B-L-O-G-G-E-R.com

Interview with Denis Bernardy
Question 9
(read Question 8 here)

 Is it possible to have videos integrated into the post body?

Of course. There are two ways.

The first is built into WYSIWYG editor - we have a special WYSIWYG editor in Semiologic Pro which is more powerful than the default WordPress editor. Among the things that it does - it handles pasting from Word reasonably well, it handles pasting a plain text and so on. It does bold, and underlines, and changes color obviously. We’ve also been adding a couple of features to it. There is an image manager in particular which is very sexy: it lets you crop and rotate your images directly on your server without needing an extra software. And Mike added one button that allows to insert videos from all sorts of existing services; namely YouTube kind of sites. If you are storing videos on that kind of sites, then you won’t need anything else. You don’t even need to activate an extra plugin.

I created a separate plugin for podcasters and videocasters which is called Mediacaster. This one will allow you to insert locally stored videos as well, such as flash videos or iPod specific formats. In addition, of course, to mp3.

Read Question 10 about Meta Keywords in Blogging.

Interview with Denis Bernardy
Question 8
(read Question 7 here)

What ping services do you prefer to get bigger success in blogging?

I use the small list which is provided in Semiologic Pro. There is Ping-O-Matic, and there is a couple of other services like Ping-O-Matic.

Now, you have to keep in mind that many pinging services will actually ping other pinging services. You don’t want to have duplicates, or at least not too many.

There is a guy in the Internet who maintains a list of ping services and who took the time to see who pings whom: if, let’s say I ping this guy he will also ping this guy who will ping that guy, etc. He has followed the entire network in order to identify who is pinging whom. And he came up with a very short list of ping services that people should be using. And these are the ones that Semiologic Pro is using, though, of course, they can be modified afterwards.

Honestly, I think pinging is important obviously, but there is really no point in pinging too much. The idea behind pinging is - you try to get a few links to your site, you broadcast your new content. But once your site has been found by the search engines, pinging becomes a lot less important than it initially was for a new site. There is really not point to be pinging all the way like ping-ping-ping; it’s useful but it’s overrated.

So, no need to become a ping zealot.

No, no. There is really no need to become a ping zealot. If the question hadn’t come u regularly in my own forum, I would probably just got stuck to Ping-O-Matic which pings like 60 or 70 services alone. That’s 60 or 70 sites that are referencing your new post whenever you write new content. That’s huge, that’s enormous already. What’ve added on top is a service in Japan, one even in China where this post maybe does not even belong to, but we added them because people say "We want more than one service" But, dude, this one service is gonna ping 70! It’s really the only one you need in practise. So, there’s really no need to become a ping zealot.

Read Question 9 about Videos in Blogging.

Interview with Denis Bernardy
Question 7
(read Question 6 here)

I remember on your site you mention a social bookmarking software. Let’s say I scheduled a big amount of posts for future posting…

when exactly will they get bookmarked - when they get published or when they are saved for future publishing?

They are bookmarked when the post gets published, as far as I can tell. You have to check with the solution developer that, but I am pretty sure it gets triggered when the pinging of a post takes place.

Read Question 8 about Pinging and Problems of Becoming a Ping Zealot.

Interview with Denis Bernardy
Question 6
(read Question 5 here)

TimeStamp and the problem that has been rumored about it - when using a TimeStamp feature your post is actually pinged not when it becomes visible on your blog and published, but once you have saved it and scheduled the for the TimeStamp publishing. This can be a disadvantage, because if over a weekend I scheduled 30 articles for future posting and all they will get pinged today, instead of being pinged day-by-day when they get published on a site. A gap of 30 days without pings!

Is this true?
Do posts with TimeStamp get pinged when they are saved or published on the blog?

It was true. WordPress in the past had a very poor procedure for future pinging - that’s what it’s called - future publishing and future pinging.

And in the past when you would publish something then the ping procedure would get triggered, even if the blog post only shows in the future. Semiologic since the very first version has been addressing this by using future pinging functionality that would replace the default WordPress pinging with a more advanced one that would work properly.

However, we’ve removed all of this since WordPress 2.1, because in WordPress 2.1 they’ve introduced a built in pseudo cron (a cron job is a robot that does something periodically). What this cron job does: it looks for a post status of future. Upon being triggered it sees - ok, there’s a post with status of future and the timestamp is in the past, so let’s switch its status to published and then we’ll switch the pinging procedure.

So, nowadays pinging in WordPress only occurs when the post actually gets published.

I have also heard that quite the same can happen when using "Save and Continue Editing" button. The story is like this - when you click it, the blog draft is saved and this draft can send a ping signal.

That is why when working with text and clicking "Save and Continue Editing" button several times - and this is rumored to cause ping spam. Is it true or not?

