ShoeMoney Theme Revision 5

We are mixing things up here again on the blog a bit. We are calling it the 5th revision but its probably more like the 10th... just the 5th since we got advertisers started keeping track. The New Comment System I love commentators and think they are important to a blog. You always want to keep commentators in perspective and be careful of spammers. Long time ShoeMoney readers know I have played around with many various comment systems and have even done crazy contests and other stuff. In my years of blogging I have discovered many things. One is that the first comment in a post gets about 90% of the clicks. I used crazyegg to show me this. This is probably why people rushed to be the first comment many times. In Revision4 of the ShoeMoney theme I tried to combat this by reverse ordering the comments. The newest comment would display first. This would solve a couple problems. 1) People could comment and feel like its not buried on the page and 2) people could get somewhat equal exposure and clicks to their site no matter when the commented. Well spammers figured this out and go through the blog and comment on every post that I have ever done insuring they are the first commenter. So for Revision5 I wanted to solve many problems. I want to do some cool contests for commentators again plus work on the comment display order issue a bit. So in this revision we are opening up registration for users. This allows us to do many things:

Track for contests easily

Keep track of users comment ratings (if others find their comments useful or not)

Give registered users a followed link to their website once they cross certain thresholds and earn trust.

Earn points for commenting which can be used for other things down the road

and many other things....

I am pretty excited about this ad it will be fun to see what we can come up with. The Marketplace Probably the biggest new feature is the Marketplace/Classifieds section. I made the marketplace years ago and it has a couple hundred RSS readers. The original marketplace just scraped forums where commerce was going on. The new marketplace allows users to actually place ads for $25. The listings will be featured on each page of ShoeMoney.com on the sidebar. The listings will stay for 6 months or until they are deleted by the user. Listings are sorted by time of posting but can be bumped back to the top for a $5 fee. People can place classifieds for things for sale or announcements and the price is pretty reasonable. As with the ShoeMoney Store 100% of the proceeds will goto charity. We also have are going to be integrating more of our behind the scenes footage and other things in the blog in the next couple weeks. Love to hear your feedback as it comes along this month.