This is a plugin designed to allow you to append nofollow to the rel attribute of selected links in your blogroll.
It does not conflict with the link relationships (XFN) specified when you edit a link. It will just be appended to the end of the rel attribute when it’s displayed.
Upload `nofollow-links` folder to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory
Activate the plugin through the `Plugins` menu in WordPress
Navigate to `Links` > `Nofollow Links` and select links you want nofollowed
Click `Mark Links Nofollow` button to save your selection
Screenshots
Feedback?
Got a bug to report? Or an enhancement to recommend? Or perhaps even some code
to submit for inclusion in the next release? Great! Share your feedback through my contact form.
I previously railed against the trend of digital sharecropping in my post Giving Up On Web Ownership. The task of taking ownership of your digital identity can be very difficult when you try to replicate the functionality of all the different sites you might use.
Trying to create owned versions of Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Delicious, Flickr and all of the other places where you have a presence could easily be a full time job. Who has the time?
This is where the concept of Data Minimalism comes into play. First try to figure out which of these sites actually add value to your life. If you really think about it, most of them are just noise. Now you have a shorter list. How can you replicate this yourself? I bet you can migrate most of these use cases into one or two sites that you manage.
If you already have a blog, how about you set up special categories for Twitter and Facebook? I’m sure there is a way to automatically tweet everything in a category. WordPress can do pretty nice photo galleries too, that should be able to replace Flickr. Maybe there is even a way to publish your WordPress galleries to Flickr?
I’m going to take a look and see what I can do to make this easier. I have a couple ideas in the pipeline. If you want to find out when I get these things published just sign up for my free newsletter in the sidebar and I’ll shoot you an email as things progress.
Today’s episode of Rebooting The News Jay was out of town so Dave had on Adam Curry and yours truly! I wish I could say I was invited to be a guest, but Dave was just taking calls and picked me. On the show I talk about my work trying to use WordPress as a microblog platform. It’s an interesting show, but if you want to skip directly to my part jump to 31:45.
On Friday I discovered that my ’96 Buick LeSabre was dripping gasoline. I take it into the shop and find out they need to replace the fuel line. The gas tank may have to be replaced as well, but they won’t know until they take it out. There are also problems with my breaks and a couple of leaking seals. Needless to say, it’s going to cost me thousands of dollars to fix. Not worth it, the car only cost me about $9,000 to begin with.
I’m about to embark on an adventure. I’m going to try going without a car for a while. This isn’t the first time I’ve gone without a car. The last time I was when I was living in CA. I had picked my apartment specifically with the knowledge that I wouldn’t have a car. I was within a few blocks of a mall and the Caltrain. I only lived 2 miles from my job, so I walked every day. This will be different.
When I bought my condo I had a car. My condos Walk Score is 23 compared to my CA apartment score of 80. The only store I can easily walk to is the Super Walmart 1.8 miles down the street. I have a bike, so that improves my range, but I don’t really like biking. That leaves the bus.
I have never ridden a bus in Madison. I’m sure I’ll be able to figure it out, but it’s an unknown. There is a bus stop down the street from my house, but if I want to go downtown I’ll have to transfer at some point. I’m not sure where that happens. Regardless I’m going to have to start factoring a lot more travel time into my schedule.
Right now three days a week I go to my gym downtown. I work from home until about 20 minutes before my session, drive there, workout, drive back. Now my commute will be closer to an hour. I can’t just take off 3 hours from work in order to take a bus to the gym, workout and bus back. I’ll either have to schedule my sessions at a different time, like in the evenings. Or I’ll have to bus downtown before work, work from a coffee shop, go to the gym then back to the coffee shop after the workout. I’m waiting to hear more details about some coworking spaces popping up in Madison that might be an option.
Either way, this will be interesting. I really don’t like owning a car so I’m hoping that I can figure out a way to make this work. Stay tuned!
After my post on Friday about Giving Up on Web Ownership a couple people pinged me asking how they would go about publishing to Twitter, without publishing in Twitter. Dave Winer is working on the problem with his minimal blogging tool but I was thinking… why can’t we do this with WordPress? So today I’m going to walk you through the steps necessary to create your own WordPress based microblog that publishes to Twitter.
This is going to be a higher level tutorial. I’m not going to walk you through installing WordPress or how to install a themes and plugins as there are plenty of places that describe this process. Many hosting companies like DreamHost have a one click install that make the process super simple. Ping me if you’re having trouble.
