Just earlier in the week I noticed that my feeds haven’t’ been updating in a few days, this is one good reason to be on your own RSS feed mailing list as you can make sure you notice if there is a problem before too much time elapses.  (I just wasn’t paying attention as I don’t check my own feeds that often).

Ironically my feeds weren’t updating and I searched Google which ironically led me to my own article that I wrote in November 2009 to fix WordPress Feedburner not updating issues.  I tried every step in my own article to no resolve, but when I clicked on the Troubleshootize and “Resync Now” buttons on Google Feedburner I saw the following error:

Feed Error: Your Feed Filesize is Larger than 512K

I was curious as to the problem, I had switched to Amazon S3 on a few days prior to my feed not updating so I considered this might be related to the issue.  In troubleshooting further I found that my settings in WordPress > Reading were configured to send my last 10 posts to the RSS feed.  As it turns out when you use several images in articles and even with WP-Smush.it to optimize image file sizes, you can easily exceed the Feedburner RSS feed file size limit.

The solution in my case was to drop the # of feeds I was sending to my RSS from 10 to 5, this immediately resolved the problem and allowed me to resync my articles.  I do send full article feeds to RSS, had I only sent summaries I probably could have left at 10.

So if you run into issues with Feed Filesize when sending WordPress feeds to Feedburner, check your last posts to see if there were any large images inserted in the post body, and tweak the number of articles you publish to your RSS, you may want to temporarily lower this number until you can get your image sizes down or get past a single offending post if you have 1 post with a lot of high resolution images.  It turns out this issue was unrelated to me switching to host my content through Amazon S3 but the coincidence had me digging quite a bit until I found the issue.

-Dragon Blogger

No related posts.

What is Microdata?

Microdata as it pertains to this article is the HTML 5 markup that is used to help classify information on a website/page/post with tags that break down certain individual elements on the page so that it helps Google or other search engines categorize and index that information.

Schema.org

You can gain the scope of Microdata types and information from http://schema.org/ or http://data-vocabulary.org but basically it starts out with having an item type.

This is an HTML 5 tag that looks like this:

<div itemscope itemtype=”http://data-vocabulary.org/Review“>

This sets what type of article the post/page is that the search engines are indexing and you can find a full list of all the schema.org types here:  http://schema.org/docs/full.html

Note, there are dozens and everything from ‘creativework’ to ‘book’ to ‘TVEpisode’ and so much more.

For the purposes of this review we are assuming that most bloggers want to index their “review” articles with the type review.  At this time the only plugin my writers and I have found that can handle auto creation of “review” HTML 5 Microdata is the SEO Ultimate WordPress plugin, with the Rich Snippet Creator module.  The good news is I was already using this plugin for the Deeplinking Module and it works in conjunction with All in One SEO Pack if you just disable the SEO modules and leave only the specific modules you want.

With SEO Ultimate WordPress Plugin however it only supports the item type of Review, so if you are looking for another Microdata item type to add to your WordPress blog I don’t have another one to recommend at the moment.

If your blog doesn’t do any reviews of anything from products to movies, then you don’t really need to add the Microdata for Review.  If you have a food or recipe blog then see the helpful links below for a plugin that will add the Microdata for recipe’s to your site.

Enable Rich Snippet Creator

Go into your SEO Ultimate Settings and make sure you enable the module for the Rich Snippet Creator.

After you enable the Rich Snippet Creator you have to configure it.

Now, I have read that HTML5 Microdata format <itemprop> is going to be the standard and I don’t know why “microformats” which are defined with <span class> tags are the recommended.  But I had better results when I scanned my site with the Google Rich Snippets tool when I set my Rich Snippet Creator Microdata to HTML5 format.

You also have to set which categories and tags you want to configure to use the “Review” microdata.  It will automatically set any matching “categories” or posts that use the listed “tags” to having the HTML5 Microdata for a “Review” itemtype.

This is good because this will automatically update all of your older posts that match these categories and/or tags to add most of the HTML5 Microdata you want to use.  The only Microdata you need to add manually at this point is the “rating” you set for each product, movie or game you review.

You do this by going into the WordPress edit post for the article, and under the SEO Settings module you can see under Rich Snippet Type “Review” there is a Star Rating Dropdown for reviewed item.

