Matt Martz has put up a very cool tutorial on segregating comments from trackbacks with WordPress 2.7 (something that has always been on my todo list, actually). Another handy read for theme authors.
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I am really excited to announce you launch of the new premium WordPress themes website - ThemeGalaxy.net. Theme Galaxy crafts beautiful WordPress Themes that are not only professionally designed but are also affordable. All themes make use of cutting edge WordPress features at prices which we think are out of this world.
All themes are of course compatible with he latest WordPress versions and have affordable prices starting from $60 for the single license just this month!
Themes are ordered in four categories for now, Business, Magazine, Personal and Portfolio so be sure you check it all out, you can browse them all here. And if you have any questions go to about or support page with theme documentations and forum.
And if you are looking for press materials or releases there's a press page available here
Guest article by Syed Abbas from Tnerd
With thousands of blogs being launched every day, one has to offer something different from the others to stand out of the crowd. The “differentiator†is what the readers will remember and that’s precisely what will bring them back to your blog. [Image credit: anniemole]
Give them a reason to remember what they saw, read and felt while they are on your blog. There are lot of other things besides “content” which are quite important in creating a brand for your blog.
Lets look at a few things which will help you make your blog more professional and create a brand.
1. Look and feel of the site is very important
Look of the site makes the first impression on the readers and visitors. Keep it nice, simple and clean. Make sure you install a theme with the right color combination and not something which hurts the eye. You can use services like Adobe Kuler or Color Schemer to choose a good color scheme.
Don’t have ads all over the page; let your readers read the content without any distraction. Making money should always be a part of writing great content and not the other way round.
2. Google Apps (customized email addresses)
Google Apps offers several products such as e-mail, calendar, messenger (GTalk), Google docs, etc. under your own domain name. So you can have e-mail address at your domain name (e.g. nerds@tnerd.com) for absolutely free. These e-mails accounts are not any different from the regular gmail accounts.
Having a personalized e-mail address adds that touch of exclusivity to your domain. Go for it! Click here to register with Google Apps.
3. Customized email for registered users
When users register with the site, an automated email is sent to the user confirming the registration at the site. The New User email setup wordpress plugin lets you edit the “from†email address, Subject and the body of the e-mail. This ads a personal touch to it. Exclusive again!
4. About and Contact page
Have a proper “About†page - write about the site, yourself, the team, etc… Having a good About page lets you connect with your users and blogging is all about creating relationships. It also shows how serious you are about the site/blog you are running.
Instead of mentioning mailto links, have a contact page where users can fill a form and submit to send an e-mail. Doesn’t it sound nice and easy. Cforms wordpress plugin lets you create forms and add to you blog.
5. Feedburner URL
Feedburner is a great service and everyone running a blog should certainly make use of it. It offers a feature called “MyBrand†which lets you have the feed at your own domain name, so instead of http://feedproxy.google.com/TechnologyNerd you can have http://feeds.tnerd.com/TechnologyNerd. What do you think; doesn’t that make you look good?
6. Comment Relish
Thank the first time commenter’s on your site by sending them an instant personalized e-mail. This not only helps you keep the visitors coming back, but leaves a good impression on the reader. Remember it’s a thank you e-mail so don’t put the visitor off by writing much - just a thank you and subscribe to our feed should be enough. Get the Comment Relish wordpress plugin.
7. Custom Login Page
Having your own login page wouldn’t hurt. Don’t get me wrong, I love wordpress and give full credit to it on my blog, but I want to have my own login screen too. BM Custom Login wordpress plugin will let you customize the login screen and have your own theme on running on it. It is the best in the town which lets you customize the screen.
Syed Abbas blogs on Technology Nerd (TNerd) and provides latest articles, news, tips and tricks on Media and Technology. He formerly worked at Google as Search Quality Strategist. Got some tips to share, you can also write a guest article on QOT.
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I’m proud to announce that Regular (S)expressions now gets 50k+ views each month.
Now it seems Regular (S)expressions is highly expected blog about MMO’s, gaming industry, web and coding discussions.
50k views is a quite a good number for my recently-shaped blog especially if we think that it has been moved to a brand new domain; http://www.regularsexpressions.com from the old http://www.huseyinuslu.net. Redirecting the old domains users and feed readers was a big concern when we moved to new domain but it seems we kept up with the situation successfully.
So celebrating this, i’ve started brand new article series for peeps out. The very first one is Building a Home Theatre.
Meanwhile, if you can advertise on the blog by ad-spots on our sidebar or even with full-page adds.Use contact form to get more information about advertising on Regular (S)expressions.
