WordPress Report For The Week Of November 14th 2008

Project Icon – A few weeks ago, the WordPress dev team put out a call to those who are interested to develop a set of icons that can be used throughout the WordPress administration area. Over a dozen designers responded but after the team decided to turn the actual decision of which icons to use to the community, half of the designers took back their submissions. As it stands, there are now five icon packs to choose from. The icon survey will will remain open for a period of 48 hours starting Thursday so be sure to head on over the WordPress devlopment blog for a link to the survey. The icons that win the survey will be added into WordPress beta 3.- http://wordpress.org/development/2008/11/wordpress-27-project-icon/

WordPress 2.7 Update – WordPress 2.7 will undergo another beta release which would make it the third in the testing cycle. Bugs continue to be added to the WordPress bug tracker but most of the problems stem from the WordPress UI redesign coupled with IE6 compatibility. Considering the icons from the survey will be part of beta 3 and the survey will last for 48 hours, I expect beta 3 to be released either on the 16th or 17th of November.

IntenseDebate Reopens – IntenseDebate, the third party commenting service has reopened its doors after closing them soon after they were acquired by Automattic. Along with the service now being available to the public, there is also a new WordPress plugin that has been released that taps into many of the features the service has to offer. Some of these features include two-way comment sync, admin panel integration, search engine optimization, trackbacks, profile sync, post settings and much more. If you have time, be sure to check out the video on the IntenseDebate blog post which does a great job explaining what the new plugin is all about.- http://blog.intensedebate.com/2008/11/12/intensedebate-is-back/

Plugin Of The Week – No Self Pings – I don’t know about you but I find it annoying that WordPress pings itself if you link to a previously published article within your blog. Thanks to the no self pings plugin, this is no longer an issue. All you you have to do is upload the plguin to your plugin directory, activate it and just like that, you won’t ping yourself when you link to an article within your archive.- http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/no-self-ping/

Popularity: 24% [?]

WordPress Report For The Week Of November 7th 2008

WordPress 2.7 Beta 2 Released – WordPress Beta 2 has recently been released to the public. This new beta includes a slew of bug fixes from beta 1. Some of the fixes that have taken place so far include:

Easier post box dropping

Plugin update and install fixes

Fixed broken wp-mail

Fixed some PHP warnings and notices

And much much more. WordPress 2.7 will not be available to the public on Novemebr 10^th but instead, will probably not be available until the end of November or possibly December 1^st. - http://wordpress.org/development/2008/11/wordpress-27-beta-2/

Fake WordPress – Reports came out this week via the Register and others about a version of WordPress which was being distributed to the public that contained a back door trojan. The hack relies on an old version of WordPress whereas the module tells you when an updrage is available with a link to download it, the link in this case pointed to a fake WordPress site claiming you could download version 2.6.4 of the software which doesn’t exist. The site has since been shut down.- http://westi.wordpress.com/2008/11/06/wordpresz/

Continue Voting WordPress Style – While the U.S. Presidential election has come and gone, there are still plenty of things to vote for such as WordPress Ideas. WordPress Ideas is used as a central location where users of WordPress from all across the world share their ideas on how to improve the software, plugins to integrate, etc. So while many within the WordPress community may think that they have no voice concerning the direction in which WordPress is heading, that thought couldn’t be farther from the truth. The fact of the matter is, you do have a voice. Ultimately, the decision is up to the team on whether or not to include an idea into the core of WordPress, but with a grassroots effort, you can easily make your idea known - http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2008/11/05/were-not-done-voting-yet/

Plugin Of The Week – Slayers Custom Widgets – This plugin adds an entirely new level of theme customization through the use of widgets. You can assign a widget to display on the home page only or maybe you only want it to appear on the single post template page. All of these options are available along with a ton of other configurations. Until now, end users had no way of configuring their sidebar outside of displaying a static set of widgets. Now, you can turn that sidebar into something useful by displaying only the things you want to display. For example, I can display all sorts of widgets on the homepage but when someone clicks on a post title, the sidebar can be filled with related posts, recent comments from the article or whatever else I want to have there. - http://www.thaslayer.com/2008/10/16/wordpress-plugin-slayers-custom-widgets-v-10/

Popularity: 38% [?]

