For writers looking to improve their blogs quickly, Darren Rowse’s “31 Days to Build a Better Blog” program might be just the thing. Rowse runs Problogger, one of the top blogs on the Internet and the place to go for information about making a living as a blogger. For the next month, starting April 6, he’ll send out an email every day to everyone in the “31 Days” program with a quick, 10–15 minute task they can do to make their blog a little bit better.

I know little beyond that — like you, I’ll have to wait until the 6th to see what kind of tips Darren is sending out. But, Darren is a) super-smart about blogging, b) very good at explaining things, and c) about the nicest guy you’ll ever meet, and therefore one ofthe givingest, so I’m sure the tips will be effective, well-written, and generous.

The program is free — you just need to give your name and email address to receive the daily emails. IF you need to get your blog in order — or maybe even get your blog started — this looks like a good, quick way to pick up a little steam.

This year, I will be meeting people I’ve worked with for a long time but never physically met, as well as folks I know as bloggers or on Twitter, and even a couple of people I’ve interviewed on the phone. So I’m pretty excited about that – and about hanging out on the show floor and talking with the vendors. I suppose if you run a blog about technology, even in the relatively small niche of technology for writers, it stands to reason that you’d get off on spending time talking with the folks who make all the neat technology that makes blogging possible. Plus, of course, when you’re in the midst of 3,000 or so bloggers, you are by definition among 3,000 or so writers.

If anyone who reads this blog is going to be in Vegas for the conference, let me know – I’d love to have a chat. Email me or send me a tweet on Twitter (I’m dwax). And hopefully I’ll have some cool stuff to talk about after the Expo.

I posted an epic piece about writing effective blog posts at Problogger yesterday, and I think a lot of my readers here would get a lot of value out of it. The basis of the article is a chapter in one of Bob Bly’s books. Bly, if you don’t know, is one of the masters of copywriting, and since copywriting is all about writing compelling, persuasive prose, I thought that what he had to say about ads could be adapted well to blogging. And maybe all writing — after all, what we want more than anything is to change the way people think about their lives, whether it’s about what kind of toothpaste they should be using or how they should think about the nature of humanity.

Anyway, have a look and let me know what you think.

HTML is short for HyperText Markup Language, and is derived from the codes typesetters used to use to know where to insert different typefaces, horizontal rules, larger text for headings, italics and boldface, and so on. The basic idea is simple — you put tags around the text you want to modify, like this: <tag>this is the text you want to modify</tag>.

Here are some of the most common tags to get you started:

<strong>Bold</strong>	Bold
<em>Italic</em>	Italic
<h1>Page Header</h1>	Page Header
<h2>Headline</h2>	Headline
<h3>Section Header</h3>	Section Header
<a href=“http://site.com”>Link to site.com </a>	Link to site.com
<img src=“http://www.site.com/path/to/images/image.jpg”>	(Note:the <img> tag is unique in not needing a closing tag.)
<p>	Starts a new paragraph
<br>	Inserts a line break
<ol> <li>List item </li> <li>List item </li> </ol>	Ordered (Numbered) List List Item List Item
<ul> <li>List item </li> <li>List item </li> </ul>	Unordered (Bulleted) List List Item List Item

There are a lot more tags, but these are enough for about 90% of all the web writing you’ll ever do.

There are lots of reasons you might want to break work up into series: long posts tend to be a little overwhelming; you might want to take the time to develop ideas over days or even weeks; or maybe you want to write a serialized story. In Series adds options to your “Write” page to create new series or to add a post to an existing series. It will also add links to the other parts of the series into the post itself, allowing readers to easily move from one post in a series to the next, no matter how many posts there are in between.

If series aren’t your thing, or are inappropriate for the writing you do (maybe you post long academic essays), you can help your readers by providing a table of contents with the Table of Contents Generator plugin. TOC generator scans your posts and creates TOC entries for everything flagged as a header (with h2, h3, h4, etc. tags). You can put the TOC wherever you want (although the top of your post would seem the appropriate place) by putting the TOC code <!–TOC–> tag in the body of your post (you have to use the “Code” view for this).

