In the WordPress world, Contact Form 7 is “the king of contact forms”. It has (as of today 9 of July 2009) 543,600 downloads, a average rating of four stars (of 279 ratings). Also it has been translated to over 30 languages and  2 years of being in the plugin directory. Those are impressive numbers so, I decided to give it a test.

Contact Form 7 is a nice plugin, works and is flexible. Still I didn’t feel quite satisfied with it, there was something missing in the user experience. I guess is (although old school is cool) it is a bit “Too Old School” for me. Today I searched for a new one and found something interesting called Visitor Contact Forms.

Visitor Contact Form has 1,161 downloads, has a rating of four stars and a half, in 2 ratings (I gave it five and it had a four star rating before) and apparently it has been on the WordPress plugin directory since 24 of June 2009. As you can see, “it’s the new kid on the block” that  hasn’t pass the test of time as Contact Form 7. Nevertheless I decided to take it out for a rid and let me tell you it was fast.

The Test Drive

First you can install the plugin, then go to http://www.visitorcontact.com/ sign up (which it actually takes seconds) and then it directs you directly to a page where you create your first contact form (See image bellow).

Here you write the name of the form, the website where it will be displayed and used, as well as the email where contact emails will be sent. Then you can write physical address information (in case is important for people to know where you are physically), see image bellow.

If you decide that it is important, write them down because it will show to the right of your form, a Google Maps pointing to you. Finally you can add your Skype Id, phone numbers and twitter username, which are posted bellow the map and become other ways to contact you. The Image bellow shows how the contact form will looked with all the additional information filled in.

Once you finished with filling up the information, you can custom the color of the Sticky Button, finally you can press the “Create Form & Get Button” button. Contact Visitor then will give you two sets of javascript code to publish your new contact form.

Note:

Although I used it in WordPress, you can use the form in any website, you just need to add the script as you will add any other javscript code. Contact Visitor gives you instructions on where is the best place script in your code.

First use a contact button that will be on the side of your website (or better know as Sticky Contact Button). The Sticky Button will be always “there”, no mater where in the website your visitor is. When he presses that button, the background will get dark and a form will show up. Is a nice action script if you ask me and is convenient because the user doesn’t navigate out of the page where she/he is. The second  is (a more traditional way), having it embed in a page in your website.

The image bellow shows the two types of scripts in action contact button to the left (in red) and the embedded contact form.

Bellow is the contact form that shows when you press the Red Contact Button.

To use it in your WordPress webiste/blog then you just install the Contact Visitor Plugin. Then go to the settings and write the number of the form you created in visitorcontact.com. (See image bellow) Here you also have the option to use the Sticky Contact Button or Make a Contact page with the form embedded. I chose both to give it a test.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day the killer feature is User Experience. Contact Form 7 appeals to a international crowd that need to customize the fields, those are the only advantages it has over Visitor Contact, because the only customization offered by the Visitor Contact is the color of the Sticky Button.

On the other hand Visitor Contact gives you a form that works, with modern feature like a Sticky Button, maps and Skype button. It also gives you a account where you can manage all the contacts of the emails received, as well as get location information of the sender (sales people will like this). Finally as stated before you get a better user experience and a service, not a plug-in that can work with other websites. Visitor Contact gives you more than just a plug-in, it actually uses the plug-in so you can get to know and use a good service.

Still I have a question: how the guy makes money? I ask this because the service is for free, so if I’m dependent on it. how do I know that tomorrow it will disappear? Yes, he can receive donations for the WordPress plug-in, but the “magic sauce” is not the plug-in but visitorcontact.com. How do I know he will charge me later, when I have various sites using the service? I guess maybe he is doing it for love and experience, or he is waiting to get enough users and then offer premium services. This last one sounds reasonable, because other people will like customization, remove the visitor contact logo (and add their logo), change colors, etc. He can even provide a newsletter service like Mail Chimp. Who knows I guess I will have to contact him and ask him. In the mean time I will enjoy a great service/Wordpress plug-in while it lasts.