WPMU.org is holding a WordPress MU plugin contest, closing on October 10. For those who are familiar with WordPress but not WordPress MU, “MU” stands for “multi-user” but a more appropriate name would be “multi-instance” — it enables you to run multiple WordPress blogs on the same WordPress installation. This makes maintenance, administration, and integration between blogs a lot better and easier than installing WordPress multiple times.
Anyway, I have an entry in the contest, which is my collaboration e-mails plugin for WordPress MU. In a nutshell, when someone submits a post to be reviewed, the plugin e-mails a list of editors that you can define, based on the post category or the author. It should be quite useful if you have a blog where you want posts to be reviewed before they are published.
I would certainly appreciate your votes — please vote here! (The “Collaboration E-mails” plugin is the 6th from the bottom.)
Thanks!
——————————————–
If you are interested, here is a list of some other plugins I have developed for WordPress:
You can also find other WordPress and code tips that I have written here.
One of the most important things when you're starting a new blog is to consider where'll you host it. This decision also relies on smaller choices like which platform you will use, how much bandwidth you will be using, how much disk space you need, etc. etc.
This post should help you decide what you need hosting wise, to prevent you from having to move your blog when it get's popular.
Update: After reading this post, please, please, share your experiences in the comments. To make this post truly valuable, we need to be able to draw from your experience too!
WordPress.org itself suggests that you host with one of the following companies:
I have to disclose that MediaTemple sponsors this blog, but I'll try to be as fair as possible in my judgement by comparing these hosting parties on fixed factors.
The stats I've compared them on, and some of my findings:
Maximum disk size
With Laughing Squid offering a meager 300 MB, they disqualify themselves almost straight away, as the rest of the hosting parties offer 100 GB upwards of storage. Unless you plan on doing a photo blog with loads of pictures every day, I doubt you'll reach the 100 GB limit soon, so other then Laughing Squid, there are no real losers here.
Included bandwidth per month
Other than what a lot of people think, the internet isn't free. It seems to be almost free though, as most parties include decent amounts of traffic. Be aware though that if you are going to host your own video or a lot of images (and why would you want to do that?), you'll have to take a good look at this.
Number of email addresses and aliases included
While I doubt this will be the breaking point for you in a hosting decision, it IS important to know upfront.
Whether you can access your hosting account through FTP and SSH
Not everyone will need SSH access, everyone will need FTP access at some point. Well everybody provides for FTP access, but if you need SSH access, be sure to check the table.
Does hosting party have a One Click Installer for WordPress?
You can safely live without it, but if it saves you a couple of minutes (or hours) work, it might be a reason to "go for it".
Is a free domain included?
Really important? Probably not, but they are contained in the price, so it needs to be here for an honest comparison.
The price when you prepay this package for 1 year
In all cases I've gone for the cheapest package, prepaid for 1 year, so that the comparison is honest.
How many issues there are on the WordPress.org support forums?
Probably one of the best measurement of both how many people use a host and how much trouble they give is the number of cases for the hosting party in the support forums. This number has two sides though, you'll probably want to check for yourself how the cases are handled if you think you'll need a lot of support.
The results:
To be honest: if you're not TechCrunch, you'll probably do fine with every hosting party as far as disk size, bandwidth, email is concerned, as long as you don't go for Laughing Squid. What's left is pricing, and with my discount code ($50 off for the first year if you use promo code "yoast"), DreamHost is by far the cheapest.
If you look at all of this the biggest question is: which of these hosts can survive a Digg frontpage. Honestly: I can't test that. MediaTemple boasts that their GridService is the best service for this kind of situation, and I can tell you that it does indeed work, but the pricing is high.
So, currently, my advice would be to go to Dreamhost, or, if you think you'll hit a lot of big social media sites often and you can afford the somewhat higher price, Media Temple.
Whatever you choose, good luck with your WordPress blog, and remember to sign up for my WordPress newsletter!
This is a post from Joost de Valk's WordPress & SEO Blog. If you want to do back-link analysis Yoast style, try out SEO Spyglass, the best desktop back-link checker out there, especially for it's price!
WordPress Hosting Parties Reviewed
I released version 0.1 of the PHP web application versioning web application. The first release is rough around the edges and needs to be modified in a few places. I do think it has always been a good start and also has been very useful for what I needed it to do. However, as I move forward I want to position it for other projects besides WordPress and it needs to be polished. Also, since it is open to the world, it needs some better quality controls attached to it, so I don’t cringe whenever my name is associated with it.
It is lacking inline documentation, test cases, solid installation script, decoupling of WordPress, support for more than uploading zip files, and a bunch of other requests. I’m going to work on the quality assurance parts first while decoupling support for WordPress.