Some changes for the better!

If you have been here within the past couple of days, you have noticed that I have once again changed themes. I decided I wanted a more “magazine style” theme for the site and have began the never ending search for that ever elusive theme.

The current theme, called Arthemia 2, seems to be a good fit, at least for now. It has most every thing in it I want/need and is fairly easy to maintain. It does require some manual PHP coding for certain items, however, I shouldn’t have to make those changes very often.

One big change that has come about due to the new theme, is the placement and exposure of The New Media Site of the Week. Previously, it was very prominent in the top right corner of the page. Now, you will find it in the Blogroll section under SOTW (oddly enough, huh) and I have added a few features to these listings, since they will be staying on board for a time now, instead of rotating off, such as an RSS feed to your site and a graphic image to represent your site (as long as I can locate those on your site, they will be added).

You will find the other new options that were on the previous theme, such as the ratings system and the gravatars. This theme has a special section for a Headline News Story and some Featured Stories and I will use the segment features like Wordpress Weekly News and Josh Buddes’ BPN Segment there. Other segment hosts that submit posts will be featured too. Currently, only Jeff and Josh are submitting show notes for their segments.

I still have the Popularity Plugin running and you can see those stats on each post. This will give you a better idea of what my readers are reading and enjoying the most!

There are more changes and additions coming in the next few weeks as I test out more plugins and maybe a theme or two. I’ll keep you posted!

Popularity: 56% [?]

WordPress Report For The Week Of October 31st 2008

WordPress 2.7 Delayed – Earlier this week, I sent an email to the WordPress hackers mailing list explaining how it was getting close to the beginning of November and we have yet to see a beta release of 2.7. Considering everything that has changed in the backend added with the features that have been implemented, I suggested that the new version will need at least a week in the publics hands in order to bake and have as many bugs discovered as possible. Ryan Boren, one of the lead developers of the WordPress project agrees which means WordPress 2.7 will be delayed from its scheduled November 10^th release date. As of right now, it looks like the release will be pushed back a week but no dates have been set in stone.

WordPess Meets LinkedIn –Those of you who have Linked In accounts will now have access to a WordPress application that is available from the LinkedIn Application directory. This app will allow your network of people to be notified of when you publish a new post. You can even opt to display your WordPress blog on your LinkedIn profile and your homepage where it will appear as a drag and drop module in the right-hand column. Like everything WordPress does, this application is open source. - http://publisherblog.automattic.com/2008/10/28/wordpress-for-linkedin/

Revolution 2 Launches – Brian Gardner who acclaimed success in the WordPress premium theme market has launched his new project called Revolution 2. These new themes are released under GPL and are open source meaning you can download and use them for free. So far, Brian has released 10 themes which range from a simple two column style design to a full blown magazine style. However, if you need theme support, you’ll have to purchase a support plan. If you’re in the market for a new theme, definitely give these ten a look through. - http://www.briangardner.com/blog/revolution-two-launches-early.htm

Plugin Of The Week – Moderator – Moderator is a combination of an Adobe Air application that can be run on your desktop and a WordPress plugin. Moderator enables users to moderate comments from their desktop instead of having to login to their WordPress administration area to handle that task. After installation, minimizing the desktop application will display a number in the Windows Taskbar which is the number of comments that are in the moderation queue. This is a very cool plugin and I think this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of doing administrative tasks to your WordPress blog from the desktop. - http://www.danieldura.com/code/moderator

Popularity: 84% [?]

Wordpress Plugins: Twitter Tools - Tweetburner Edition

I was searching around today for a way to use Tweetburner more with my blog posts and came across this plugin for Wordpress that takes Twitter Tools by Alex King and adds the Tweetburner support to it.

This plugin is a modified version of the Twitter-tools plugin, written by Alex King. Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. One of those features is tweeting you’re blogposts to Twitter. The URL’s of your blog posts are translated to TinyURL’s by Twitter, to stay within 140 characters. This modified plugin uses Tweetburner.com to shorten the URL’s.

What is Tweetburner.com?