XML Sitemaps or Google Site maps are xml files that list the URLs of your site and metadata (of the URL). This metadata includes the date the URL was updated, how often changes and its importance compared to other URLs in the site. All this information makes “life easier” for the web crawlers of search engine, as well as making sure that all the links are crawled. The sitemap doesn’t guarantee that the search engine will index you site, but it will increase the probability of it. This file is different from the sitemap page of websites, which is a list of pages (represented by its title) so the visitor is able to find them instead of going through every menu option. For more about XML sitemaps you can visit sitemap.org and about the navigational sitemaps (i.e footer of dell.com) check this link here.

For WordPress there is a plug-in that generates the sitemap of your website or blog: the Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. It’s called Google Sitemaps because it was first introduced by Google.

When your blog was hosted on WordPress.com you didn’t need to install this plugin because they will take care of this. However when you migrate your blog or site to hosted solution, you have more freedom and power over your site, and “with more power comes more responsibility”. So we are responsible to generate the xml file so its reported to the search engines. Thankfully this plugin does all the hard work.

Once installed you proceed to generate the sitemap of your website by going to XML-Sitemap option in the Settings menu. Then you will have a screen where you can build the sitemap and configure the plug-in in various forms. The default settings work fine since it will report the sitemap to MSN, Ask and Google. For Yahoo you will need to have Yahoo account and generate a API key that will permit the plug in access the services. You can get the key from here.

You can also use the webmaster tools by Google to manually upload the sitemap. Using the webmaster tools permits you to check for URL that are not found and learn more of how Google is indexing your website.

When I moved the webmaster tools told me that my URL were not found, however when I clicked on them there was no problem. After some time I figure out that the problem was that I changed the permalink structure of the blog. I set it up back to the original structure (from wordpress.com)

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

and the next day I checked everything was OK. If you get a bunch of not found URL in the Google Webmaster tools, check your permalinks that might be the problem.

This post is part of the “G to the Square WordPress Chronicles”, for more chronicles click here.

You just moved from wordpress.com to a self hosted blog using wordpress, you found your dream theme and you are blogging. The wordpress.com stats are running without a problem, the only thing is that you suddenly haven’t registered any visits for some time (see image bellow). Zero is the worst thing you can see for boosting your confidence.

Zero Stats flatline

If the visits have been zero for a long time there are to things you can do, setup up your Google Analytics account and install the plug-in in WordPress. That will give you a second source for stats.

To fix the Zero problem in the wordpress.com stats, go the the theme editor and check the footer.php file. If you don’t see the

<?php wp_footer(); ?>

line just before the </body> html tag, then put it. That should fix your problem Zero problem.

This post is part of the “G to the Square WordPress Chronicles”, for more chronicles click here.

The “WordPress Chronicles” are posts on experiencing and dealing with WordPress. I have to say that is fun, some things don’t always work, however is always straight forward. On the other hand Drupal is just a mountain of menus over menus and constant scrolling up and down. So after every post on working with WordPress, you will se a sentence stating that this is part of the WordPress Chronicles with a link to the category.

A couple of weeks ago, I spend around two days building a website, using WordPress, as a Content Management System (CMS). The idea behind the page was to make a prototype of a idea and gain experience with WordPress from scratch. I had to deal with common roadblocks that I find when dealing with LAMP Stack (Linux Apache MySQL and PHP).

While chatting Stavros (a friend) and told the above and he replied:

so, these 2 days made u an expert?

you should write a blog

the 2 days expert

He was kind off joking, however it made me ponder about expertise in building websites using CMS. You see, in theory many people “know” how to build a website using a CMS. Hosting companies had made a business on providing a cheap place ,with one click setups for Drupal, Joomla, WordPress and others. However during the process roadblocks appear, so what we do? We Google for it or subscribe to forums and ask. Now, with twitter and similar platforms people look for the solution there, either through search of keywords or just asking. So, for every roadblock there is search in various places on the Web. If it works we bookmark it and generally go there to look for more solutions. We continue like these, until we had finished and achieve our milestone or goal. Some may even blog about, to share their experience and note how it different from what they found on the Web.