The issue currently is that I really only support SQLite, but I’m going to finish support for MySQL also. This should hopefully ease up on the time it takes to search and load the pages.
I think these central features need to be addressed for the version 0.2 tag and release.
Version 0.2 will work on AJAX searching instead of displaying all of the functions. I’ve found that it takes an long time to load pages and what I really need is to just search for the elements I want the version info for.
Better installation script.The current installation script is extremely basic and doesn’t allow for any configurations. The goal for supporting both SQLite and MySQL is to allow for creating the needed components for getting them to work. SQLite needs its own directory to hold the database file and this directory needs protection against people downloading the file. Well, it isn’t that important to protect, but no one should be accessing the directory anyway.
Extensible library architecture.I want to use some patterns, which will hopefully enable extending the functionality later in the development. This also includes reworking the directory structure. The web application shouldn’t be that difficult or that much to it, but it should allow for ease of extending later also. It probably will change later when everything is worked out and better packaging of the script needs to be done.
MySQL support.I know MySQL better and can optimize the code for it. I’ve found that I’ve learned how to optimize the table structures for SQLite better to where they aren’t as slow. However, I believe that MySQL support should probably give some users a boost over SQLite for some large databases. It may extend the period for which development and testing is needed to complete this feature. If I can’t finish it, then really I’m going to focus on the other features first.
Versioning look up support.In version 0.1, there is only one way to look up the versioning information for the web application and that is uploading a zip file. You have to do it every time and it does get to be a pain after some time. I want to extend support to accessing the already uploaded files instead of having to reupload them every time. I also want to support traversing directories and getting the versioning information from those files.
Quality AssuranceThere isn’t currently any quality assurance in the web application and I really need to change that. Right now the script isn’t that complicated or large, but going forward, I don’t want to be hypocritical with writing a script meant for finding the information for the @since phpdoc tags. It looks bad to write a script for helping those that write inline documentation and neglect inline documentation. I’m also going to work on unit tests for various parts of the library. It will help in reducing the amount of bugs. I doubt I’ll finish the test cases in this version, but over the course, I’m going to work on it more. I’m not going to release the final version until all of the unit tests are written.
The web application versioning purpose is to record the various elements in PHP that can be documented. Mainly functions, classes, class attributes, methods, constants, and limited global variable support (must be declared in a function as global). For web applications that neglect @since tag information, this web application will be helpful in finding that information. Since it was built for WordPress, it also supports filter and action API version information.
When I was asked to speak on how WordPress changes lives at WordCamp Portland in September of 2008, I was faced with a dilemma. While WordPress does change lives, blogging changes more lives. How do I connect the dots between WordPress and the life changing experience of blogging?
I didn’t realize that the WordPress Community would give me the answers I needed to that question. Their inspirational answers led to the following video on how WordPress changes lives, and the creation of the WordPress Fairy Blogmother.
WordPress changes lives because of the community. Over and over again, people told me that WordPress changes their lives because of the people it brings into their lives. While it doesn’t really matter what blogging platform you may use, it’s the community that supports and encourages fellow WordPress users that makes the difference. Without the WordPress Support Forums, the incredible free WordPress Themes created by imaginative and altruistic fans, the powerful WordPress Plugins created and shared by those who saw a challenge and found a solution, and the support and willingness of WordPress users to educate others on how to use the program and make it work better - there would be no community.
WordPress has inspired many to learn about coding, design, web development, marketing, but also how to be a part of a community. WordPress fans are the definition of the social web. With the passion that comes with learning and sharing WordPress tips, tricks, and techniques, they’ve founded a grassroots community, which led to WordPress meetups and social gatherings, and now to WordCamps around the world.
When I attend the many business and professional conferences to speak and present programs, it’s fairly serious. I’m there for business. They are there for business. It’s serious stuff.
When I walk through the door of a WordCamp event, I’ve found family. We’re instantly friends. We all know each other, and if we don’t, we will within a few moments. We’re risk takers and yet communal spirits, sharing the risk together. When one person pushes WordPress, we all benefit from the results.
As I interviewed people and asked the WordPress Community for help in discovering how WordPress changes lives, I knew I had to put faces on the many people who’ve had their lives transformed by their involvement in WordPress. In the first half of the video, I honor those whom I’ve known for several years since early in the development of WordPress, as well as a few new friends. Many of these people have gone from interested enthusiasts to friends of WordPress to employees of Automattic, the parent company of WordPress. By using WordPress and being involved in the community, they’ve built their businesses and reputation as WordPress experts, and in turn, powerful forces on the web.
Sure, any blogging platform can do that, but there is something about Matt Mullenweg and his vision for WordPress and blogging in general that brings people together to achieve more than they could alone. This is what changes people’s lives. Together, we’re stronger with WordPress than without.