No, it’s not true. And it’s not true for the very same reason. The ping procedure nowadays only gets triggered at the moment when the post status switched from anything to published. And that’s when the pinging occurs.

When you click "Save and Continue", "Save and Continue", "Save and Continue" - then it will not ping. It only pings when the status becomes published.

Which also means that when you have something which is published already and you edit it, it will not ping either, because the post status is not changed.

Read Question 7 about Automatic Social Bookmarking Solutions and Blogging.

Interview with Denis Bernardy
Question 5
(read Question 4 here)

Are there any strategies that can help to cross link different blogs
(not some automatic junk)?

This kind of thing is usually dealt best with this so-called automatic junk tools which are not necessarily junk. Automated linking would assume several things: detecting what the keywords are. This is something that can be reasonable easy to do nowadays because of the web services that are put in place by the search engines.

But you still have to insert an actual link. So the question goes down to - Are we saying where the links show up? We do have a tool which is called Smart Link. It is some thing that I have been initially doing. I needed a tool that would be a little like Auto Links - say you have a post, and there are keywords in it. You want let’s say Dog Training to be linked to your dog training page. And want this to happen any time you reference Dog Training.

On second thought maybe you don’t want this to happen every time. Say if you mentioned Dog Training three times in a text, then it makes sense to link to if the first time because it’s the first mentioning, and it makes sense from usability perspective. But every single mentioning of Dog Training article gets a link to this very same location - then it becomes clumsy.

Smart Link allows you to pre-insert links. So there is a special syntax which is basically you have open brackets - get your text the link if necessary (you can remove it, it uses the link text) and close the brackets. What happens then is that it decided whether to insert the link or not based on whether you have the content on your web site. It would silence the links until you create a page that has Dog Training.

If you insert a link to a bookmark, it will link to the bookmark instead of the page until you create a page. When you are on a page it uses the same syntax - the bookmark is already on the page.

Basically you end up managing special links to other sites using the link manager in WordPress. You just create as many links as necessary. You use the Smart Link syntax to pre-insert these links. So that actually you don’t need to insert them into your content manually. That is as closest as we can get from cross linking of several blogs. We can do that, but this is, probably, not what a user has in mention.

I would assume what she had in meaning like tool which would automatically extract the meaning of text and based on centralized depository will link to other sites. There is obviously room in a market for a tool like that. This is not something that I or any other else - as far as I know - has ever done.

Read Question 6 about Future Posts and TimeStamp Problem in more details.

Interview with Denis Bernardy
Question 4
(read Question 3)

How can I get more money from AdSenses? What are the magical places to spot AdSense blocks on my blog to get more clicks? Legally, of course.

That would more of a question to AdSense specialist - I am afraid I am not. But I can give you a few pointers because quite number of my customers are. And they’ve been asking me to allow for AdSenses in the locations that they find more interesting.

So, one of them is just beneath the title of your post. Top left floating AdSense block. You have the title and you have the content, the correct location - the one that should get the most clicks - would be to the left if you float it, let’s say 240 x 240 pixel wide advertisement or 260x 260, I don’t remember the specific format. But anyway, that location - top left of your post, because you are reading left to right. So, you read the title and bang! So, that’s the place where the click rate is pretty good.

The second location is in place of the navigation menu. That qualifies more as a dirty trick then anything. But you know Google tends to say that this is a perfectly legal place and it’s fine to do that. So you can basically have this one line - strip of ads that looks a bit like a navigation menu, and then you can get some pretty good clicks from that because people will think it’s a navigation menu of your site and just click the ads.

There is another great place, still in that area, you make it span over the width of the entire site, over the content. I’ve seen this done on a site, absolutely fantastically well done. What the guy had done is he put 4 images of super models, his content was basically all keyword loaded stuff. And he had this big title like "How to become beautiful in two weeks worth" or something. The only thing you could see when you have a small screen that you see when you logged into his blog was this title which was very catchy and then he had pictures of these 4 models in bikinis running forward and so on and 4 ads just underneath. They were just calling to get clicked with advertisement related to creams and diet pills and things like that. And then there was his blog content which obviously was changing from a day to the next which was there just to generate the ads. I would assume this is more shady, barely acceptable as Google is concerned. But I’ve seen it used quite a number of times. I can imagine that site must have been converting extremely well. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had 20% click through which he was boasting. 20 or 25% CTR when normally it’s 1% or something like this.

There is the last place which is interesting and this is changing head here, this is UI guy, the User Interface guy who’s talking - the top right of the screen. It’s excellent, because in European languages people read from left to right. And most people are right handed. So what happens is that spontaneously when you open a web page you move your mouse out to the top right of your screen. It’s the most natural thing to do.

So when you pick up your mouse and look for your pointer, immediately after, your eyes spontaneously go to the top right of the screen. And that’s a good place for an ad.