Expert is define as “one with the special skill or knowledge representing mastery of a particular subject” by the Merriam Webster dictionary. The Internet gives you this ability to become a expert, anybody can do it, with a low barrier of entry. However it might take less time for a person, that already has done it various times. Nevertheless, once we do it we feel more comfortable the next time and even gain confidence to help other and “show off our expertise”.

The more you learn, the less you know and there will be always somebody with more experience than you. That doesn’t mean that in this age with access to all the information on the Web, you can’t be a expert in your own realm.

Let’s take for example Scrappy. He just rented some shared hosting from “Easy Hosting CMS” and installed Drupal. He uses power a site (scrappy.com) of his portfolio and his blog. After some issues, he was able to make it run after a four days of hard work. Scrappy is proud of his website and he shows it off to his friends and peers. A couple of week pass by and Lil Ed wants his own website. So, he asks Scrappy for help because he sees him as an expert, based on what he saw in scrappy.com. Even if Scrappy has only done it once, the perception it gives to people that don’t have an idea of actually how to do it: is that he is an expert.

If this was 1990, Scrappy will have had a hard time figuring a lot of things. He will need a bunch of books and ask a bunch of people. Today all this knowledge or expertise can be accessed and absorbed on the Internet. As a result, you will have a lot of “2 day experts” hanging around in communities. Now the questions is what are those that has been working with X topic for years? Even more, are they as important as they where 20 years ago?

The Compositio WordPress theme was design by Design Disease and brought to you, thanks to Smashing Magazine. Now that my blog is self hosted I decided to install the WP-reCaptcha plugin as a antispam measure for the comments. The plugin worked well with other themes, so that is how I new the problem was with the theme. Tried to fixed by myself, looking at the comments left in the plugins home page, however I couldn’t. So, I left a comment and Blaenk Denum was kind enough to help. Apparently is a common problem when the reCaptcha box doesn’t appear bellow the comments textbox.

The solution is to put

<?php do_action(‘comment_form’, $post->ID); ?>

in the comments.php file just before line 70 (or before </form> tag) for the Compsitio Theme, as stated by Bleank. For the other themes look for the </form> tag  and paste the code just before.

The code we insert, is call to a Action Hook. Based on the Theme Development guidelines there are some Plugin Api Action Hooks that should be included on all themes. These actions hook need to be present in the theme, for the Plugins to display information directly in the header, footer, sidebar, or in the page body. In the case of the comments the following is stated:

comment_form

Goes in comments.php and comments-popup.php, directly before the comment form’s closing tag (</form>). Example plugin use: display a comment preview.

Usage: <?php do_action('comment_form', $post->ID); ?>

For the case of the Compsitio theme, this line of code was only missing in the comments.php and was present in the comments-popup.php.

Once you have made your video in Animoto, you might want to post it in your blog. If you have WordPress and already wrote the post, and want to include it, the process is not that smooth as it should. Generally I write and then look for the media to include, or included until the post is finish. Animoto has the option of creating a post, that goes to your WordPress drafts, with the “embedded widget” and then you could add the content. However if you include more than one video, your not going to do more than one post? Also I want more control and freedom, copy paste freedom.

Note the reader: It might seen of too complicated for some users and they are better of posting the video from Animoto and then write the blog, true. However the target audience is for people that want to post more than on video or/and want more control.

Here is how you do it:

Go to your Animoto account and play your video.

Then click on the Post/Embed online button, the video will stop.

You will be presented with a variety of social media places where to post the video, choose the Embeded instead. There you will be presented with to options: MySpace and Other Sites. Click on Other sites.

Copy the code and put it on notepad or some text editor.

Here is a sample code that I copy from my video:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/46928cc51133af17/499300880f97edc6/46928cc565ffaf02/94f136e9/-cpid/791d0466298564d9/autostart/false/widget.js”></script>

Note the two alphanumeric strings above: one in red and the other in blue. You copy the code bellow and assign to the wid the red string and to the pid the blue string. Genearrly the red one will be the same for all your videos in Animoto and the blue one will change every time you generate the code in the site, even for the same video.