Enjoy all the inspirational reasons WordPress fans offered for how and why WordPress changed their lives. And don’t forget to check out Glenda Watson Hyatt: How WordPress Changes Her Life Daily, the video made especially for the finale of my presentation.
There are two versions of the video. The YouTube version is low resolution and a smaller file size. The Viddler version is higher resolution and 138.5 meg file size. The video is ten minutes long. The transcription of the video is below.
YouTube Version of How WordPress Changes Lives by Lorelle VanFossen
Viddler Version of How WordPress Changes Lives by Lorelle VanFossen
I haven’t found an easy way to add subtitles or captions to this Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum v9 program. Any help would be appreciated. Until then, this is the transcript of the video.
Fairy Blogmother: Hey, is this thing on. Hey. Is this on?
Is it working? It’s not working.
Bang! Bang! Hello, are you working.
Ah, there we go.
* Instrumental Music “When you wish upon a star” from Pinocchio *
“When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are.
Anything your heart desires will come to you.”
“If your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme.
“When you wish upon a star, as dreamers do.”
“Fate is kind. She brings to those who love
The sweet fulfillment of their secret longing.”
“Like a bolt out of the blue, fate steps in and sees you through.
“When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.”
Featured WordPress Community Members:
*Music*
*Static*
Fairy Blogmother: Hello! Is this working?
It’s stop working again, dang it.
What’s going on here? Okay, wait, wait.
Bang! Bang! Ah, there.
Barbara Rozgonyi: Hello, my name is Barbara Rozgonyi with wiredPRworks.com, and Lorelle, thank you for interviewing me in the bathroom. How has WordPress changed my life? I can’t tell you everything in 15 seconds but I can tell you that it’s really made me into the person I’ve always wanted to be. Now, I can be an author, I can be a person who really influences lives. And boy, it’s so interesting to see what readers have to say. To see them take just a little piece of information and take it and make it huge that will help so many people. And I get to hang out with cool people like Lorelle in the ladies’ room.
John Hawkins: Hi, this is John Hawkins from johnhawkinsunrated.com. WordPress. WordPress changed my life how. Let’s see. I’d say I’ve met some amazing people through WordPress. I Twitter and I answer people’s questions, and you would be amazed at the amount of people who are just dying to connect with you through WordPress. Go WordPress!
Hey, come to WordCamp Las Vegas on the January 10-11, 2009. See you there!
Stace Baris:
My name is Stace Baris with aceinternetmarketing.com. And WordPress has changed my life because it is open source, lots of great Plugins for doing SEO getting my content out there, lots of widgets I can use and also made affiliate marketing really easy with great Amazon Plugins and all sorts of things. If you are serious about blogging, WordPress is the way to go and Lorelle is the person to get your info from. She’s great.
Susan Patton: Hi, I’m Susan Patton the Marketing Eggspert from Sparkplugging.com/marketing. How WordPress has changed my life? Besides getting me interviewed in the bathroom at Blog World Expo, the height of experiences, it makes it really easy. I have some tech experience but I love the creative side. So I don’t want to deal with the hard stuff. WordPress makes it easy to do what I want to do. There are Widgets for everything. There are template for everything. It’s easy. And I can worry about everything else and not my blog.
Kim Woodbridge: WordPress has changed my life by giving me confidence in my abilities and helping me earn money. I’ve found that I love
working on it. Plus, I’ve met so many interesting and talented people online.
This sounded so much better in my head but it didn’t come out quite right 
Well, I hope it gives you the idea. Thanks! Kim Woodbridge kimwoodbridge.com [Via email]
Naked Bones: I would say WordPress has changed my life, and it has made it easier. It gave me the room to empty my mind of the everyday stuff we all go through. [Via blog comment]
Wendy Piersall: Hi, I’m Wendy Piersall. I’m CEO of the SparkPlugging.com. Looking back I was remembering when I first started my brand. I kicked it off with WordPress. WordPress made it absolutely easy for me with little-to-know tech experience whatsoever to create a powerful brand that is now rocking the blogosphere. I tell everybody now to just start with WordPress. It’s brain dead easy and it’s extremely just brilliant and I don’t know how we could function with out it. We owe a lot to you WordPress. We love you.
Owen Cutajar: [from Twitter] WP means I can build a great new website, secure and loaded with functionality, all b4 breakfast. Good Luck at #wordcampdx.
Heather Rasley: Hi, my name is Heather Rasley, the deputy at Automattic. I made the switch to WordPress after discovering that all my favorite awesome bloggers use it. I’m very happy to be working for Automattic and making other people happy, too.
