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Here’s a useful plugin for bloggers working with data: Datapress allows you to quickly visualise a dataset as a table, timeline, scatter plot, bar chart, ‘intelligent list’ (allowing you to sort by more than one value at once – see this example) or map.

Once installed, the plugin adds a new button to the ‘Upload/Insert’ row in the post edit view which you can click to link to a dataset in the same way as you would embed an image or video.

The plugin is in beta at the moment and takes a bit of getting used to. There’s a convention you have to follow in naming Google spreadsheet columns, for example – this Glasgow Vegan Guide spreadsheet has quite a few of them – but this could add some new visualisation possibilities. It seems particularly nice for lists and maps (if you have lat-long values), although Google spreadsheet’s built-in charts options will obviously be quicker for simple graphs and charts.

UPDATE: I’ve also just learned that the large empty space below the table can be fixed under the ‘Configure Display’ tab in the editing view.

The plugin has a demo site with some impressive examples and the developers are happy to help with any problems. It’s also up for the Knight News Challenge if you want to support it.

A couple months ago I installed a plugin on the blog that meant search engines would index links in comments: by default WordPress uses ‘nofollow‘ on comments to stop spammers abusing them to boost search engine rankings, but that prevents genuine commenters getting credit for their contributions.

One problem: as one commenter pointed out, the blog as a whole was set to ‘noindex-nofollow’ “which equals a no trespasing sign for search engines for ALL of the site’s links. It’s Google suicide.”

I added that problem to my vast to-do list, and moved on.

But that moved to the top of my to-do list recently when the BBC made a similar mistake with their linking mechanisms.

So I scoured this blog’s code to delete the meta tag nofollow reference – to no avail.

I called for help from Twitter followers, and got two very useful suggestions: Andy Dickinson found a plugin to alter the meta tags; and Gavin Wray pointed out the much simpler option: in the blog admin go to Settings > Privacy > and select make visible to search engines.

Invisible comments

But now I have a new problem. As Malcolm Coles pointed out in the comments, the commenting system IntenseDebate uses javascript, which means “the comments are invisible to search engines in any case because they now rely on javascript to be seen … (try looking at those pages with javascript off to see what I mean).”

This is not only a problem for this blog, but for any organisation which uses javascript for its comments system – including The Guardian, as Coles recently pointed out.

As I wrote this post, Malcolm emailed to tell me about a post he’d written about commenting systems and javascript generally. IntenseDebate had responded to say they were “rolling out a non-javascript-friendly version which will be visible to Google although it’s still in beta.”

So there’s hope yet, but I don’t like the accessibility issue at all, so should I switch back to standard comments?