookie use a little, but it would be better if they set a cookie based on an action, rather than a display.
  The original RFC for cookies states that browser support for cookies should be a minimum of:-    
  • 300 cookies in total
  • 20 cookies per domain
  • 4095 bytes per cookie

  To be perfectly honest, I don’t want all those cookies, whether they are 1st party or 3rd party.

• Ability to brand the retweets with @andybeard etc, though you still get “via @tweetmeme” at the end
• The button is removed from excerpts using a filter on get_the_excerpt() – more on that to follow

However essential features of Tweetmeme and Tweetmeme Button are missing if it is going to be used by serious marketers.

Whilst I am not a huge fan of the @tweetmeme at the end of button tweets, it is something that users can just delete. However I have some additional problems / requirements / feature requests

1. The latest incarnation of Tweetmeme prevents the button, as standard, appearing on custom excerpts.

I can understand this from a user perspective:-

• Most bloggers are using automatic generated excerpts that might include the button javascript
• This appears ugly on the page, and is useless if they are also using that for their page descriptions

However some people use custom excerpts and custom meta descriptions, and like displaying tweet buttons on their front page without adding custom filters to functions.php or hacking theme files. Can the options be expanded with a separate set for use on the_excerpt? I can also see people wanting to use different buttons on full page, excerpt and rss, and only have one button on the_excerpt, but top/bottom on both feeds and posts.

2. The Headlines Used

Currently there is no way to define the text that is being used within a tweet – the text used is the Title tag from the header of a page. Many blogs use various titles for different purposes

• In the header for SEO
• For the title of a post
• Various navigation elements
• Custom titles for RSS feeds
• Calls to action for Social Media
• Calls to action for Twitter, or what Tim wrote about a few months ago, Social Bites

I really need to be able to define the text dynamically for each button display.

3. The Links Used

Tweetmeme like tracking things. Guess what? So do I…

I don’t so much care about branding of the final tweet links – it would be a bonus, but I need to be able to track the way I want to track.

• Within my short URL software
• Google Analytics for various goals
• Possibly for use with affiliates

I understand that Tweetmeme need the permalink to associate with tweets, but couldn’t I provide that, in addition to the link actually used to generate links? You might end up generating a lot more short links, but you would know in advance, without having to check headers, that all those links are to the same URL.

4. My Tweeps Like To Track Too

As a person who might occasionally click on Tweetmeme buttons, there is one fatal flaw.

If I use my own link shortener, I can track the response rate. I like knowing which topics and headlines generate a response from my audience. If something proves to be popular, maybe I will repeat it for people in a different timezone.

Tweetmeem Buttons remove my ability to test the popularity of the content I post.

The solution is actually fairly simple:-

The tweetmeme buttons are quite happy to write cookies all over a users system, why not read just one cookie, a unique user ID for Tweetmeme as well. The default user ID would identify which URL shortener they prefer, and their API ID. If you want to be extra secure, you could store both of these in a cookie on the user’s computer, rather than store them yourself. Links would ultimately go through the following redirects

• Tweetmeme Bit.ly
• Tweep (any)
• Publisher Short (any)
• Permalink + parameters
• Permalink

That is a lot of redirects, it might slow things down a little, and Googlebot might not like so many jumps, but ultimately this provides a better experience for users, and for once any SEO factors aren’t important – Google will have to cope. The 2 URLs to include with the javascript would be

• Permalink
• (optional) Publisher Short (any) / Permalink+Parameters

5. Split-testing

The observant among you would also notice that with all these parameters being set with each page load, it would be possible to split-test response to some degree. This level of functionality would add real value, and might even be looked on as a useful, modestly priced, premium feature – $10 per month/site  or $30 per month/site unlimited? For tweeps it would have to be free.

Thus I think Tweetmeme is a great idea, but to be turned into something that not only remains on my blog, but which I might even be willing to pay for, it needs significantly more flexibility.

Tweetmeme could be turned into a masterful, measurable viral marketing tool, with just a few tweaks.

Update: Tweetmeme Marketing Features Coming

Sarah from Tweetmeme has just left this message in the comments area

Hi Andy,

Your suggestions have been added to our todo list here in the office so do look out for the new features you’ve requested. They will take us a while to do but they are coming.

