Our #1 goal is (and always will be) to send you guys as much traffic as possible. So with that in mind we’ve made a couple of small changes that will have a huge impact.

RSS Feed Modifications - The links in the RSS feed now point directly to the source of the story! If you submit a link from your site and it reaches the front page on PlugIM, anyone who reads our feed and clicks on the headline will go directly to your site. We’ve taken ourselves out as the middle man. Yes this will mean PlugIM suffers a hit to our own traffic, but again our #1 priority is sending traffic to you. We also added two new links in the feed under each story. The first one shows the current number of plugs the story has and links to the story’s page on PlugIM so you can easily go and vote if it’s a story you like. The second link shows the how many comments have been posted and links to the comment section of the story.

Another nice side effect from changing the feed to link directly to the story is if the same story has been bookmarked on del.icio.us, submitted to Digg or reviewed at SumbleUpon, you’ll see the current stats for each in our dynamic FeedFlares under each story. It also makes it easy for you to bookmark, Digg or Stumble the stories directly.

If you like the changes we made to the RSS feed we ask that you show us your appreciation by subscribing to it: http://www.plugim.com/rss2/

Social Bookmarking Buttons Modification - Under each story on PlugIM there’s a section of social bookmarking buttons so you can easily submit the story to your favorite social bookmarking and news sites. In the past, clicking these buttons always submitted links to the story page on PlugIM which we thought was a little selfish of us. So we changed the buttons to submit links to the original story instead. So now when you submit your link to PlugIM, you can just click each button under the newly submitted story and submit your link to all the other social bookmarking and news sites as well.

If you like the change we made to the social bookmarking buttons we ask that you show us your appreciation by bookmarking us.

One thing that’s always bothered me about posting stories to sites like Digg is that there’s no easy way to keep track of who’s commenting on your posts. Often times when I post something, I’ll end up leaving the story open in a browser window and refresh it periodically throughout the day to see if there are any new comments. Usually I’ll check it a couple times the day I post it and then rarely ever go back to see if anyone’s posted anything new.

One of the most popular plugins for WordPress is the subscription plugin where you can subscribe to a post and automatically receive email notifications any time someone comments on the post. I use it all the time and it saves me a ton of time. It’s great for when you ask the author a question and don’t want to keep checking back to see if they’ve posted a response yet.

To me it seemed like a no-brainer to add subscription capability to PlugIM and I’m happy to announce it has finally arrived! Earlier this week we wrapped up our testing round and now the PlugIM subscription notification system is in place. You can easily subscribe to any story on PlugIM and you’ll receive an email any time anyone comments on the stories you’ve subscribed to.

There are a couple different ways to subscribe to stories. Every story has a new ‘subscribe’ button under the comment box. Simply click the button to subscribe to the story, you don’t even need to submit a comment. The button uses AJAX to change from a subscribe button to an unsubscribe button so just click it again later if you wish to unsubscribe from the story. The other way to subscribe to stories is to use the automatic story subscription options located in your profile. You can choose to automatically subscribe to every story you post on PlugIM which is a nice easy way to keep track of your own stories. Also you can choose to automatically subscribe to all stories you comment on. Both options are on by default.

I hope you all find this modification useful and I hope it encourages you all to comment more than you do now because that was the driving force behind making the modification. If you have any questions, find any issues or have any suggestions, just post a comment here to let me know.

It took over 6 months to for us to reach 500 members. From there it only took another 2 months to hit 1000. That’s how fast our community is growing thanks to all of you. It’s really starting to feel like a collective effort to increase awareness of our community. Members are chipping in and writing WordPress plugins and creating buttons. Others are mentioning us in forums, bookmarking us on Del.icio.us, and joining our MyBlogLog community. Dozens of you have written blog posts and reviews of PlugIM to spread the word and most recently many members are using the new PlugIM widget on their sites.

It really has become a group effort and I can’t say thank you enough. Everyone seems to be realizing the more we all pitch in and promote the site, the more everyone benefits because those front page stories are going to get more and more traffic. Another way you can pitch in is to continue to provide me with as much feedback as you can. As I’ve said before, most of the modifications made to PlugIM are from suggestions made by the members. I don’t want to call all the shots; I want you guys to tell me what you want. Feel free to leave your ideas in a comment on this post or email me.

I’d like to wrap this post up by personally thanking a few people who’ve gone the extra mile to help PlugIM grow. Thank you to Jack Humphrey, Michelle MacPhearson, Mark Blair and Matt Ellsworth. Hopefully in another couple of months I’ll be thanking you all again when we hit 2000 members.

If you use the Google toolbar and PlugIM then you’ve got to check this out. A fellow PlugIM member, Mark Blair of www.smoblog.com, developed a PlugIM button for the Google toolbar and it’s packed with functionality.

You may be familiar with the PlugIM bookmarklet which creates a button (in Firefox) or a favorites shortcut (in Internet Explorer) that allows you to submit the current page in your browser to PlugIM with a click. One thing that always bugged me about the bookmarklet was that there was no way to make it a button in Internet Explorer, it had to be a shortcut. Mark’s Google toolbar button gets around this dilemma because it’s installed directly into the Google toolbar itself rather than the browser. So now IE users can have a submit to PlugIM button which is so much easier than searching for a shortcut in your favorites menu.