If you’re posting long academic essays, you probably have footnotes. Wp-footnotes makes adding footnotes easy. Wherever you want to insert a footnote, just type the content of the footnote in double parentheses, like this:

Lots of people use footnotes ((It’s a beauty way to go!)), and they want an easy way to do it.

Wp-footnotes will replace the text in double parentheses with the appropriate superscript numeral, and throw the text to the bottom. It will also allow your readers to click the footnote marker to go straight to the footnote, and then click the “back” link to go back to where they were in the text.

If you’re the kind of writer who feels like sharing your writing life with the world, Gnomebox has several plugins just for you. Daily Word Count allows you to keep a running log of how many words you’ve written each day, and place a marker either in the sidebar of your site or in daily posts telling your readers. Lots of writers do this to keep themselves motivated — knowing that an audience is watching helps them stick to their daily goals better than if they only had to be accountable to themselves.

The Daily Word Count plugin integrates into another Gnomebox plugin, the Writing Projects Plugin, which creates a new tab under “Manage” where you can list the title, description, estimated word count, and other information about all of your projects. Again, you can post this information easily to your site either in the sidebar or inside of posts. A great way to help keep your readers informed of how the next book or screenplay is coming along.

Finally, the Submission Tracker plugin does… well, can you guess? It creates another tab under “Manage” where you can track submissions, and again, you can post the status of each submission to your site. This would be useful as a way to give your readers a peek “behind the scenes” at the nuts-and-bolts stuff of the writing business.

There are thousands of other plugins out there — chances are, if you can think of something you’d like your site to do, someone’s thought of it and written a plugin to do it. The WordPress Plugin Directory is the place to start, although not everything manages to find its way into the official directory. What plugins are other people using that they want their writing colleagues to know about?

WordPress regularly releases new versions to fix bugs and close security holes, so it’s important to keep up-to-date.WordPress Automatic Upgrade makes upgrading from one version of WordPress to another a snap. When a new version of WordPress is released, you’ll see a notice on your WordPress dashboard when you log in. When you see this, go to the “manage” tab, and then the “Automatic Upgrade” tab. From there, just follow the directions. WPAU will take the site off-line, deactivate your plugins, backup your database and files, download the new version fromWordpress.org, install it, update the database, reactivate your plugins, and bring everything back online. You can choose a fully automated upgrade, but I prefer to walk through step-by-step, because that allows me to download the backups as they’re created rather than at the end of the process (in case something goes wrong in the upgrade process — which has never happened to me, but just in case…).

You don’t want to only backup your database when there’s an update, though. While most of the files that make up your website won’t change except during upgrades, your database changes every time there’s a new post or comment. Ideally, you want to backup at least once a week, maybe more if your site gets a lot of traffic. The WordPress Database Backup plugin will allow you to create and download backups on-demand, but what’s better, it will do automated backups and email the file to you, on whatever schedule you choose. Once it’s installed, you tell it which database tables to backup — the default WordPress tables are selected by default, but lots of plugins add their own tables; I suggest selecting them all — and when to do it. From then on, every week (or whatever interval you’ve chosen) you’ll get an email with the most recent backup attached. Just keep these — I have a folder in my email program for each website I run, and the backups just go straight into their respective folder. If anything ever goes wrong with your site and you need to restore the database, you can easily upload and import the most recent database backup.

Between these two plugins, just about all the most tedious work of keeping your website up and running are taken care of for you. I’ve used both on several sites and through several upgrade/backup cycles, and both work fantastically.

These are pretty bare-bones tools, though. While WordPress’ RSS feeds are fine for your readers, WordPress doesn’t offer any tools to track how many subscribers you have, or to list the number of comments, or to add links for social networking sites so that, for instance, your reader can bookmark your latest post on del.icio.us. Likewise, while a reader can leave a comment on your blog, they have no way of knowing if anyone has responded — other than obsessively reloading your page over and over — which stunts the development of ongoing conversations with and between your readers.