Step 1: Install P2 Theme
The first thing to do is make the site look and behave like a microblog. Do this by installing the P2 theme which is provided by Automattic, the same company that is behind WordPress. It’s also available on WordPress.com if you’re not interested in hosting your own blog.
Step 2a: Install a Twitter Plugin
There are many plugins that will allow you to publish your posts to twitter. I tested a bunch of them but only found two that worked. The one I’d recommend right now is Twitter Blog which was pretty easy to set up.
To get Twitter Blog configured, you need to connect to your Twitter account using OAuth. This is as easy as clicking the “Sign In With Twitter” button in the settings page. It also seems to require a bit.ly account and API key. I already had an account, and getting the key was as straight forward as going into the bit.ly settings page and copying and pasting it into the Twitter Blog settings page.
The only problem I’ve found with using a twitter plugin is that they all seem to tweet the title and url. Since we’re posting a status update without a title, WordPress automatically creates one that is the body truncated to 40 characters. Therefore your tweets are just the first 40 characters and a link back to your status update. Not ideal, but not the end of the world.
Step 2b: Use TwitterFeed
If you don’t want to use a Twitter plugin or can’t (like on WordPress.com) head over to TwitterFeed and register the RSS feed from your site. It can check your feed every 30 minutes and post for you a max of 5 tweets at a time. Obviously if you are going to post more then 5 tweets every 30 minutes, you’re going to have to go with a plugin. If you go this route, be sure to select “Description Only” for Post Content under Advanced Settings so you can get around the truncated post title issue.
Summary
At the end of the day, while this is certainly better then nothing, there is work to be done. I’ll do some more research and maybe write a plugin or two that makes this a seamless experience. It seems like we’re really close to a solution.
Last year when I was helping organize BarCamp Madison 2011 I was busy getting the website set up. I set up a WordPress site and planned on getting modules installed to handle registrations and session tracking. Before I even got a chance to do anything other members of the group set up an eventbrite event for registrations, a google moderator site set up for session tracking, a google wave set up for organizer communication and there was already a google group for community communication.
Instead of taking the time to build up value in our web property, they scattered our brand and functionality all over the internet. Have people given up on the concept of web ownership?
It’s one thing if you’re technologically unsavvy and have no other way to piece together the functionality you need, but these were the Madison tech-elite! Why would they do such a thing? One person actually said something to the extent of “Do people actually have websites anymore?”
Am I the only person left who thinks it’s a good thing to create a strong web presence? To stake out your own space and build it up? When we were promoting the event where should someone link to? Obviously it should be http://www.barcampmadison.org/ but if someone wanted to link to the registration page they would link to EventBrite and we would lose that link.
When we have BarCamp this year I hope to be prepared with all the functionality on the BarCamp website. Otherwise will we be able to reuse the registration link from last year or is that tied to the old event? Will we be able to easily clear out the ideas on the old Google Moderator site?
My girlfriend uses Facebook as her primary form of online communication. Is this any better? I own the domain andrewshell.org and I own my e-mail address at that domain. Right now it’s being hosted by Google, but if I wanted to get off that tomorrow I could set up my own e-mail server, point my e-mail address at the new server and nothing changes. If my girlfriend gets off of facebook what will happen? People will either continue to send her messages on facebook, or if she deletes her account they won’t know how to reach her.
On the internet it’s important to own your content. Please don’t give away your freedom. Dave Winer has the right idea with his new minimal blogging tool. It’s OK to publish to twitter, it’s just not OK to publish in twitter.
I own a lot of stuff. A rough estimate puts me at 600 CDs. There was a time I would buy 1-3 CDs every week but the last CDs I bought were back in December 2009 and I don’t think I’ve ever put those CDs in a CD player. I bought them, put them on a shelf and continued to listen to them on Rhapsody. Clearly I wasn’t buying them for the music. It was about ownership, putting it on a shelf for people to see. My CD collection was who I was.
I’ve had a realization. I don’t care anymore.
I held off buying any sort of DRM protected eBooks. I wanted to be able to read, archive and share my books without worrying that one day my books would stop working. Lately I’ve been buying kindle books to read on my iPad. Today I canceled my pre-order for the hardcover of Seth Godin’s upcoming book Poke the Box. I decided I’d rather not bring more physical stuff into my life and ordered the kindle version instead.