Tweetburner.com lets you track what happens with the links you share on Twitter, and shortens it on the way too. For example http://trebel.nl/blog/2008/03/28/wordpress-plugin-voor-tweetburnercom/is translated into http://twurl.nl/ybetg8 and they offer personal statistics for tracking the clicks and shares of your ‘twurls’.

This is a modified version of Twitter Tools, so if you already have Twitter Tools installed, you will want to uninstall it first before installing and activating this plugin. It will replace your current version of Twitter Tools and also give you the Tweetburner capability.

You can pickup this modified plugin at http://rebelic.nl/tweetburnercom-plugin/

Popularity: 67% [?]

Wordpress Plugins: PingpressFM

I have been using Wordpress for some time now, and thought I would talk about just one of the plugins I use currently called PingpressFM. If you are familiar with the service called Ping.fm, and you use this service for microblogging updates to sites such as Twitter, Tumblr and others, and you also run a Wordpress blog, then this is the plugin for you!

Now, if you use Ping.fm, you know you can go there and input up to 140 characters, including links, and it will send out to the various services that you are subscribed to, automatically. PingpressFM works the same way by accessing Ping.fm and sending your blog post title to each of the services you subscribe to along with the permalink to the blog post. In this way, you don’t have to make a separate post to Ping.fm or your other microblogging services as this plugin does it for you as soon as you publish your post.

You can download this plugin from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pingpressfm/

Popularity: 59% [?]

WordPress News For The Week Of October 24th 2008

WordPress 2.6.3 Released – WordPress 2.6.3 was released on October 23^rd to address a vulnerability that was discovered in the Snoopy library. Snoppy is used by WordPress to parse feeds show in the WordPress dashboard. The team considers this a low risk vulnerability but they decided to quickly release a patch to take care of it. Now, if you don’t want to perform a full upgrade, they did provide links to the two files which were patched. You can download those and overwrite the ones in your directory and you’ll be safe. - http://wordpress.org/development/2008/10/wordpress-263/

WordPRess Ranked 33 – Comscore recently released their monthly analysis of the top web properties for September. WordPress came in at number 33 in the list of top 50 web properties for the month. The numbers were comprised of total U.S. (home, work, and university locations). According to Comscore, WordPress saw 23,125,000 visits during the month of September. Although Comscore says WordPress, I am inclined to think that they are discussing WordPress.com and not .org. - http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2008/10/22/wordpress-ranked-33/

Akismet Has Stats –A new version of Akismet was released back on October 20^th which provides some bug fixes as well as a cool new feature in the form of stats. Akismet stats track your comment metrics, including missed spam, false positives and Yummy Pie, which displays your ham vs. spam count in a nifty pie chart. What is ham you might ask? To put it simply, legitimate comments. Be sure to download the latest version to check out your spam stats. - http://blog.akismet.com/2008/10/20/akismet-221-now-with-stats/

Plugin Of The Week – Backlinks – Backlinks is a plugin which basically copies the google backlink functionality. Because a substantial amount of people still use Blospot which stubbornly refuses to implement trackbacks, you do not see the full number of pages linking to you. At the moment it is at a very basic version but the author plans to add more features in future versions. You use it by simply adding its tag to your templates - http://dbzer0.com/the-penguin-migration/backlinks

Popularity: 74% [?]

Podcaster Training: Should I Setup a Web Site or Blog?

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This is a question that is asked, most often, by newbies and novices in the New Media arena. Should I program a full web site or should I just setup a blog site, I really think I need both! Well, to answer that question, here are a few things to consider:

In order to setup a full HTML based web site, you will need to know how to program in HTML or have an HTML Editor and know how to use that or even hire a programmer. Learning HTML is not hard to do, it just takes time, like most anything that is worth doing. Hiring a programmer could cost you by the hour or flat rate, however, you are still talking out of pocket expenses for maintenance, changes, etc. Doing a full web site also will require a little creativity on your part. With site layout, design, content and graphics, you will have a lot on your plate to think about, even with hiring a programmer, as they will need guidance and direction while programming your site.