Select the star rating you want to assign to your product, movie, game…etc that you have reviewed and update your post.

When you view the source code of your post, you will now see some new HTML5 Microdata tags which comply with Data-Vocabulary.org specifications.

The following will appear at the top of your article (only visible in source code)

<div itemscope itemtype=”http://data-vocabulary.org/Review“>

And the following will appear below your article (again only in sourcecode)

<div><span itemprop=”rating” content=”3″></span><span itemprop=”reviewer” content=”aidyspoetry”></span><time itemprop=”dtreviewed” datetime=”2011-06-27″></time></div>

• The itemprop “rating” is going to be the rating for the product.
• The itemprop “reviewer” will be the author who reviewed the product (grabbed by getting author of post)
• The itemprop “dtreviewed” is the date and time the review was published.

Doing this will help ensure your articles are complaint with the Schema.org markup for Microdata and may help your articles get better SERP listings.

Validate Your Microdata

Give it some time to index after making changes, then use the Rich Snippets Testing tool to validate your post/page has proper HTML5 Microdata being picked up by Google. You should see the author, and all defined items properly displayed.

Here is an example with a recent review of Cedar Rapids:

Summary

This isn’t a complete Comprehensive article about the importance of Microdata and Schema.org formats that you should be using, but this article should help you get started and at least have your articles or posts that are “reviews” get the proper HTML5 markup so that your Microdata will be picked up by Google.

Also note that at the time of this article the SEO Ultimate WordPress plugin stull uses http://data-vocabulary.org and not the newest Schema.org for Microdata formats.   This is still beneficial and I hope sometime soon that the plugin will support Schema.org which is what is likely to be the standard for Search Engines.

But Wait, There’s More

Here are some other great resources for learning more about schema.org Microdata and why you should be using it for your site.

• http://authoritylabs.com/blog/implementing-schema-microdata/
• http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/add-rich-snippets-reviews-wordpress-blog/
• http://seo-hacker.com/schema-big-ranking-factor/
• http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/internet-news/google-updates-pagerank-on-the-heels-of-panda-2-2/

So my fellow bloggers, how many of you have implemented HTML5 Microdata into your blogs yet?

How many of you are just now determining if you should be doing this?

-Dragon Blogger

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Add and remove contact fields

In WordPress 2.9 they added the ability to filter the contact fields, so you can add or remove fields at will. For example, the function shown below (which needs to be pasted into your functions.php file) removes the AIM field and adds fields for Twitter and Facebook:

function modify_contactmethods( $contactmethods ) {
// Remove unwanted fields //
unset($contactmethods['aim']);
// Add new fields //
$contactmethods['facebook_url'] = 'Facebook URL';
$contactmethods['twitter_url'] = 'Twitter URL';
return $contactmethods;
}
add_filter('user_contactmethods','modify_contactmethods');

You can add and remove fields at will. The variables for the default fields that you’ll need to delete are:

• AIM – ‘aim’
• Yahoo IM – ‘yim’
• Jabber / Google Talk – ‘jabber’

You can label your new fields as you wish. Obviously the more descriptive they are, the better.

Display the information for the author

Now that you’ve collected the information, you probably want to do something with it. Many websites these days have a small author box at the bottom of the posts which allows you to show a link to the author’s homepage and display the author’s gravatar and bio.

If you want to display any of the new contact fields in your author info box (you may also want to display it in author.php), use the following code, changing the argument for the appropriate field that you set in the function above:

<?php echo $curauth->twitter_url; ?>

That’s all there is to it! Piece of cake right? How do you plan to use this? What kind of fields do you think would be good to collect and display with the author’s info? Maybe LinkedIn? Or YouTube?

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First, if you don’t know what ReplyMe is then I suggest you head on over and read my ReplyMe WordPress plugin review.  In short though ReplyMe is a plugin that will allow your blog to auto email commenters when their comment is replied to.  It does this without them having to checkmark a box to subscribe to comments and does this email only for replies to their comment thread and not for the entire post.

ReplyMe only works if you have Comment Threading enabled in your WordPress blog, so make sure you have the WordPress Settings -> Discussion -> Enable threaded (nested) comments checked.