Here are two plugins that add another dimension to how readers can interact with your site. The first is the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin, which allows you to redirect your site’s RSS feed through Feedburner. Feedburner is a free online RSS feed service that offers a number of features to its users, including a subscriber count (which can be extremely difficult and even impossible to find using your webhosts stats log), the ability to insert ads into your feed, and “Feedflare”, which inserts your post’s comment count, plus links to add to del.icio.us, Digg, and other social networking services.

You’ll need to sign up for a Feedburner account first (it’s free). You’ll be asked to provide your site’s RSS feed, and will then be provided with a new Feedburner feed address (it looks like “feeds.feedburner.com/yourusername” or something similar). Once you’ve installed the plugin, you insert your new Feedburner address into the plugins configuration page, and hit “Save”. Now, you can add whatever Feedburner features you want (and there are a ton more than I’ve described) and they’ll automatically show up in your readers’ feeds. What’s more, any existing RSS subscribers you have will be automatically and transparently redirected to the new feed — they won’t even notice.

Subscribe to Comments is a plugin that allows your visitors to receive email notifications whenever someone adds a comment to a post they’ve already commented on. Let’s say someone asks a question, or leaves an angry rebuttal of another commenter’s comment — it stands to reason they’d want to know if a response was made. Without Subscribe to Comments, they’re stuck revisiting the page, until they forget or lose interest.

What Subscribe to Comments does is add a checkbox below their comment saying “Notify me of any responses to my comment” (or whatever text you choose). Readers who comment this will get an email whenever someone adds a new comment in the future. (It also allows the option to subscribe even if you don’t leave a comment.) This encourages them to revisit your site and, hopefully, to continue the conversation they started with their earlier comment. Not only does this help foster a sense of community, it raises the comment count — which will attract even more readers to look at the comments and, hopefully, leave more. And so it goes — building community depends on this sort of “snowball effect”, where the impact of 10 comments is far more than 10 times the impact of one comment.

Fortunately, there are several WordPress plugins that help minimize, and often eliminate entirely, spam from your comments section. The first, Akismet, is even built in. You need to activate it, though — and for that you need a “Wordpress API key”. Fortunately, that’s easy enough to get — just sign up for an account at WordPress.com and they’ll send you one by email, automatically. It’s a long string of characters that, after you’ve activated Akismet, you’ll be asked to enter. Just cut-and-paste it from the email.

Akismet works by aggregating the collective judgment of its users. Every comment on an Akismet-enabled site is fed through their servers and compared with their profiles of known spam. If a new comment on your site looks like a piece of spam in Akismet’s database, it’s flagged as “spam” (you can look occasionally and make sure it’s all properly flagged, and un-flag comments you think should not be considered spam). If it looks kosher to Akismet, it’s sent back to your site. If something “spammy” gets through Akismet, you can manually flag it as spam, and Akismet will add it to their database. When you mark something as spam, it helps the rest of the network; when anyone else on the network marks something as spam, it helps you.

What Akismet is to comment spam, the Trackback Validator plugin is to trackback spam. Normally, trackbacks are notifications sent to your site when a trackback-enabled site links to your site. It’s a nice way to let someone know you’re linking to them, and it posts a link under the post they linked to so that other readers can click through and see the conversation unfold. Unfortunately, a lot of scummier sorts have hijacked the process, sending fake trackbacks to sites just to get the link. Trackback Validator checks the address the trackback links to, to make sure there really is a page there and it really does link to you, before letting the trackback show up on your site.

The third line of defense against spam is Bad Behavior, which aims to stop spam at the source by identifying “bad guys” before they can reach your site. Bad Behavior looks at the way that a visitor or alleged visitor is attempting to access your site. Since most comment spam, trackback spam, and other malicious attacks against your site are carried out by automated programs accessing the site directly (as opposed to a person accessing it via a browser), they can often be identified and, in Bad Behavior’s case, prevented from being able to access the site at all.