Jane Wells: Hi, I’m Jane Wells and I’m the user experience person with Automattic. WordPress has changed my life by exposing me to a kick ass community of open source developers and allowing me to work with the best guys in the world.
Karen Jackie and Dana Rockel: I’m Karen Jackie partner of Content Robot and Dana Rockel from Content Robot. WordPress has changed our lives because it has actually given us an entrepreneurial spirit and we produce WordPress blogs for clients all over the world. WordPress is a great platform. We started out as a blogging company and moved to WordPress and we don’t do any other platforms right now. WordPress is it.
Nathan Moller: My name is Nate Moeller from MollerMarketing.com. Without WordPress I don’t know where I would be in the blogging community. What else is there. Blogging is WordPress.
Fairy Blogmother: Oh, no. Not again.
They must be redesigning the interface. Sigh.
Can’t they leave anything alone. They keep messing with things.
It was just fine the way it was. Why do they have to keep changing things?
ARGH!
At WordCamp Portland, I surprised the audience from behind, wearing my WordPress Fairy Blogmother outfit. I spoke about the points mentioned at the beginning of this article, and asked the audience to come forward with their “testimonies” on how WordPress changed their lives. I was stunned at the number of people wanting to share their stories, nearly bringing the audience, and myself, to tears.
You can see the video of part of the presentation by Dale Chumbley streamed live from Cubespace in Portland, Oregon.
The end of the program featured Glenda Watson Hyatt: How WordPress Changes Her Life Daily, a video on how this woman uses WordPress to blog only with her left thumb. Because WordPress continues to be the most accessible and disabled-user friendly blogging platform around, she has opened up her sphere of influence and network of relationships around the world as her blog allows her to “speak out” when her body won’t.
As we design and develop WordPress Themes, Plugins, and code, the WordPress Community needs to remember that Glenda is an important representative of our users.
Thank you again to everyone who helped me put this together, everyone whose lives have been touched my WordPress, and everyone who has helped changed my life with WordPress.
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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.
The latest episode of WordPress Weekly is out the door and although it was great to get back in the saddle, I must admit that the show was rough around the edges. However, I am already in the process of making the show better by trying not to cover news stories which have been published on WeblogtoolsCollection.com. I’ve also stepped up my process of gathering people to interview as I remember those being some of the most popular episodes of the show.
I believe that this first episode has some kinks but I will work on getting rid of those for episode 24. Keith is a good co host and I think we will eventually work well together as naturals. I have to remember that I am not only doing this for myself anymore but I am representing Mark along with Weblogtoolscollection.com. Since the show is published in the WordPress dashboard, I must make extra precautions to make the best show that I can as I’m now in front of a large audience. Not that I didn’t try to do this before but there is a sense of pressure as I feel like I’m under a microscope.
I’ll try to lighten up the mood on next weeks episode but if you take a listen, please provide your critique of the show and give me some tips to improve. To those who continue to support me and the show, thank you as I really do appreciate it.
First,download and install the FastCgi Extension for IIS 6 from microsoft.The FastCGI protocol enables PHP applications to be hosted on the IIS web server in a high-performance and reliable way.FastCGI re-uses CGI processes for multiple requests, which provides a significant performance boost as compared to CGI.
Once FastCgi is installed,Config FastCGI extension to work with php:
[PHP]
ExePath=c:\php\php-cgi.exe
Next,download and install eAccelerator.eAccelerator is a free open-source PHP accelerator, optimizer, and dynamic content cache. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. It also optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. eAccelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times.
After eAccelerator is downloaded:
extension=eAccelerator.dll
eaccelerator.shm_size="128"
eaccelerator.cache_dir="c:\tmp\eaccelerator"
eaccelerator.enable="1"
eaccelerator.optimizer="1"
eaccelerator.check_mtime="1"
eaccelerator.filter=""
eaccelerator.shm_max="0"
eaccelerator.shm_ttl="0"
eaccelerator.shm_prune_period="0"
eaccelerator.shm_only="0"
eaccelerator.compress="1"
eaccelerator.compress_level="9"
eaccelerator.keys = "shm"
eaccelerator.sessions = "shm"
eaccelerator.content = "shm"
That’s all,restart your IIS and you’ll get a faster Wordpress on windows IIS 6 with highly boosted performance.
Because IIS does not support mod_rewrite module for rewriting URLs,the biggest problem hosting wordpress on iis is that you always get an ‘ugly’ and not SEO-friendly index.php in your permalinks.you can install wp_url_rewriting,an open source URL rewriting for wordpress, to resolve this issue.
Don’t like the proposed WordPress 2.7 menu structure? Why not make it sortable and with ability to rename top-level menu items so that those who still prefer Manage and Write instead of Posts and Pages can have it.
