I’ve been pretty bad about posting here, but busy responding to requests. Thanks to everyone who has been using my services. You sure keep me busy.

On top of customer support, my family and my day job, I’ve been working with Alex Shalman and John Chow to build an awesome plugin for comments on WordPress sites. Standout Comments is now up to version 0.95 and has been quite popular with those who use it.

As with most things WordPress, it’s been a community effort. Not only with John and Alex helping me get it done and marketed, but also with the awesome users of the plugin sending in bug reports, feature requests and suggestions. It’s truly amazing in a way I hadn’t imagined.

It’s also quite challenging as the number of variations of WordPress themes and installation situations start to emerge. Wow. Talk about “I hadn’t thought of that.”

StandoutComments generally let’s you integrate your marketing efforts into your comment form and take advantage of the fact the user is entering their email, but not in a sneaky way. The user is given the option to opt-in to your auto-responder and/or your Feedburner email feed. They can also follow you on Twitter.

StandoutComments features:

• Full integration and customization with any WordPress theme
• Subscribe to notifications of new comments on posts
• Integrate with any auto-responder to grow your list
• Integrate with FeedBurner email to notify users of new posts
• Integrate with Twitter:
  • Users enter Twitter ID to show Twitter avatar instead of Gravatar
  • Display Follow site owner on Twitter below comment form
  • OR Integrate with Twitter’s @anywhere to display a Twitter Follow button
  • Use Twitter’s @anywhere to link Twitter IDs in your entire blog with hovercards (@installedforyou)
  • Use popular short url providers to display a Tweetback URL
  • Track Tweetbacks and integrate them as comments
• Nearly all text and styles can be customized to suit your blog.

Anyway, version 0.95 was just released today and expands on the features we have, and finally includes the Unsubscribe option. Yeah, it should have been there from day 1 but wasn’t.

Next up I’m making sure it’s ready for WordPress 3.0 in general (ie: still works), enhanced features for 3.0, and also the WordPress 3.0 multisite option, which may be important now that WordPress mu is integrated with core.

ReviewAZON

A while back I purchased a WordPress plugin, which I had never done before. With such an abundance of good plugins available in the repository, I’ve never felt the need. Part of doing this website and consulting with various clients in various fields, I am asked regularly to evaluate a plugin or to recommend a specific one for a given task.

I purchased the ReviewAZON plugin by Brad Hanson and started building a few sites with it. I’m pretty impressed over all.

Generally, what it does is insert content from Amazon into WordPress posts or pages. You can do single product posts, multi-product inserts and even bulk important entire ranges. In fact, the book reviews on InstalledForYou.com are being auto-posted over time by the plugin.