We’re using your post as our guidance, and if you are up for it when we have something to show, would you be up for looking over it and seeing if there’s anything we’re missing? We would like to get it right and have a really strong offering for marketing experts so feedback and working closely with experts like yourself is essential really.

Lets keep the conversations going between us and if you drop me an e-mail then I’ll make sure you are on our early adopter program :)

Many thanks
Sarah

I think this is a superb response and I want to thank Sarah, Nick and the rest of the Fav.or.it team for accepting my challenging post “head-on”.

I have been using a hacked version of the popular sociable plugin for months. The hack consists of just adding 14 characters that are very important to the well-being of your website (if you use Sociable)

rel=”nofollow”

I have discussed providing this hacked version, or a better one in the past and just didn’t get around to it. I am not going to sell the advantages of making this change.

I just get sick of visiting the blogs of friends and not being greeted by pink boxes.

I have created a special download page on this domain for hacked Word press plugins

Note: I did offer this as a suggestion to the author before the last release to include by default or as an option, and he declined.

I will most likely be providing a few more hacked plugins as a distribution, but please understand I do not regard these plugins as a branch from the original.

Goto WordPress Plugin Hacks

Why Nofollow Shoemoney.com?

Here is what is written in the Google webmaster guidelines:-

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

Shoemoney recently has been been creating lots of controversial link baiting and hackbaiting content. This includes how to hack MyBlogLog, and encouraging other people to try it out for themselves.
Whilst the Google Webmaster Guidelines don’t mention hacking sites as being a bad neighbourhood, their Adsense guidelines certainly do not allow Adsense to be displayed on sites containing hacking content.

Taken from the Google Adsense Policy:-

Sites displaying Google ads may not include:
* Violent content, racial intolerance, or advocacy against any individual, group, or organization
[snip]
* Hacking/cracking content
* Deceptive or manipulative content or construction to improve your site’s search engine ranking, e.g., your site’s PageRank
[snip]
* Any other content that is illegal, promotes illegal activity, or infringes on the legal rights of others

I tend to look on the criteria for sites eligible to display Adsense as a good indication of what a “good neighbourhood” is as the webmaster guidelines are not very specific, and leave this up to the judgement of the webmaster.

I should also note that hacking material also contravenes Yahoos policies as well as I mentioned in my previous MyBlogLog post, so there is very little room for doubt.

My personal opinion (from a business standpoint, and not based upon differences in opinion) is that Shoemoney.com now contains objectionable content including information on how to hack and manipulate the data on 3rd party websites. In some ways what he has also been promoting could have been looked on as identity theft.

As such Shoemoney.com has become a “bad neighbourhood” to which I personally don’t want to link, and so I modified a plugin to save me time in deleting links from previous content and comments.

As I have the plugin, I though others should have the option of using it as well.

Plugin Name: Shoemoney nofollow
Plugin URI: http://andybeard.eu/2007/02/shoemoney-nofollow/
Description: Searches for links to shoemoney.com, and adds a rel=”nofollow” tag if necessary (based on Wikipedia Nofollow by Ken Yasumoto-Nicolson and Identify External Links by Mark Jaquith)
Author: Andy Beard
Version: 1.0
Author URI: http://andybeard.eu/
License: GPL

Download Shoemoney Nofollow for WordPress

I should note this plugin has nothing to do with disagreements with Shoemoney in the past and his invitation tactics as previously discussed. Previously I had left all links intact from my domain to his, but as he is now encouraging hacking on an almost daily basis, I had to take action.