Denis, I heard from you that your new version of Semiologic can be a big helper to the people who will be positioning let’s say AdSenses or some other textual blocks or whatever inside the post. This is related to more freedom that you are giving to people in the section of widgets. Can you tell a little about it, because it’s really up to the AdSense placement topic and very important.

Sure, but before I do that - a quick reference on how it was in Semiologic until now. Until now we’ve been using a software of my designer called Ad Spaces. Basically it’s in overlay, so you have the web site and you have to impress a layer of ads on top of it. And that’s how Ad Spaces work. And then you would say I want an ad in a header, here’s the ad that gonna go in the sidebar or this is the ad that’s going to go before the titles and this ad will go after the titles, and so on.

And we’ve been managing that from a completely separate interface in Semiologic. And I had this constant stream of end user requests which were related to "Well, I’d like to hide my ads when my regulars come" or "I’d like to show the ads only when someone comes from a search engine" - displaying ads based on the context.

We’ve introduced that in Semiologic 5. So in Semiologic 5 you can, when you create your ads, also set when it’s going to be displayed. The default would be to display to all the time, but you can also decide to display the ads if the user is not a regular visitor so I am showing the ad else the user is coming from a search engine and I show the ads XXX times else and so on. It’s a slightly modified version of plugin called Who Sees Ads which was as I may recall 2nd prize in WordPress plugin competition. So, I’ve improved it and sent couple of my changed to Ozh, not all of them, but a couple.

So, we’ve added widget support, and every ad creates a widget that you can then insert using the widgets. The widgets in Semiologic 5 is a complete transformation and goes beyond anything ever seen in the WordPress world. We’ve been addressed a lot of customer questions like "I’d like to place this piece of information in between my title and the content" or "I’d like to be putting this piece of text here, how do I do this?" - in the past I’ve been answering all sorts of questions related to that.

I had the plan to generalize widgets in Semiologic, and Semiologic 5 has done just that. The entire canvas - you can drag and drop the widgets within it: before the content, before the entries you can add ads, if you want to invert the header and navigation menu and put the ad in between the two or beneath the entire thing - just drag-drop widgets in there, if you want to add related posts in your sidebar - you can, and if you on second hand that a related post should be more in a content itself - you can do that as well, if you want to have a small piece of text after each post to prompt users to subscribe to your blog - it’s just a drag and drop, and if you want to insert the ads wherever in the canvas - you can do that as well. And better yet, I’ve also introduced widgetized interface that allows you to say this widget shows on the front page, but not on static pages, it should also show on category and tag pages - and so on. And you can turn them on and off based on context.

It generalizes in a certain manner what we’ve been doing with Ad Spaces and it takes WordPress to whole new level.

We can say that without any technical background and games with HTML stuff people can naturally do almost anything they wish with the widgets. Not just simple 2 or 3 columns as it has been before. They can play with the major column of content as well. Anything they wish.

Absolutely.

Read Question 5 about cross linking solutions in blogging.

Interview with Denis Bernardy
Question 3
(read Question 2)

Content stealing is really a big problem. Many people ask questions "What to do?" "How can I stop or prevent the steal of my content?"

Question 3.
Do you have any ideas about how Semiologic can help people about it
(if it is possible)?

I’d say it’s not possible, but you can work around it. Let me explain.

The content theft is due to the presence of RSS feeds. RSS is really simple syndication and these are machine readable of your content. You know your front page has series of posts on it, and these posts appear in the RSS feed.

Now, depending on the amount of content that you put on your front page and on your blog posts your content in then subject to theft or not. Basically if your content is in your RSS feed, then potentially anyone can steal it, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about that.

Except… Except putting your content outside the RSS feed which is what I usually recommend my customers to do. I have a plugin in Semiologic Pro which is called Silo Web Design. What it breaks down to is - I tell the users, "Your real content should be on static pages anyway." You know the difference between the static page and blog post is that the static page is left outside of the blog chronology. It’s a permanent piece of content.

If you are writing say Dog Training Tips - there is something intrinsic about dog training tips, it’s not something new, it’s not a new piece of information that is constantly moving, there is something permanent in that piece of information.

So, it’s usually a better option to create a static page for that piece of information and then to create a blog post and say, "Well. I’ve updated the dog training section, and I’ve added a new tip how to teach your dog how to sit." And this post gets into your RSS feed with a link to a static page.

When you organize your site in this manner, then your content is theft proof, because the true content is not in the RSS feed, only the announcement of your new content is. And if your announcement ends up in the RSS feed and get to other blogs - all the better, because that’s an extra one way link to your site. You don’t need to worry about.

Read Question 4 about make money blogging and AdSense placement on blogs.

