Some months ago, WpHacks introduced a site I just created, called WpVote. The purpose of WpVote was to give the WordPress community a Digg-like website where people can share their blog posts and promote it.

Many WordPress users thought it was a good idea and I quickly had a lot of members, due to the great promotion from WpHacks. Sadly, spammers came too. And they were very, very active.

WpVote was using the Pligg cms. Sadly, this tool isn’t very flexible and modify it isn’t easy at all. I’ve tried a few anti-spam solution but nothing worked. Quickly, the site became a spam-farm and I, as well as the users, abandonned it.

But last month, I thought “If only WpVote was running within WordPress”. I’ve never heard of any “Digg-like” site using WordPress, but I thought that I can give a try. I was easier than it seemed. 2 weeks before, I had a new version of WpVote, ready to be used by the community.

Was it hard to create? Not really. I didn’t modify the WP core, but instead used the TDO Mini Forms plugin, a custom theme I created and a few Ajax functions. Though, the fact that I know WordPress quite well helped me a lot to achieve this goal and think how I can make it work.

Now, a few words about the brand new version of WpVote:

WpVote works just like million other sites like Digg: Once registered, you can submit news, tutorials, hacks and everything related to WordPress. Once your story received at least 5 votes, it is promoted to the front page. Good luck for DoFollow lovers, our Pagerank 4 frontpage IS DoFollow!

So if you’re a WordPress addict and want to promote your posts to the community as well as gaining free backlinks, don’t hesitate to join us. Note that if you were a member of the previous version, you’ll have to register again due to the change of platform.

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

If your WordPress blog gets a lot of referral traffic, there is a WordPress plugin you may want to check out called Greet Box. This plugin actually looks at where referral traffic is coming from and displays an appropriate greeting message to your readers.

A popular example is Digg.  If visitors come from Digg.com, they will see a message reminding them to Digg the post!   If you have a Twitter account, you can also setup a custom message to show people visiting from Twitter reminding them to “Tweet” your post or to follow you on Twitter.  This plugin also works for visitors via Google search, etc.

For everyone else, you have the option of setting a default greeting message for new visitors (not matching any referrer URLs) suggesting them to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Greet Box Plugin Features:

• Compatible with various WordPress cache plugins so you do not have to sacrifice speed.
• Show a different greeting message to your visitor depending on the referrer URL. You can add/edit/delete/disable these greeting messages as you choose.
• Detect the visitor’s search keywords and use those keywords to display related posts.
• Show a default greeting message even if the visitor does not match any of your configured referrer URL.
• Show a default greeting message even if the visitor does not have JavaScript enabled.
• AJAX greeting message in the front-end makes it compatible with caching plugins and WPMU.
• AJAX administrative interface that uses nonce verification to discourage hackers.
• Ability to set a timeout to forget a visitor so we do not keep nagging them with greeting messages.
• Ability to setup regular expression rules to exclude some referrer URLs from seeing greeting messages.
• Ultra customizable greeting message box (with CSS) allowing you to prepend/append HTML around the greeting message box.
• Currently the following traffic referrers are in Greet Box by default (you can easily create your own if your favorite referrer is not on the list):
  1. Delicious
  2. Digg
  3. Google
  4. Yahoo
  5. StumbleUpon
  6. Technorati
  7. Twitter

You can download Greet Box here.   If you’d like to check out some of the other WordPress plugins we’ve featured in the past, you can check out our WordPress Plugins page.

Although Digg has its share of problems, it is an undeniably useful service that they provide. More often than not the best stories will make their way to the front page.

Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t really fit in very well on Digg, as they have many users that are not bloggers, and the site is more geared towards reporting news.

If you are looking for a good WordPress Theme, I recommend checking out WP Themez. This site was inspired by Digg, and allows users to submit and vote for their favorite WordPress themes. The idea is that the best themes make their way to the top with the most votes.

So far, the site is just getting started, so its hard to gauge how useful of a resource it will develop into. The other problem is see is that most WordPress users want to find a theme that isn’t heavily used, so they will probably avoid the most popular themes.