• Lucia’s Linky Love Plugin – I was going to liken this plugin to a Ferrari, because it is built to be fast, but it is probably more like a Subaru, not just fast but designed for rugged terrain and can handle the twists and turns of comment spammers without slowing down.
• DoFollow – many look on this as the granddaddy of NoFollow plugins – you just switch it on and it works, all nofollows are removed from comments and trackbacks.
• Dofollow (WP Plugin) – Sometimes I wish this one has been given a better more descriptive name. It includes the ability (optional) to remove nofollow from comments after a period of time.
• Link Love – this is a brand new plugin that removes nofollow after a certain number of comments have been made – this rewards regular commenters – one thing I like is that the detection is based upon email address and not domain or URL, so it allows a commenter to spread the links how they like.
• GoodLinks – This plugin looks extremely useful for many people who have layout problems when people post long URLs – it also removes NoFollow as an option
• Blank Target Comments – Another multi-purpose comment link plugin – it removes nofollow from only the comment author links, and adds target=”_blank” – no link because it doesn’t seem to be available for download any more which is a shame.
• Remove Nofollow – Cristian Mezi from SeoPedia’s plugin – I am not sure of the history or features, but it is probably similar to the original DoFollow plugin.
• NoNofollow – Including this link for historical reasons – Bronski’s plugin doesn’t work with newer versions of WordPress, but credit where credit is due.
• WP-Nofollow – Again included for historical reasons – one of the first plugins for WP 1.2 based on the original MT plugin code

For those that like hacking core files Rob has a simple guide to removing nofollow, though I prefer to avoid hacking any core files as it makes keeping WordPress up to date easier.

How to Remove Nofollow From Blogger / Blogspot

New Blogger Blogspot – Here is a guide on how to remove nofollow from your blogspot blog using New Blogger for both comments and trackbacks.

You can also remove nofollow from Classic blogger that is published by FTP

How to Remove Nofollow From Typepad

Mike Sansone created a simple step-by-step guide on How To Remove Nofollow From Typepad
Fox Tucker has also come up with an interesting way to present links without nofollow on Typepad blogs.

How to Remove Nofollow From Moveable Type

How to remove Nofollow on Moveable Type – A Comprehensive guide on removing Nofollow from Moveable Type and Disable the Redirect

This also referenced Removing the Redirect Link

Legacy link for Moveable Type and Nofollow (it wasn’t complete)

Some Plugins Not Included?

I did find a few other Nofollow plugins available, but they appear on sites that are using nofollow for links in their own comments, seemed to be copies of the same code others provided, or were just dead links so I didn’t include them here.

Add Nofollow

If you want to do the opposite, and add NoFollow to certain types of links, here are some resources. There are some great and totally legitimate reasons you might want to do this.

• Add Link Attribute – this plugin is extremely powerful in the hands of someone who wants to control the flow of Google Juice around their site. Some links are purely navigational, or link to forms or other pages both on or offsite that do not contain content. This plugin allows you to zap them without modifying core files.
• Wikipedia NoFollow – want to reclaim the Google Juice you send to Wikipedia that currently stops flowing, and turns Wikipedia into a black hole – this plugin is the perfect answer – if Wikipedia turn the flow back on, you can reciprocate just by switching the plugin off.
• WP Temp Nofollow – I am not sure how up to date this one is, but if you have hacked WordPress to remove the nofollow code, you could use something like this plugin to add nofollow back for a period of time. It was designed for older WordPress versions that didn’t have nofollow as standard.
• NoFollow from Home – This one is interesting from an SEO perspective in that it adds nofollow to links in your content on the home page
• Don’t Follow – This plugin allows you to selectively add nofollow to links in your comments simple by adding /dontfollow to the end of the URL – I am not sure how nicely it plays with other nofollow plugins as I would assume it would have to have a lower priority so that it adds nofollow after any other plugin has removed it. (thanks Lorelle)
• Nofollow Those Dupes – My own plugin to add nofollow to links within content to everything other than single pages, thus avoiding Google Juice leaks on duplicate content pages.

Add NoFollow Other Platforms

• NoFollow List (Drupal) – Allows you to add a list of sites to nofollow (such as Wikipedia)

Lots of people in the last few day have proclaimed (finally) an end to using Nofollow on their blog and many of them are friends or regular readers. Now whilst I would like to link to them all, there are far too many of them (plus I have something else planned). Instead I am going to link to the one that I feel is most significant. Dougal Campbell has just installed a DoFollow plugin, and as a core developer of WordPress, this is a major development. Maybe we can see some optional features within WordPress and WordPress.com soon.

I would love to add more to this list, so if you know of other plugins, especially for platforms other than WordPress, please let me know in the comments or ping me and I will add them to the list.