Interview with Denis Bernardy
Question 2
(read Question 1)

Denis, another question is submitted by the user of your Semiologic and it’s a peculiar question about one of the features there. You have a feature when someone makes a comment to the post to approve it, delete it or mark it as spam.

Question 2.
What happens exactly behind the curtain when you mark comment as spam?

They get flagged as spam and they are kept in a database. They are no longer shown on the blog obviously.

There are a handful of tools in WordPress that leverage the existing spam and conduct analysis whether a new comment is spam or not based on its similarity with previous comment marked as spam. That’s what happens at the background.

WordPress doesn’t do that by default, you have to get a plugin called Spam Karma which is extremely resource hungry.

When you activate Akismet it’s also used in the global pool of known spam in order to fight future spam that will look similarly to this comment that you’ve just marked as spam. There is a neural network that can potentially feed on this data that you are marking as spam. It makes it less likely to appear spam in future on your sites.

So we can say if you mark it as spam you are really joining the fight against spam comments.

Exactly. And that would assume that you activate a plugin that is neural network based - there are two (of them). There is Akismet which centralized. What happens is when you mark comment as spam you also tell Akismet "please send this comment to Akismet server", and within the Akismet server it gets stored for future reference, so that when there is a new spam it gets processed and compared to the existing/known spam - and this increases the probability of detecting the future spam, based on this database of spam items.

Read Question 3 about content theft here.

Script of Interview
Done by Free Blogging Advice Guidelines Project
with
Denis Bernardy - Inventor of Semiologic

Hello Denis, I am Dim Vasen from Free Blogging Advice Guidelines project, and I am really happy to be having an interview with you which, I think, can be of great help to many bloggers throughout the world. Denis, you are warmly welcomed here.

Thank you.

I have sent you a list of questions to make you not that surprised about what people are asking here and you have that list as well. That’s why - if you don’t mind - I would like to go to question number one which is quite simple. I have been in this situation, many people have been as well.

 

Question 1.
What should ideal blogging platform have inside?

So that people could make proper choice. What’s your opinion about what should be inside a perfect blogging platform.

I think I would say what’s around it is more important than what’s in it. What’s in it obviously you would expect things like an ad manager, the ability to have leverage on the way things are laid out and some leverage on managing your header and the tool on managing your navigational menu, whatever.

But all that ultimately are tiny features that you add up together. There is just a tremendous amount of features that are available for WordPress. You know, you can always add the missing components which is rare, because with Semiologic PRO because there are so many things there already.

I think that they key thing that one should be looking for when looking for a blogging software is someone who’s accountable, someone who maintains it in the background. That would be the key value of Semiologic PRO. It’s not just a piece of software. It’s a piece of software that is maintained. And there is community around it, value added service providers, virtual assistants to help out users who don’t want spend time configuring their blog. There are copywriters, there are people who do skinning and graphic design, there is the community forum where you can get all sort of answers to all sorts of questions. And I am around to answer questions as well, and there is a guy who works with me on a regular basis - Mike - who is also extremely helpful.

I think much more than the actual features - ad management, poll manager, events management, all sorts of related widgets, all sorts of fuzzy widgets that allow you to list posts and pages, etc.

But the core value of what you should be looking for when you are looking for a blog software is much more related to maintenance. Like making sure when a new version of WordPress shows up not everything is broken as happens often. This is where the value in Semiologic Pro is. When there is a WordPress update, Semiologic Pro gets updated as well. We update absolutely everything when necessary.

In particular this latest WordPress update - it was 2.3 - it broke like 50% of plugins. And we repaired single one of them so that the customers could upgrade their blogs. And we’ll continue doing that with the next versions as well.

I really like your point because I did not think it this way, to be frank. But I agree with what you are saying. It’s absolutely scary when you have picked a blogging platform to be abandoned. Yes, for example, there is WordPress, there are many plugins to it. But if the plugins are free, no one would care about giving a help to you.

And I, by the way, was personally surprised with the support and that you answer the questions, I was also getting answers from Mike. Think about the support, who is behind, are they helping or not - then you have very great chances to be successful with your blog and, definitely, this blogging platform.

Read Question 2 about how to fight comment spam here.

Free Blogging Advice Guidelines Project
Has Recorded Yesterday
Skype Interview with Denis Bernardy - Inventor of Semiologic

This is interview has covered the questions of our blog visitors and gave very interesting revelations about:

• blogging in general
• how to choose the best blogging platform
• how to protect your blog content from steal
• what spots on your blog give better results with AdSenses
• how to ping blog properly
• how to customize the blog looks with new widgets
• and many other interesting topics.

This interview about blogging is recorded in audio, and will be published on this blog in a series of posts with the script of the interview and the audio file itself. So please keep checking the category of Denis Bernardy on Free Blogging Advice Guidelines project for the details of the interview.