WordPress Dashboard menu sorting and renaming
Here is how it works:
What do you think?
If you haven’t reviewed the GigaOM White Paper: The Facts & Fiction of Bandwidth Caps, do it now.
As of Wednesday this week, Comcast, the largest provider of broadband and DSL for Internet access in the United States is going to be restricting your data transfer levels to 250 gigabytes a month. According to Om Malik:
With this move, the cable company will become the symbol of a new Internet era, one that is both monitored and metered. It is an era that threatens to limit innovation and to a large extent, the possibilities for new startups.
Many bloggers are part of online businesses and startups as well as suppliers of video, podcasts, and downloadable and uploaded files across the web. As web designs and WordPress Themes become more graphic and code dependent, increasing our bandwidth access levels, these limits impinge upon that grown and that access.
While WordPress Themes, Plugins, and Widgets account for very small levels of data transfer, what about a new WordPress user who wants to download and experiment with a lot of Themes and Plugins? Downloading more than a gig or two of WordPress stuff is rare, but if you add that to their other file downloads, like software, instant messaging, IRC, email, flickr, YouTube, podcasts, music, news, television, VoIP, and all the information and data that enters our world through our computers - those numbers add up fast.
I just moved from a satellite connection with a 17 gig limit. We hit the limit all the time and we weren’t downloading music or shows. I didn’t even download podcasts until I went on a trip. There were three of us using the web for our work. Download a few software programs, update your computer’s operating system, test out some Plugins, and it all adds up fast.
According to the White Paper, “today’s power users are tomorrow’s average users” with a predication that by 2012 we will be paying about $215 a month for Internet data access. Malik and others are fighting back with words in hopes of changing this “walled garden” limitation. I hope you join us in spreading the word.
The timing of this announcement comes the same time as the announcement of the new World Wide Web Foundation was announced. In the welcome statement, the founders, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, stated:
The World Wide Web Foundation seeks to advance One Web that is free and open, to expand the Web’s capability and robustness, and to extend the Web’s benefits to all people on the planet. The Web Foundation brings together business leaders, technology innovators, academia, government, NGOs, and experts in many fields to tackle challenges that, like the Web, are global in scale.
One of the focuses of the World Wide Web foundation is to investigate, in its Web for Society program, how to lower the barriers of accessing the Web for people who are not able, today, to find accessible and usable information.
While I’m totally in favor and support breaking down communication and language barriers, as well as all social, cultural, and technological barriers, the biggest barrier we have to fight is greed.
It’s getting harder and harder to find free access to the web. Someone has to pay. With belts tightening around the world, will Internet access be only for the rich?
The Internet was originally started and built on lines abandoned by the phone companies, the same companies who struggled to find ways of charging for that access after they realized they were missing out on the financial possibilities of connecting via the Internet and web. They have been looking under every rock to find ways of making money off this “web thing” ever since.
Yes, we must pay for the continued growth and access to the web, but restricting bandwidth and data transfer hurts an economy already showing the flashing red danger signal.
Be warned, be aware, and let Comcast and others know that you do not want this. Fight back with your voice. Spread the word.
I remember when Arthur C. Clarke predicted that long distance telephone calls would be free by the end of the century. I thought it odd since he was a very intelligent man and he lived in the same world that I did, one where corporate greed controls everything. I couldn’t see such a thing as being possible, but with the web, it became possible. Will that freedom continue or will corporate greed continue to slip into our pockets?
Site Search Tags: comcast, bandwidth, data transfer, internet access, internet provider, high cost, bandwidth restriction, bandwidth limits, internet connections, wordpress themes, wordpress plugins, wordpress news, download, upload, files, connection, internet
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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.
Product: Wordpress-MU (multi-user)
Version: Versions prior to 2.6 are affected
Credits: Juan Galiana
Juan Galiana has published the advisory to Bugtraq this week which includes a proof of concept exploit.
Wordpress-MU is affected by a Cross Site Scripting vulnerability, an attacker can perform an XSS attack that allows him to access the
targeted user cookies to gain administrator privileges
In /wp-admin/wpmu-blogs.php an attacker can inject javascript code, the input variables “s” and “ip_address” of GET method aren’t properly sanitized
WordPress-MU were notified and version 2.6.1 addresses this issue. We recommend all users upgrade as soon as possible.
This month we grew not just in blogs and users, but in company size. As I mentioned in a previous post, the team from Intense Debate is now a part of Automattic. We’re also trucking along with Version 2.7, and listening to your input from the two design surveys opened up this month.
Here are the stats:
Other interesting stuff:
We welcomed new WordPress VIPs, including The NFL.
