* All prices on this site are for a two-year sign-up.

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The .CO top-level domain is opening up over the next three months, and many are predicting it will soon be on par with .COM in terms of desirability. This belief is even built into the way the domain is being released. There are three stages: one for trademark holders, one for general advanced orders, and then one for every one else. The catch, of course, is the price. There is some variation between registrars, but the trademark holders and advanced orders are looking at a couple hundred dollars a pop for these domains. In return they get a jump on everyone else, as regular priced orders don’t start until July. If people didn’t expect a big demand, they wouldn’t pay the premium for the time advantage. And even after the premium periods, these domains will still be thirty bucks a year, well north of the $7 to $9 that most of us pay for our .COM domains.

Only 10 registrars will be handling .CO domains and they are hoping to hit it big. Mark Boost from LCN suggest that the .CO roll out “has the potential to become the biggest global domain since the 1985 launch of .COM”. David Andrews from domain.com predicts “we’ll see a rush of companies launching or re-launching their brands around their .CO name.”

Okay. I’ll buy that a boat-load, hell a fleet-load, of money will be spent for these domains. I don’t doubt that .CO will be far more successful than, say, .biz. I even believe that there will be an insane landrush and normal folks will be lucky to get obscure things like antiquebutterdishes.co.

But I don’t buy it replacing .COM or even seriously challenging it.

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A few months ago, I wrote a post about adding chapter quotes to your WordPress posts. Here I’ll show you another way to add them to posts without them showing up outside of the single-post page, and this method doesn’t require any changes to your theme files.

Last week, I released a WordPress plugin called Conditional Shortcodes. The plugin gives you shortcodes to let you include or exclude parts of you post depending on the context in which it is being shown.

You see it coming, right? Yes, there is a shortcode for including things only when just a single post is being shown. It is the [is_single] shortcode and you could use it for chapter quotes like so:

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Conditional Shortcodes is a WordPress plugin that gives the power of conditional tags to the people writing and editing the content.

As theme designers know, you do some things differently when showing one post than when showing many, and WordPress has tools for handling this. First, there are the different theme files (e.g. single.php for single posts), including the ability to have a special theme file for each post or category if desired. In addition, there are the conditional tags, functions such as is_single and is_archive, for more surgical changes.

But all of that flexibility goes to the theme designer. In general, people on the content creation side have maybe two tools for changing the display of things. They have the <!–more–> tag to limit what gets shown outside of the single-post page. Alternatively, if the theme uses it, they can provide a custom excerpt for those other pages. That’s it.

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