NoFollow Community on Bumpzee

A list of 10000+ sites that are supporting the no nofollow | dofollow | i follow movement isn’t a viable proposition. In fact there are 149,000 references to DoFollow listed by Google, though not all of those sites are using a dofollow solution, or have the ability for users to leave a comment or trackback.

For a number of months I though about creating a directory of DoFollow supporters, and even have a prototype site with loads of features, but it just didn’t offer enough usability, and managing the growing community would have been extremely time consuming.

My solution (I did consider many) was to create a community that allowed no nofollow community members to find bloggers that were like minded within their own niche.

Bumpzee has support for tagging, parsing tags and defined categories from within the RSS feeds, thus it is possible to browse blog posts on any subject.

The interface isn’t ideal yet, but is under constant active development and hopefully in the future you will be able to just go to a tag on parenting, and find 50 or more blogs who write about parenting, and their recent posts, and who all use a dofollow equivalent for their blogging platform.

I encourage you to join the No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Community

It is my intent for the community to be the largest and most active on Bumpzee, and we will build the community together.

Even if Robert Scoble includes one of your posts in his shared feed, the majority of people who will read that content will be in a feed reader rather than on your site.

So how do you attract more people to your site, or to subscribe to your feed?

Content Strategies

I actually started writing this post yesterday, and decided to “sleep on it” and add some more content. It seems Darren had the same idea for a post so I have deleted this section and you can read his list instead. As my blog has always been more technical in nature, I am going to go into one specific feature from the list which is what I started off with yesterday.

Related Posts in Feeds With Ultimate Tag Warrior

I know lots of my readers are now using Ultimate Tag Warrior, so they will find this very handy.

I have previously posted the code needed to insert UTW related posts somewhere on your blog. It was quite a short piece of code, but sometimes UTW can seem daunting.

Adding related posts to your RSS feed is also very useful, because the majority of your regular readers will be subscribing to your feed, and reading your content in a browser.

There are various “related entries for feeds” plugins available, but they normally depend on simple page analysis to determine a relationship, or use the Yahoo API which for me always returns fairly poor relationships. With extensive use of tagging you can define relationships yourself, thus articles really are specifically related, and not possibly related.

I have seen various hacks to add UTW Related Posts to feeds, but they involved playing with core WordPress files. Whilst I am happy to hack themes, I avoid anything to do with the core files, at least on this blog. WordPress is frequently being updated – 2.1.1 and 2.09 are just around the corner and thus hacking the core files should be left to those comfortable using SVN and working with “bleeding edge” code.

Today I noticed a new plugin for adding Ultimate Tag Warrior Related Posts to your RSS feed. For me this has a number of advantages.

• New Subscribers – I am often asked to point out recommended reading to new subscribers so they can “catch up” on what has been said before.
• Click-throughs – more chance a reader, even a long-time reader will click through and read an older article.
• SE Spiders – they will have more paths to follow from your feed
• Syndication – another chance of a lot more links – sometimes it is “legitimate”, for instance

WebProNews asked permission to syndicate my content and I have approached a few more sites to do the same. Other services and sites aggregate content, and sometimes don’t provide good links back to the source, but often overlook additional links in the content. You can always block trackbacks if they are not playing fair. I normally gain a benefit from it however they handle my content.

I have now found a simple solution, a plugin to add UTW Related Posts to your feed. It is quite a simple plugin, but ultimately I like simple solutions rather than hacking something myself.
It creates a nice neat tidy list in your feed:-

Despite Darren’s misgivings about cluttering up your feed, I can highly recommend it. I have been using it for only a couple of days and I have already seen an increase in clicks through to older content and I am sure it will also help with backlinks from sites syndicating my content.

I should also re-emphasise that this blog is experimental – it is not perfectly optimised from the start and this allows me to measure how small improvements increase performance.

I just found out about another alternative for those comfortable with CSS called Feed Styler. It allows you to apply CSS to various page elements automatically, effectively using 2 style sheets, one for your blog pages, and another for your feeds.
It achieves this by automatically adding inline CSS styling to various page elements.

