July 12, 2010 By Amanda Padgett
Posted by Dawn Farias
OK, I admit it: the only things I know about Seth Godin are that he is bald and doesn’t have a horizontal header on his blog. He has a vertical one. Both points can be easily illustrated. Observe:
Actually, I should say that’s all I knew about Seth Godin until recently. Blogging with Amy published a post talking about how to use and optimize the What Would Seth Godin Do plug-in for WordPress. That’s how I came to find out more about Seth Godin. But first, more about plug-ins.
A plug-in for WordPress and Typepad is a lot like the header gadget for Blogger: a plug-and-play functionality that allows you to optimize your blog in a particular way while minimizing the amount of coding you have to know yourself. Now, back to Seth Godin.
Mr. Godin publishes books, blogs, speaks in front of people and enlightens others about marketing, business and such. He wrote about the unique-to-blogging problem of new visitors to your site being unclear about what was going on but how constantly clarifying things for them would bug out your old readers. Richard K. Miller grabbed on to a bit in that post which recommends using browser cookies to show relevant information, in a prominent place, that changes depending on how many times the visitor has come to the site.
Would you like to see this plug-in in action? Visit Musings of a Housewife. Upon arriving, you’ll see a message box under the post title:
When you visit, I want you to refresh your browser window a few times (three should do it). There. Now, you’re no longer a new visitor and what you should see is this:
The message box is gone!
Removing the message completely for return visitors is only one way to customize this plug-in. You could change the message after a few visits as Darcy at My 3 Boybarians does or leave the message the same for all visitors, new and old, as Theta Mom does. Visit their sites and refresh your browser to gain Regular Reader status and see what happens to the messages. You can even decide on the location of the box: under the post title, under the post content, between the banner and content, and so on.
And now that you know what to look for, why don’t you keep an eye out for this plug-in and leave a comment if you find any really clever ones? I love seeing how creative people can be when given the exact same raw materials to work with.
Up next: What Would Seth Godin Do plug-in for Blogger
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You can find more from Dawn Farias at her site A Bit Bloggish – a place with digital scrapbooking kits, tutorials and tidbits on daily life. Feel free to follow her on Twitter, too!