But Mark’s PlugIM button does much more than just submitting the current page you’re viewing to PlugIM. Here’s a list of the features this little button can do:

• Submit to PlugIM: Click the button and you’re forwarded on to the submit page of PlugIM where the URL of the story you were just reading is automatically pre-populated so all you need to do is fill in the description and pick a category.
• Search PlugIM: Enter a search phrase in the Google toolbar and click the PlugIM button and instead of searching Google, it’ll search PlugIM.
• Recent Front Page PlugIM Stories: There’s a drop down on the button that displays a list of links to the most recent front page PlugIM stories by using PlugIM’s RSS feed.

Another great thing about the button is it’s a one click install and literally takes seconds to do.

Download: You can find the download for this little wonder on Mark’s blog here:
http://www.smoblog.com/plugim-toolbar-button/

If you like it as much as I do, please be sure to give Mark a big thank you! Thanks Mark!

Now you can install the new PlugIM widget on your WordPress blog with this awesome plugin provided by Michelle MacPhearson. If you’re not comfortable editing WordPress template code then this plugin is for you because this is as simple as it gets. Just download it from Michelle’s site, upload it to your WordPress plugins directory, and then activate the plugin. That’s it! Then every one of your blog posts will have the PlugIM vote box ready for your readers to plug your posts. They don’t even need a PlugIM user account to vote.

Download the plugin from Michelle’s site here:

http://blog.michellemacphearson.com/wordpress-plugin-plugim-votebox/

Be sure to give her a HUGE thank you! Thanks Michelle!

Have you heard of Social Bookmarks Manager yet? If not, now’s the time to familiarize yourself with it. It’s a freeware application developed by SoftLogica which automatically generates social bookmarking code for your website. All you need to do is enter a few pieces of information, such as the URL and title of the page, check off which social bookmarking services you want buttons for then copy and paste the code to your site. It’s that easy. From their site:

“Social Bookmarks Manager is designed to simplify the process of bookmarklets creation for your blog posts, articles and any other web pages. The program comes with 60 profiles of the most popular social bookmarking sites and generates ready-to-use HTML code. You can manage appearance by choosing between text-only, icons-only and mixed links, adding prefix and selecting separator.”

The software currently supports button creation for 60 of the most popular social bookmarking services including, most recently, PlugIM! Of course I’m honored that PlugIM was selected to be a part of this software package alongside with such heavy hitters as Digg, del.icio.us and Furl and I want to say a quick thank you to Sergey Petrov, the CEO of SoftLogica, for making it happen.

You can download your free copy of Social Bookmarks Manager right here:
http://www.socialbookmarksmanager.com

From now on, whenever you submit a story to PlugIM, the site automatically registers your vote for the story as well.  This eliminates the extra step of clicking the ‘plug’ button after submitting a story.  I noticed several people were missing this step and as a result we had quite a few stories being submitted with zero plugs.  Obviously if someone’s taking the time to submit a story, they feel it’s worthy of their vote, so we just eliminated that step altogether.  The result is a cleaner, faster and more intuitive story submission process.  Enjoy!

As some of you may know, the requirement for a story to reach the front page of PlugIM was 2 plugs within 10 days of the story being submitted.  Because of the site’s continued increase in popularity and traffic, the requirement has been adjusted to 3 plugs within 7 days.  Over the last couple of days almost every story submitted has been reaching the front page.  This not only increases the value for a story reaching the front page, but also better reflects the opinion of the community and it’s members as to what is considered to be the best stories submitted.

Recently PlugIM.com user garageband777 posted a story about Socializer which is a free service from eKstreme.com that allows you to easily submit a link to several social bookmarking systems so instead of having a link to each social bookmarking website, you have a single link to all of them.  So of course my first comment to the post was “Does Socializer allow you to add your link to PlugIM?” which unfortunately it didn’t.
 
I contacted Pierre over at eKstreme and asked him to consider adding PlugIM to Socializer and after taking a look at PlugIM and realizing how rapidly the community is growing, he agreed to add PlugIM as one of Socializer’s social bookmarking sites.  I’m quite excited about this and really feel it’s going to help push PlugIM to the next level.  We’ve already had several new members sign up and post new stories coming in from Socializer and we’ve only been listed there for a couple of days.
 
You’ll notice the Socializer link has also been added to the list of links under each PlugIM story so please make use of it and check it out.  You can add your favorite PlugIM stories to your other favorite bookmarking sites with just a couple quick clicks.  Once you see how easy it is, you’ll be adding Socializer to your blog or website as well.

PlugIM gets a lot of traffic from fellow Pligg site owners and by far the number one request I get is for our Google Adsense Revenue Sharing Mod.  Up until recently I only had the mod available for Pligg version 7.2 because that’s what PlugIM runs on.  However, since I’ve been working on upgrading PlugIM, I finally have the mod available for 8.2 as well.
 
I posted it on the Pligg forums here: PlugIM’s Google Adsense Revnue Sharing Mod for Pligg Beta 8.2
 
If you have any questions, please post them in that thread and I’ll be sure to get back to you as soon as possible.