Some purists might argue (and they do in the comments) that RSS Feeds should be free of all styling, and that if someone subscribes to a feed, they do it to avoid visiting the site, to get just pure content.
Unfortunately a lot of RSS readers don’t have even basic styling for HTML elements such as blockquotes, so I can see a need for this even if you are not looking to add more complicated styling.
In my opinion, most readers are not purists – they subscribe because they don’t want to have to navigate a long list of bookmarks every day to see if there is something interesting on their favourite sites. It isn’t a question of looking at the content unformatted, but of receiving the content they want to read automatically.
It is true that readers could somehow hack Firefox to apply custom styling to Google Reader, but most are not that technically capable.

I have downloaded the plugin, and it is another thing to add to my very long “todo” list. I haven’t tested it, so if you do, please let me know how you get on.

Also of note, Devlounge are having a refer-a-thon offering a free link in their sidebar for the site that sends them the most traffic. I think a much better option is just to subscribe to the blogs that send you traffic, and maybe write something about them if you see something interesting. This seems a very insular approach.
Their 100K unique visitor day is in total since they launched, as it seems (based on dubious Alexa data anyway), that I already receive as much traffic as they do.
You could look at it as a success until you read their full announcement and a previous post celebrating 400 subscribers.
The uniques are most likely unique by IP per day rather than cookie based uniques.

For me the most important statistic of all is subscribers, and to maximise the number of subscribers I gain from different traffic sources.

Sometime in the future I plan to add some subscriber only content

Sociable has been due for an update for a long time. In popularity I am sure it is among the top 20 plugins in use, maybe even top 10 – it is certainly very visible on blogs, more so than the very discreet Share This plugin.

I contacted Peter a couple of weeks ago asking if there was an update coming soon, and he said to me that he was back working on Sociable, and an update was imminent.

You can currently download beta4, it is quite possible that the plugin will go final today.

It hasn’t changed a huge amount, other than adding a lot more bookmarking sites, so you can choose which sites are popular with your audience.

I have just sent Peter a small update which he can hopefully include:-

• Adding the nofollow tag to the links
• Inclusion of a Plug IM button
• Inclusion of a Bumpzee Button

You can see the new buttons as I am currently testing them on this blog with version 2.0 Beta4

If you are wondering about PlugIM and Bumpzee, PlugIM is a growing site similar to other social bookmarking sites, but with an emphasis on Internet Marketing (where you are allowed to plug your own posts), and Bumpzee is a new social network for Affiliate Marketers that picks up your feed content automatically for other people to vote upon.

Yesterday the big news was about Technorati adding some kind of Digg clone (Technorati WTF), but in many ways Bumpzee might have similar functions, because you can find content based upon tags, and vote on the ones you like. They don’t have the massive amount of content yet, but it could be a very useful service or script within vertical markets.
In fact from what I read on Niall Kennedy’s blog, WTF grew out of an internal notes tool, and is more a way of explaining news on Technorati, a social feature, rather than a voting system. Technorati votes for sites with blog posts, which generally take more than 3 seconds to write, unlike Digg, so the top stories might actually be more news worthy.

The list was becoming a little unwieldy with the number of related posts, so I have cleaned up the simple code, added some error trapping, and here it is.

<?php if(function_exists('UTW_ShowRelatedPostsForCurrentPost')) { ?>
<h2>Related Posts:-</h2>
<ul class="utwrelposts"><?php UTW_ShowRelatedPostsForCurrentPost("posthtmllist" , "" , "10"); ?></ul>
<?php } ?>

Be careful on the quotes, as I still haven’t worked out why they are not appearing correctly under WP2.1

Using Ultimate Tag Warrior for controlling related posts means that you are not having to rely on a 3rd party algorithm to define what is related, although by limiting the number of related entries as I am now doing to 10, UTW seems to pick the most related posts fairly well.

Then I noticed a mention over on Matt’s blog (just search for Matt) in the comments that somone had written one.

Wikipedia Nofollow Plugin

And here is a link to Wikipedia to test it

Edit: after posting I grabbed a screenshot

Oh and I submitted it to Digg

Lol, ok so the “Digg This Plugin” is seriously screwed. I link through to a Digg I made for the original blog post, and the original author – in the comments I posted a link to here as an example of it working. Digg this now thinks I have votes for this post, and the button actually seems to link through to the digg on someone elses blog. Weird…
Someone has created a more secure “Digg This” plugin called “Digg That”, which apparently cures the problem, I will give it a try.