So, now that I told you about the ReplyMe plugin (again) and what it does you are probably curious as to why you would want to customize it right?

Default ReplyMe Email Output

By default when you get an email from a comment reply, the format will look like this:

By default the plugin will let the commenter see all new replies via email and it shows the link of the comment thread, but doesn’t actually have a clickable link back to the post.  This is the default.

On FamousBloggers.net, they were doing a neat little trick in that they show you via email that you received a new reply, but you have to actually click the link back to the thread to read your reply.  This forces a commenter to go back to your site to read the reply, which will increase the odds that while they are there on the site, they may reply to the reply or possibly browse to something else on the site.

Customizing the ReplyMe Email Output

So I wanted to customize the ReplyMe email output to make it to where the commenter would have to return to the site to read the reply.  I also wanted to include additional information like how the commenter can follow me on Twitter or Facebook right from the comment reply.  This is also a good way to offer an eBook or mailing list enticement for those who want to implement that as well.

To customize the ReplyMe email message you just go to your WordPress Dashboard and under Settings click on the ReplyMe link

Here you are given a list of shortcode you can use for the email message which are very important as they will generate the links and info you need.

Using this shortcode information, I modified the follow code which is the default code:

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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><p><b>Your comment on the post <a href="[posturl]">[posttitle]</a> has a new reply</b></p></span></span>
 
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><div style="padding:10px;margin:10px 0;background:#FFFBCC">
Here is your comment:<br />
<div style="border:1px solid #919191;margin:5px;padding:4px;"> [commentmsg] </div>
[commenter] -- [commenttime]
</div></span></span>
 
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><div style="padding:10px;margin:10px 0;background:#FFFBCC">
Here is the new reply:<br />
<div style="border:1px solid #919191;margin:5px;padding:4px;"> [newcommentmsg] </div>
<a href="[newcommenterurl]">[newcommenter]</a> -- [newcommenttime] <br />
Visit: [newcommenturl]
</div></span></span>
 
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><p>
Thank you for your commenting on <a href="[blogurl]">[blogname]</a> :) <br />
[blogurl]
</p></span></span>

To look like this instead:

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<em><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><p><b>Your comment on the post <a href="[posturl]">[posttitle]</a> has a new reply</b></p></span></span></em>
 
<em><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><div style="padding:10px;margin:10px 0;background:#FFFBCC">
Here is your comment:<br />
<div style="border:1px solid #919191;margin:5px;padding:4px;"> [commentmsg] </div>
[commenter] -- [commenttime]
</div></span></span></em>
 
<em><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><div style="padding:10px;margin:10px 0;background:#FFFBCC">
</span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #0000ff;">You can read your comment thread here:<br />
<div style="border:1px solid #919191;margin:5px;padding:4px;"><a href="[newcommenturl]">[newcommenturl]</a></div>
</span><a href="[newcommenterurl]">[newcommenter]</a> -- [newcommenttime] <br />
</div></span></span></em>
 
<em><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><p>
<span style="color: #0000ff;">Don't forget to follow <a href="</span></span></span></em><a href="http://www.twitter.com/dragonblogger&quot;"><em><span style="color: #0000ff; font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">http://www.twitter.com/dragonblogger"</span></span></em></a><em><span style="color: #0000ff; font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">>@dragonblogger</a> on Twitter or Like <a href="</span></span></em><a href="http://www.facebook.com/dragonbloggertech&quot;"><em><span style="color: #0000ff; font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">http://www.facebook.com/dragonbloggertech"</span></span></em></a><em><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #0000ff;">>DragonBloggerTech Facebook Fanpage</a><br>
</span>Thank you for your commenting on <a href="[blogurl]">[blogname]</a> :) <br />
</p></span></span></em>

So now with the ReplyMe plugin modified, when a commenter receives an email update it will look like this:

I did notice that previously I would reply to comments and sometimes not get any replies back.  Hopefully this will generate a few more interactions on the site and keep users replying to their replies.

Update May 11th 2011

Thanks to Brad Harmon who suggested consideration of people who mostly check email and websites via smart phones now, these users are less inclined to follow a link in the email without knowing the reply, but a good reply will make them want to return and visit the site.  At the thought of this I decided to modify the ReplyMe code a little to where it does show the full commment, but right under has a URL with a clickable link and invites the user to return to the site to continue the conversation.

