Despite the fact that I’ve been blogging for over three years now, the past two days have been a unique experience for me.   For the first time in my blogging career, one of my posts made the front page of Digg.    Truthfully, this isn’t the big accomplishment that it used to be as many bloggers make it there in their first few months of blogging, but this post isn’t about that.  Instead I wanted to post about my experience being on the front page of Digg.

Funny thing is, the post that was Dugg was our best 3-Column WordPress Themes gallery, which was actually published on October 2, 2007.   In that post, we featured our favorite 3-column WordPress themes in a gallery format for people to look through and find a suitable theme for their WordPress blog.   This of course was before any of the premium WordPress themes or content management themes we have today.  After I noticed the post was on Digg’s front page, I decided to revisit this post and noticed how “2007″ it was.   WordPress has grown a lot since then and the quality of themes has really grown with it, making many of these themes really look outdated.

Anyway, I digress.  It was Sunday afternoon before I realized WP Hacks had crashed due to being on the front page of Digg and it took a few hours before I tracked down the reason why and got the site back up and running.   Once that was figured out I decided to dig through the Digg comments (pun intended) and was surprised with what I found:

1) Surely not the “best” themes out there.
Even though some look good, the others are really… well, insignificant.

2) Is it just me or are all of these comments ridiculous? This has become very common on posts like this where they are a ‘best of’ list. My guess is someone is paying people to digg their article and make it FP.

3) Wow, someone just randomly grabs a heap of themes with no discernible consistency of quality at all, jams a bunch of screen shots together into a blog post, then by virtue of having dug every submission of of anyone in his list of ‘friends’ in the last six months, gets this propelled to front page. Then he logs in his army of fake accounts and makes a bunch of comments about his own post.

4) These aren’t that great, and all of these comments look like spam . . .

Seriously?!?   I wasn’t even aware this post had been Dugg for almost 24 hours and suddenly I have an army of accounts and I have friends digging for me?   Is it not possible for people to legitimately make the front page of Digg these days?   I guess I don’t use Digg enough these days to know the “rules for getting to the front page.” With that said, probably the funniest part is this post being close to a year and a half old, yet people act like it was a fresh post showing current themes.

Anyway, for years now I’ve never really focused on Digg traffic and I think the comments above show why.  It is simply a rush of traffic which is usually not targeted to your niche topic, so there is little chance of converting them into readers.   Why exactly would someone want their post on the front page of Digg?  The only potential benefits I can think of are incoming links I suppose.   Otherwise it is more of a hassle than anything.

So, what are your thoughts on Digg?  Do you still use it?

Oh, and to our new readers, if you’re looking for a new WordPress theme, here are a few updated theme galleries we’ve made:

• 140+ Free and Premium WordPress Themes Gallery
• Premium WordPress Themes Gallery

I figured it has been a little while since we’ve got a good blogging discussion going, so here is today’s topic.   Do you still use the WWW prefix when setting up websites on your domains?

For some background on what I’m talking about, here is an excerpt from Wikipedia:

The letters “www” are commonly found at the beginning of Web addresses because of the long-standing practice of naming Internet hosts (servers) according to the services they provide. So for example, the host name for a Web server is often “www”; for an FTP server, “ftp”; and for a USENET news server, “news” or “nntp” (after the news protocol NNTP). These host names appear as DNS subdomain names, as in www.example.com.

This use of such prefixes is not required by any technical standard; indeed, the first Web server was at “nxoc01.cern.ch”, and even today many Web sites exist without a “www” prefix. The “www” prefix has no meaning in the way the main Web site is shown. The “www” prefix is simply one choice for a Web site’s host name.

Some Web browsers will automatically try adding “www.” to the beginning, and possibly “.com” to the end, of typed URLs if no host is found without them. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera will also prefix “http://www.” and append “.com” to the address bar contents if the Control and Enter keys are pressed simultaneously. For example, entering “example” in the address bar and then pressing either just Enter or Control+Enter will usually resolve to http://www.example.com, depending on the exact browser version and its settings.

Though it is just my personal preference, you might notice that Hack WordPress does NOT use the www, nor do any of the websites I’ve setup over the past few years.  Anymore with 301 redirects (which for WordPress users, it is now built into the software) and today’s modern internet browsers, I don’t feel that it is necessary any longer and I think sites look better without it.

According to Google it doesn’t matter which you choose, but they want you to stick with your choice so your inbound links are consistent.  Overall, it really comes down to a preference thing.   Do you use the www in your domains?

I’m not really sure if this is a trend or just coincidence, but over the past week I’ve noticed quite a few of the blogs that I stumble upon require you to setup an account before you can leave a comment.  Anyone know what is up with that?

This is obviously a very useful WordPress feature for blogs that have a strong community built around their website, but I think most people should consider the consequences before they require you to register to comment.  A choice like this could keep truly hinder a new blogs growth or discourage a blogger who isn’t seeing the reader interaction they were hoping for.

As with pretty much everything, there are some positives and some negatives to doing this.  Off the top of my head, here are a few positives and negatives of requiring registration to leave a comment on a blog:

Positives of Registration

• Spam Prevention – Requiring registration should stop spam completely.
• More Options – Requiring registration opens up some interesting opportunities to customize comment appearance, allow you to create profiles, etc.   I’ve seen a few high profile websites do this, but the registration usually is optional instead of being required.

Negatives of Registration

• Less Comments – Some people value comments more than others, but I think most bloggers would find less comments to be a negative as the whole concept of blogging was formed around the concept of reader interaction with the writer.

I personally do not leave comments on blogs that require registration because it just isn’t worth it to me.  I have enough accounts to manage without trying to remember my account information.   I also think things like spam can easily be avoided for WordPress users using tools like Akismet and Bad Behavior, Spam Karma 2, or Math Comment Spam Protection (which we use here).

I’d like to hear what you think in the comments below.   How do you feel about blogs that require registration to comment?   Do you take the time to register or do you just decide not to comment at all?