It seems that everybody has a blog these days, and that means everybody has blog comments to manage. Developer Daniel Dura has introduced a new application that could go a long way toward making that task easier. The application is called Moderator, and it was built using the Adobe Air platform. Moderator allows you to handle comment moderation chores without opening a browser window.

Moderator is a hybrid application in that it uses both a Wordpress plugin and an Adobe Air-based application. Installing the plugin in your Wordpress blog and placing the application on your desktop will allow you to:

View unmoderated comments from your moderation queue.

Receive notifications of unmoderated comments in your dock (Mac) or system tray (PC).

Mark individual comments for acceptance, deletion, or as spam with a single mouse click.

View the gravatars for the person that posted the comment.

Minimize the Moderator application to the system tray (PC) or close the application window (Mac) and still get notification of new comments.

Installation is also relatively easy. Download, upload, and install the plugin as usual, then activate it in your Wordpress plugin control panel. This will place a Moderator item on your Settings tab. The Moderator Wordpress page will then assist you in the installation of the Moderator application on your desktop.

The current version is an early one, so you can expect improvements. The author is working on speed issues when several hundred comments are in the queue, and with matching the Moderator Wordpress page to match your administrative theme settings. Dura says that after Wordpress 2.7 is released, there will be no further need for the plugin portion of the app. Moderator will, at that point, communicate directly with native Wordpress functions.

The desktop application portion of the software requires that you download and install Adobe Air on your system. It is available here. There are production versions of Adobe for OS X and Windows, as well as a beta release for Ubuntu.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, October 25th, 2008 at 1:29 pm under Blogosphere, Software, Tips and advice.

Read more entries by Michael W. Jones.
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