Martha Stewart converted to WordPress and devoted an entire episode of The Martha Stewart Show to blogging.
The UK Royal Navy uses WordPress and is the first of the UK’s Armed Services to have a blog.
We had a record-breaking number of WordCamps this month, with fantastic turnouts:
Phew!
WordPress in itself is a decent system but it can be made into a rock solid blogging beast. Adding plugins can make WordPress into the Swiss Army Knife of blogging: just pull out whatever functionality you need for your specific blog!
Many people have asked me for my list of top WordPress plugins. Of course I've written quite a few WordPress plugins myself, but I'd thought I'd share with you what I think are the best WordPress plugins out there.
FeedBurner FeedSmith
I use and love FeedBurner, even though it goes awry every once in a while, and the best way of using it is with FeedSmith, which I've been using since before it was "acquired" by FeedBurner. Just install, enter your FeedBurner ID and activate. That's it, you're done.
HeadSpace2
Anyone who has been following me for a while knows I'm a huge fan of John Godley's plugins especially HeadSpace2 and Redirection. HeadSpace2 takes care of all my meta tags and inserts my Mint code. If you don't need fancy things you can use it for Google Analytics and other trackers too!
Lighter Menus
The WP 2.5 and 2.6 backend is a bit "heavy", lighter menus turns the menu into a drop down and saves a LOT of space in the top part of the interface. Check out how cool my admin looks now (click for larger image):
pageMash
My site uses a lot of pages, and sometimes you want to move around some pages. The default WordPress way of doing that is hard (you have to give each page a menu order by hand) but pageMash is excellent for that, with a nice Ajaxy interface in which you can just drag and drop pages. Have a look (click for larger image):
Redirection
WordPress doesn't do any 301 redirections by itself when you, for instance, change the slug of a page (the part of the URL that identifies the post). Redirection does do that for you though. You can also add your own redirects in the very user friendly admin panel, that's why it takes care of all my redirections, and does so wonderfully.
Search Excerpt
WordPress Search by default sucks. Fixing it takes a bit of work, but the heavy lifting is done by this plugin. If you want to know what I've done with this blogs search pages, read my post on improving the WordPress search function. The results are very cool, as you can see in this search, for instance.
Wordpress Automatic Upgrade
WordPress upgrades quite often. Which is both a good thing, and a pain in the backside because of all the work involved. This plugin takes care of that, and even though I've heard of people having problems with this one, for me, it has always worked amazingly well. I've used it to upgrade all of my WordPress blogs and sites to the latest version for at least 6 months now.
WP-DBManager
Not only is this plugin perfect for doing automated backups, it can also do things like database optimization and the admin pages for it allow you to do the occasional query from within WordPress!
WP Security Scan
Even when you update to the latest version all the time, there's still this slight chance of you getting hacked. WP Security Scan helps you minimize this chance by pointing you right at all the vulnerabilities in your blog.
WP Super Cache
I can't imagine running this site without caching, although I have it turned of 98% of the time, I do turn it on whenever I'm about to hit Digg / Reddit / StumbleUpon, and it has saved my "life" a couple of times. WordPress has a tendency of becoming slower when you make your themes more complex, and when you add a lot of plugins. This plugin allows me to still have both and keep my readers happy.
WPtouch iPhone Theme
While the majority of your site's visitors will be using a normal web browser, you do want to make iPhone and iPod users as happy as possible too. This plugin helps you do that, by serving up a cool interface for iPhone and iPod Touch users, that looks approximately like this:
This is a post from Joost de Valk's WordPress & SEO Blog. If you want to do back-link analysis Yoast style, try out SEO Spyglass, the best desktop back-link checker out there, especially for it's price!
11 Top WordPress Plugins Every Blog Should Have
In my last post in this WordPress SEO series, we covered how to use the XML-Sitemaps plugin so you could generate a sitemap for your WordPress site. Today, we’re going to cover the best way to get Google to recognize that sitemap and start crawling your site!
The first thing you’re going to need is a Google account (a Gmail account should suffice).
Once you have that, you’ll want to head over to the Google Webmaster Tools. Now, I could spend all day explaining all the different things you could do in here, but instead, I’ll just link you over to a much more in-depth article that you can read at your leisure.
Once you have arrived at the Google Webmaster Tools page and have signed in, the first thing you’ll want to do is add a site. Just input the URL for your site (the one you want crawled by Google) and click “Add Site”.
The next page will ask you to verify the site. Obviously, you shouldn’t be able to claim you own a site when you don’t. So, Google uses one of two methods of verification — you can either upload an html file to the root of your website’s domain, or you can insert a META tag in the <head> section of your website.
Either option is fine, but you do have to do one or the other.