I’ve been following Ev Bogue as he wrote and published his new eBook Augmented Humanity which I’ve been reading and so far as been amazing. Ev practices minimalism and has written a couple eBooks on the subject. I admit I envy his freedom. In a recent post he talks about his packing list as he travels around the world. I have too much stuff to be able to live his lifestyle.
I don’t know if I would ever be able to get down to less then 100 possessions and I’m not sure I’d want to. What this has done is allow me to analyze my relationship with the things that surround me. Why do I have this book? Unless I’m currently reading it, or have it on a schedule to read, why do I have it? Maybe I should just get rid of it.
Take a look in your own life and ask yourself about the relationship you have with your possessions. Are they adding value to your life or are they draining it from you? Would you be able to easily move right now if you wanted or would your possessions keep you from your destiny?
I had an interesting conversation with my friend Monica last night. We talked about information overload and she brought up a term “News Poisoning” which means how you can poison your mind by watching the news.
What do I mean by poisoning your mind? If you watch the news you may be afraid to leave your house because everything from hotel rooms to movie theaters are infested with bed bugs. My Mom (who watches the news nightly) is afraid that if I go to Mexico I’ll be kidnapped. I also believe that the Tea Party Movement is caused by News Poisoning.
How much thought do you put into what you allow into your mind? How much are you influenced by what’s available in your community? Dave Winer on returning from Sundance commented on the awful state of news in Park City, UT.
I’ve been a consumer of RSS feeds for a long time. However last year I declared RSS bankruptcy. I’ve also struggled for a long time knowing that I’m not particularly knowledgeable in world affairs. How do you choose what’s important and how do you make sure the information you’re getting is accurate? I currently get my news in two ways. First I still use Google Reader, to a much lesser extent then before. I only follow 5 blogs and can easily check my feeds once a day max. Secondly I’ve replaced much of what I used to use Google Reader for with my own River of News. This suits me better because there isn’t an unlimited backlog of posts and there is no status for what has been read or not. I can just visit that page and see what’s new. If I’m busy, I don’t feel compelled to check it at all. I might only read that page once a week.
I don’t know the answer to this. I realize that I’m not getting a balanced diet of information but I’m not sure I care anymore. It’s more important to me to consume less information because at least then I won’t feel overloaded. If something really important is going on, I’ll hear about it.
What is your strategy for staying informed? Do you watch the evening news?
My life needs fixing. There are a lot of things going on that I need to repair. Some of which are:
Lose weight, get in shape
Develop the power to avoid procrastination
Improve my concentration
Start my own business
I think the key to solving these problems is to put those parts of my life on autopilot. If I can get into a routine where I don’t have to think in order to succeed ideally I’ll be more inclined to actually accomplish my goals.
A good example of this is what I’ve done already with working out. I signed up for Orange Shoe Personal Fitness which has been great. The reason it’s worked better then a traditional gym membership is the accountability. Since I’m working in small groups (no more then 4 people) or one-on-one personal training, when I schedule a session I know I have to go. People will notice and contact me if I miss a session. I got a routine of when I go and I’ve been going 2-3 times a week since I started. And since I’m working with a personal trainer I don’t have to think about what exercises I’m going to do or if I’m pushing myself too hard or not enough. I just show up and they tell me what to do. Obviously this is more expensive then a traditional gym membership, but I’m getting results.
What else will I be able to put on autopilot? I’m thinking I should put together a morning checklist. Something where every day I wake up and go through each item on the list. That way I can make sure I do the things I need to do like my stretching exercises and 10-15 minutes of meditation.
What are some aspects of your life that could benefit from being on autopilot?
I’m not a huge fan of new years resolutions. I think most people throw out some big vague goal like “lose weight” or “start my own business” then forget about it by the end of January.
I was just thinking of a different approach to new years resolutions. What could you accomplish if you spent 60 hours working on your goal in 2011? Well, guess what? That breaks down to approximately 10 minutes a day.
If you just decide to spend 10 minutes every day working toward your goal you will spend about 5 hours a month or 60 hours a year.
How about spend 10 minutes a day meditating or reading? Or spend 10 minutes every morning doing some jumping jacks to boost your metabolism? Maybe you should pick a few goals and dedicate 10 minutes a day on each one?
I'm Andrew Shell, a PHP developer in Madison, WI. I'm interested in exploring ways that I can leverage everything the internet offers without giving up the ownership of my content.
I'm Andrew Shell, a PHP developer in Madison, WI. I'm interested in exploring ways that I can leverage everything the internet offers without giving up the ownership of my content.