['clearspring_widget title="Animoto.com" wid=" " pid=" " width="432" height="260" domain="widgets.clearspring.com"]

(Note the apostrophe betwen the braket and clearspring, that should be removed when posting, is so the wordpress will not try to process it as a widget)

At the end you will end up with the following:

['clearspring_widget title="My Animodo Post Hack" wid="46928cc51133af17" pid="499300880f97edc6" width="300" height="200" domain="widgets.clearspring.com"]

Which will look like this:

[clearspring_widget title="My Animodo Post Hack" wid="46928cc51133af17" pid="499300880f97edc6" width="300" height="200" domain="widgets.clearspring.com"]

You can also change the title, width and height of the widget. The hight and width alters the widget, not the content so you will end up like a “baddly cut off” video, as shown above.

Once you finish, you are ready to put it in your post in HTML or source mode, depending on the editor. You can use the preview button to check how it looks and if you need to tweak the size to goes better with your blog and blogging style.

Conclusion

Social media is about sharing, if you suck at it even with a great product/service, it will not pick up as it should. Animoto uses Clearspring for the posting and embedding of the content produced on the site. Its ok to outsource that, generally those one fit all solution that promise the heavens, don’t do a good job. Usability test will be nice to find where clearspring product fails. At least the Facebook one does a good job if I’m already logged, unfortunately I can’t put it in “my videos”, its posted like YouTube videos.

Enter Annika Lidne, from Lidne Inc. She is here to talk about hwy she loves social media and hate Facebook. Again I didn’t take notes (but next one and forward I did).

Annika starts with the walled garden effect and AOL. I have never heard about the walled garden effect, but knew about AOL and how it was the gran daddy of Internet (in USA) a decade ago. Basically the walled garden effect (for those who don’t know) it’s a closed set of services provided to users, such as Facebook. They want everybody and everything to stay in Facebook, because they revenue comes from on ads on Facebook. The problem with this is that sooner or later something better comes or people get sick of being “taken hostage” in this beautiful walled garden, so they leave. Such as it happened with AOL, since users needed to navigate the Internet through their browser. This  also was a pain for content providers because they needed to fit AOL requirements.

For more on walled garden check out this post. Here is a guy starts on justifying why he refuses to participate in social networks, which leads to the walled garden discussion.

Annika talked about how this is a women’s world since there are more girl or woman bloggers than men (she gave stats for Sweden, not the world which is suspicious since women in Sweden kick ass), the same with social network activity. But she forgot to mention that men still rule, even if there is a shift, we still rule (sorry but is true and it doesn’t mean it’s a good thing, but its true.)

Girls dominating social media should not be a surprise, since girls (in their teens especially) have this tendency to talk a lot. Remember back in the days when there was no internet, and how girls will also monopolized the phone for hours, talking and talking. Same today, but they got IM, SMS, they got social networks and now they figured out that blogs are a way to expressed out of the “walled garden”. All the  tools mentioned  above, help keep in touch with most of their friends on the same time, which is a way of life and not just a phase.

Teenage girls want to express themselves in so many ways; in contrast boys are happy with their video games and porn. (Yes I said porn and I don’t think today with the Internet a teenage boy haven’t seen a naked women in some way.)

For those that where at Facebook Garage, you may remember the presentation highlight was in the Q&A, when a guy monopolized it by attacking here and questioning why she hated Facebook. The guy needed a chill pill, since it looked like a vendetta against Annika. It just show how people are different and need different things. So if you need something more personalized and don’t have what it takes to do a social network from the scratch, maybe you can make one at Ning. At Ning you can create a  social network of anything, for example nustart students at KTH, Olimpia fans in La Ceiba or I want to learn Swedish but I’m lazy social network. I guess you got the point.

At the end of the day maybe Facebook is doomed, but blogs will live another day and that is why they state that the next social network will be wordpress.