Disqus is great for managing comments on Wordpress. However, it appears that most blogs don’t pick up the disqus trackback / pingback URL that Disqus advertises when you’ve set it to manage pingbacks for you. Instead, external blogs post directly to your Wordpress site and their pingbacks are stored in your Wordpress database.

This means that Disqus will not show your pingbacks because they are being stored in your WP comment table and not in the Disqus system.

This is the current solution we’re using on Fried My Little Brain to show pingbacks:

1. Turn off Disqus for trackbacks.
2. Use this great code snip from Marco Luthe to show pingbacks on posts.
3. Then we’ve extended the formatting of Marco’s code to show the date, excerpt and link rather than just a link as before (code below).
4. Ensure that Akismet is still running for inbound pingback spam filtering.

Our extended pingback formatting is as follows. This code should be used to replace Marco’s foreach loop between lines 22 and 30:

Download the excerpt.

Happy wordpressing!

Here we have August’s newsletter. If you want sign up for monthly goodness from Team Fublo, then sign up here.

A themed knowledge section this month - information with spacial awareness… who and what is near you?

• This Huffington Post gallery of geolocation apps highlights how geolocation is starting to change how we use web, often for good.
• These amazing city locals vs tourists infographics seek to distinguish between the different types of Flickr users that take photos in various areas of major world cities: London / Sydney / write up in Fastcompany.
• Mashable reports that Google are fully focusing on their check-ins in their Places API.
• For the techies, it’s now very easy to create a basic site that finds the visitor’s location and shows information on the returned info. This hackday project called Look Around You does exactly that in the browser, plotting wikipedia entries on a map so you can explore your area. How it was done is documented on the Yahoo! Developer blog. There is also good overview of geolocation on Smashing Magazine.

But what happens when geolocation goes wrong?

• Websites can change the language you see based on your location. Go to Sweden and suddenly Google shows you Swedish results every time for example, you’ll need to use a work-around like one of these.
• We know people are worried about loss of privacy from geolocation, as this survey found. The problem seems to be that users haven’t yet realised the implications of what they’re already publishing as Leo Hickman discovered when he became a Foursquare stalker for the Guardian and wrote about it.
• And what about the children?!

Random / Fun
Silly things to be getting on with in August, wherever you are!

• Go on twitter, say you want to travel half way round the world in thirty days, get spotted by Steven Fry, and almost make it there. Then write a book.
• Vampire Kittens on E4. It’s like that Yeti Olympics game, but with obstacles.
• Peckham Terminator on youtube (nfsw / swearing etc) … watch to the end to see how the guy gets off the bus - London style.

Our Projects
A few of the interesting things we got up to in July.

• In collaboration with Baseconcept and 66db Digital, we “did the dev” on a new Wordpress 3 site for Old Bailey Solicitors.
• The stats are in from our Vitamin iPad competition on Fried My Little Brain.
• And we’ve signed up with Protein Networks to deliver ads on Fried My Little Brain and UKStreetArt.co.uk - more to come soon.

Hope you have a great August!

We were approached by We Are Social to run a competition for one of their clients, Vitamin Water. With the release of a new flavour of their water called “i-focus” the competition was to win an iPad.

Team Fublo decided to run this competition on Friedmylittlebrain as it has the bigger of the three audiences and we felt our readers would be after an iPad. To enter the competition they had to complete the sentence “I find it hard to focus when….” 

We made it a stipulation that as well as answering the question, they were required to become a fan of Friedmylittlebrain on Facebook too.

Running for two weeks, here’s some stats for you:

• 294 competition entries were made
• 893 page views/697 unique views
• 51 Tweets
• 19 Shares on Facebook
• 199 stumbles on Stumble Upon
• Gained over 300 fans on Facebook

The competition was picked up by Money Saving Expert and a user posted to their forums with that post generating 1,130 views.

We also decided to create a leaderboard creative to put on Friedmylittlebrain. This meant we could move the competition post from being a ‘sticky’ so as to keep the homepage fresh and generate some click throughs to other content. Using OpenX we targeted the ad at UK readers only, which resulted in a total of 5000 impressions with a CTR of 1.3%

All in all, a successful competition for us and a thing to note:

• What will be the drop off of fans on Facebook now the competition has closed presuming that a lot of them aren’t interested in electronic music?

Universities minister says students leaving higher education should rethink what they consider to be a graduate career

“The other point I’d make is that we have some odd definitions of what constitutes a graduate job. The most vivid example of that is that setting up your own business does not constitute a graduate job.”

Read the full article on The Guardian

Wordpress, the love of many a designer and developer?

Here at Team Fublo we’ve got a slight obsession with the platform and with the release of 3.0 a few weeks back, we’re continuing to use it (with theme frameworks) on a lot of our current and forthcoming projects.

Recently we’ve been:

• Utilising the custom menus system
• Creating custom widgets and templates
• Figuring out how to use Custom Post types to fit the needs of clients
• Generally playing around with the platform to make life simpler

Wordpress + 960.gs + Solr = Optimized workflow

What are you doing with Wordpress (3) ?