All three of these plugins can be used together, giving you a pretty good defense strategy against the kind of scum that has decided that your site is a great platform for whatever malicious purposes they have in mind. Once installed, the only thing you have to do is remember to check your spam queue once in a while (the WordPress dashboard will let you know how many comments are in the spam queue and need to be approved or marked as spam) to make sure you catch anything Akismet missed — which should be less and less, since Akismet is learning faster and faster the more people use it.

This week, we’ll be looking at several plugins a writer’s site should have. Some of these are useful, even essential, for any site, such as the ones that prevent spammers from filling your comments with ads for porn and poker sites. Others are highly specialized to meet the specific needs of writers, such as one that allows you to share your writing goals and your progress towards them with your readers.

To give you a taste of what plugins can do, I thought I’d start by introducing “Javascript Pull-Quotes”, a plugin that allows you to place selected text from your post into nicely formatted pullquotes. Adding a pull-quote is easy with Javascript Pull-Quotes; all you have to do is place <span class=“pullquote”>around the content you want in the pullquote</span>. If you use the visual editor in WP, it’s even easier — the plugin inserts a pull-quote button into the writing toolbar — highlight the text you want as a pull-quote and hit the button.

Javascript Pull-Quotes offers several ways to customize the look and placement of your pull-quotes — you can try one of five built-in styles, or if you’re comfortable with CSS, you can add new definitions to your site’s stylesheet. You can place pull-quotes on the left or right-hand side of your text column, and you can have each subsequent pull-quote alternate sides.

• 25+ Pieces of Writing Software You Should Know About
  Ali at Daily Writing Tips offers up no less (and possibly more) than 25 applications that writers might get some use out of. There are apps for collaboration, word processing, writing novels and screenplays, organizing your research materials, and more. Some are free, some are somewhat expensive. Not all of them are apps I would recommend, but you might have a different opinion.
• The Benefits of Writing a Pillar Post
  Tay at Super Blogging pays a visit to the territory I covered in my Build Your Blog’s Traffic and Impact with Resource Posts, with 4 very good reasons to think about writing your own pillar posts, and a few examples to get you started.
• Junk for Writers
  Paperback Writer lists 10 office supplies every writer will want to clutter their writing space with. Pure office supply porn!
• 24 Rebellious Resources for Freelancing
  Quiet Rebel Writer is tearing it up lately with more rebellious resources than you can shake a stick at! (Not that you’d want to – what would that accomplish?) Here, Amy Lillard sends you off with the message that we writers, we can write ANYTHING – and gives you 24 places on the web to make that platitude a reality.
• 6 Productivity Tools for MS Word
  Ah, MS Word, the savage witch-queen of the writing profession. WE hate you, yet are compelled to bow down before your greatness. Samuel Dean at Web Worker Daily gives you a handful (if you’re polydactylic) of tips to help you tame the beast.
• The Hidden Freelance Writing Job Market
  Jodee Redmond at Freelance Writing Jobs suggests ways freelancers can find work by taking a step or two out of the ordinary.
• Could The Freelance Writer’s Most Important Tool Be The Lowly Spreadsheet?
  Tom Chandler at The Copywriter Underground tells you how to use a spreadsheet to help keep you on top of your freelance work. Spreadsheets are all mathy and stuff, and writers tend to want to forget they even exist, but as Tom reminds us, there’s some real value for writers who remember that they’re running a business, too.

And a couple of self-promoting links, if you don’t mind:

• Smithereens is holding a contest to find the wittiest twitterer on Twitter. To enter, tweet something witty and copy the tweet and the link to the comments of that post. I’m judging entries, along with James Chartrand of Men with Pens.
• James and I are judging another contest, this time at my fellow Lifehack writer Joel Falconer’s site, Joel is looking for someone to write a great post on how bloggers can use FriendFeed. Check out the post for more information. (For the record, I have no idea why James and I are suddenly the go-to pair for judging contests – we actually don’t know each other. Coincidence, I guess.)

What have you come across this week that might interest your fellow WTC readers? Or, better yet, what have you written that you want to share with the rest of us? Leave a link or three in the comments!