So I have updated my ReplyMe Customization text to look like this now in the reply section under original comment:

<div style="padding:10px;margin:10px 0;background:#FFFBCC">Here is the comment reply: <br \><div style="border:1px solid #919191;margin:5px;padding:4px;"> [newcommentmsg] </div>Respond your comment thread by clicking here: <a href="[newcommenturl]">[newcommenturl]</a><br>	<a href="[newcommenterurl]">[newcommenter]</a> —— [newcommenttime] <br /></div>

-Dragon Blogger

Who else customizes their ReplyMe plugin?  How do you leverage the customization features?

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The article you should read is titled How to add Social Media Buttons in WordPress and this will provide you with the code to add the buttons manually to Thesis or non-Thesis WordPress themes as well as showcase 3 plugins which can help add social media buttons automatically.  I opted for the Custom Sharebar plugin because it allowed me to build new share buttons on the fly which make it easy for you to add a BlogEngage, Blokube, SerpD, BizSugar or any other of your favorite share site buttons.

With the Custom Sharebar it also puts the bar on the side of your post so that when a reader scrolls down, the Sharebar will scroll with the post.  No longer does your reader have to remember to go back to the top of your post, they have the social submit buttons right in their peripheral vision the entire time.  This in theory should increase the number of shares your article will receive.

Old Social Submit Buttons

Before the change you can see my social buttons are squished in my post on the top right, they are only at the top and on long articles you have to scroll all the way to the top to share my articles. This also causes images and text to either float to the left of the image or be pushed down which affects cosmetics.

New Social Submit Buttons

You now can see the buttons are off to the side of the post instead of inside the article, they are always at the eye level of the reader and will scroll with the content when it scrolls.

Setting up the Custom Sharebar

When setting up the Custom Sharebar you just install the WordPress plugin, then go to the options to start configuring which buttons you want to display.

You simply edit position #’s and decide which social articles you want to present on your site.  Note, you probably should limit to no more than 5 or 6 tops so pick the article directories which convert the best or have provided you with the most traffic/votes previously for a good starting point.

When setting up the Twitter button, remember to click on ‘edit’ and add your twitter username in the data-via=”twitterid” section so it will have a via @yourusername when someone tweets your article.  Or you can simply add your “Twitter username” to the sharebar settings instead.  I preferred to use custom code so I can add the data-related to recommend other Twitter accounts after retweeting.

Building Custom Sharebar Buttons

It is very easy to build custom sharebar buttons, all you have to do is click “Add New Button”

Then all you have to do is name the button, and cut/paste the code for the “voting buttons” from the article directory you want to implement.

I used Blokube for this example, and chose buttons on the Blokube Voting Buttons page.  All I did was cut and paste the code for 1 vertical button and 1 horizontal button.

Set the position # and checkmark enabled to enable the Social Submit button to show up on your site.

Then test the button to make sure it works properly.

When Not to Use Custom Sharebar

Custom Sharebar will put the Social Media Sharing buttons on either side of your blog posts, but if you have sidebar columns on both left and right side of your blog post, then the Custom Sharebar is better of not being used by default.  You can use the custom code included in the Sharebar to put the buttons manually inside the post or instead use the Digg Digg WordPress plugin or one of the other plugins/php code tips recommended in the article on Traffic Generation Café listed above in this blog post.

Overall I am super impressed with the Custom Sharebar written by By Monjurul Dolon of DevGrow and I highly recommended it to bloggers who use themes which have sidebars on only one side of their blog.

What do you think of my new share buttons, do you like the new position and feature better than having them at the top right of the post?  Share your honest input, if you liked the old method better let me know.

Custom Code Buttons for Sharebar:

Google +1 Button (Tall)

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<!-- Place this tag where you want the +1 button to render -->
<!-- Place this render call where appropriate --><script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
 (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();
// ]]></script>

Google +1 Button (Small)

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<!-- Place this tag where you want the +1 button to render -->
<!-- Place this render call where appropriate --><script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
(function() {
var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true;
po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s);
})();
// ]]></script>

BlogEngage Vote Button

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<script type="text/javascript" src="http://blogengage.com/evb/button4.php"></script>

-Dragon Blogger

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