After you have verified your site, click the “Sitemaps” link on the left menu. This is where you are going to tell Google the location of the sitemap you generated (normally located at www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml).
Click the “Add Sitemap” button on the left menu and choose “Add General Web Sitemap”.
Finally, you’ll want to tell Google the location of your sitemap. Depending on whether you chose to “gzip” your sitemap, the location of your sitemap will either be www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml or www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml.gz — so be sure to input the correct location here. If you chose to do both (XML and gzip) then you could enter either of these and be fine.
That’s it! Click “Add General Web Sitemap” and Google will begin crawling your site (based on your sitemap) soon.
Yahoo and MSN Search have similar programs to which you can submit your sitemap as well. But for the sake of time, we’re just covering Google here, since they are the biggest. Truth be told, most of your search engine traffic will probably come from Google, no matter what you do.
Now that you have Google crawling and indexing your site, we want to make sure everything else is optimized for it. Next time, we’ll cover how to edit the permalinks in WordPress so that you can use targeted keywords and start getting ranked for the keywords you want. Don’t miss it!
If you write a blog post that links to another blog post (or sometimes just web page) and you have everything set up right, a pingback sends a notification to that target blog with information about your post.
A trackback can be sent even if you don’t link to the target post - you have to enter the ‘trackback url’ of the target blog post in the relevant input field (’Send trackbacks to’) when writing your post - which will give the same result. A blog will generally supply the link location for trackbacks to its posts.
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A complete customizable, slick twitter plugin that auto refreshes without page reload. If that’s what you’ve been looking for then head over to Kishore Asokan’s blog. He has released a Wordpress plugin that does just that.
Here are it’s features, and I’m sure you’ll love it.
It looks pretty much interesting, at least for the Twitter enthusiasts out there. If you didn’t like those boring non-customizable twitter boxes, try this.
Daily SEO blog - SEO Tips and Social Media for the learner
Mac freeware reviews, free online tools and productivity tips
Customizable Ajax Twitter Plugin for Wordpress that auto refreshes
I was so thrilled when Glenda Watson Hyatt of the Do It Myself Blog volunteered her story of how WordPress changed her life for my WordCamp Portland keynote presentation. I’ll be sharing the videos and pictures of the program in the next few days, but I wanted to share with you Glenda’s personal story.
As you design and develop WordPress Themes and Plugins, and even WordPress itself, remember that you are serving thousands, maybe even millions of people just like Glenda. Creative, energetic members of society determined to give back to their community, yet unable to communicate in person or easily interact with a computer. They are reliant upon those of us who make the web possible, and social, to communicate with others by maintaining web accessibility standards.
Glenda tells her story in her book, “I’ll Do It Myself.” Imagine being unable to communicate but having a lot to say. With the help of determined friends, family, and an off-and-on-again support community, made her way through high school and then into college, and eventually into her own consulting business without much ability to talk “normally.”
Glenda Watson Hyatt, Darrell Hyatt, and Lorelle VanFossen at Blog World Expo
I was extremely lucky to spend time with Glenda and her wonderful husband, Darrell, at Blog World Expo in Las Vegas. We had a great time visiting and both were extremely excited about being included in the WordCamp Portland event through video. I’m lucky to have found two wonderful new friends and I look forward to visiting them soon in the Vancouver, British Columbia, area.
If you have a social media or web technology conference in the Pacific Northwest - or anywhere for that matter - and you want an incredible inspirational blogger to speak to you, get Glenda. She will change your life with her smile and attitude.
Thanks, Glenda!
Site Search Tags: glenda, glenda watson hyatt, i can do it myself, i’ll do it myself, accessibility, accessible, web accessibility, web standards, disabled, disabled blogger, inspirational, how wordpress changes lives
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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.
Automattic have published WordPress 2.7 user interface wireframes (.pdf) that list and explain the changes planned for the next major release of WordPress.
WordPress 2.7 User Interface proposal (version 002)
I think there are only two things wrong with the purposed user interface and the information architecture:
WordPress has always been regarded as a simple and easy platform (software) for publishing blogs and by blogs I mean articles with photos, pictures and videos posted in chronological order. Why would one need eleven top level navigation items to do just that. I am referring particularly to Settings, Tools and Plugins menus items. What if a plugin creates a tool that needs to be configured? On wp-testers mailing list Stephen Rider mentions another set of reasons why it may not work.
Why is there a need for breadcrumb navigation if the main menu is only two levels deep. More importantly, by clicking on the top level navigation item (in the left side menu) one is only able to expand and collapse child items of that menu and not go to a particular subsection. So the question is — where will the previous level breadcrumb navigation item lead to? Will it be Add New or Edit f