Setting up a blog, especially today, is relatively easy to do and fairly quick to do. Even someone with a little imagination can setup a blog site and make it look great and functional. There are a number of platforms you can use such as Wordpress, Drupal, Typepad and Blogger. Depending on how much time and effort you want to spend on your blog site, along with what functionality you want, will dictate which platform you choose. Out of all of the platforms available, Wordpress seems to be the number one choice for most new bloggers. It is easy to use, easy to setup, offers a variety of themes and plugins and of course, is free! Wordpress offers a hosted blog site where they take care of the hosting of your blog, the bandwidth, everything. All you do, is set it up and start blogging. For most beginners, this is a great starting point, so that you can keep everything free and don’t have to worry about paying for a host each month or year, domain name, and the like.

For those that have there own domain name and hosting plans, Wordpress offers a self hosted version of their platform that allows for even more expandability and functionality. The self hosted version is just like the hosted version, except you have the entire script on your own hosted server and you take care of setting it up, hosting it, bandwidth, etc. With the self hosted version, you can add as many themes and plugins as you like to make your blog site like a blog or even like a web site!

Ok, consider this, you want a web site that will give you the freedom to “make it your own” and you also want a blog so that you can keep your visitors, clients, customers, whoever, up to date easily with the happenings of your business, podcast or even your life! Right? The web site will take time to get off the ground because of having to be “built”, programmed, designed, approved (by you, of course) and then sent out to the search engines, promoted…you get the idea I think. Now, take Wordpress, add a custom theme that you pick out from the hundreds available to you, add the right plugins to give you the interaction and functionality you are looking for, add your own flare for graphics, fonts, etc., add separate pages for “departments” or areas of your podcast or business, point your domain name to your Wordpress site (if you have one) and then let Wordpress do the SEO (search engine optimization) for you as it silently sends your new blog site out to the search engines, while you promote your new site and start sending people to it yourself.

Wordpress lets you do all of the design and customization, posting, management, etc. from a dashboard page. It’s layout will let even the beginner to use Wordpress to get started right away. Even if you don’t have a creative bone in your body, I’ll bet you will be able to find a ready built theme that will make your blog site come to life and you can start using the site instead of fretting over design specs, programming fees and the like.

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Popularity: 39% [?]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

WordPress News For The Week Of October 10th 2008

13 WordPress Plugins You Should Use - Smashing Apps.com recently published a list of 13 plugins that they believe most people don’t use but probably should. Some of the plugins on this list include: Manageable, Tweet this, AddFree Stats and WP Super Cache. A great list of plugin some of which I use. - http://www.smashingapps.com/2008/09/23/13-wordpress-plugins-you-probably-dont-use-but-should.html

Six Tips On Creating A Magazine Theme – For the ambitious ones out their, Catswhocode.com published an article describing six tips and tricks on creating a Magazine styled theme. The article describes how to use conditional comments, static page as the homepage, multiple queries in the homepage, using custom fields and more. The site even gives you code examples that you can copy and paste for learning purposes. - http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/blogging/wordpress/6-tricks-and-tip-to-create-a-magazine-wordpress-theme-838

The Perfect WordPress Themes – Joost de Valk wrote an excellent post diving into the aspects of what makes the perfect WordPress theme. The post covers topics such as hooks, template files, widget support, browser compatibility, looking for outgoing links and more. This is a great article to read as you can develop your own check list to use when browsing for a new WordPress theme. - http://yoast.com/perfect-wordpress-theme/

Plugin Of The Week – Exclude Pages – This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you uncheck it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your page navigation menus). Pages which are children of excluded pages also do not show up in menu listings. (An alert in the editing screen, underneath the “include” checkbox allows you to track down which ancestor page is affecting child pages in this way.) - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exclude-pages/

Popularity: 57% [?]

WordPress News For The Week Of October 3rd 2008

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Brian Gardner Goes Open Source – Brian Gardner who is known for producing the most successful premium WordPress theme series Revolution has announced on his blog that he will be going all open source. Here is what his announcement entails in a nutshell. The revolution themes site will be shut down on October 31^st to respect those who purchased a premium theme. November 1^st, a brand new revolution site will launch along with new packages that people can purchase which will contain support, tutorials, customizations for particular themes etc. Brian also announced that he will be working with Jason Schuller of WP Elements on this new project. - http://www.briangardner.com/blog/revolution-going-open-source.htm

WordPress 2.7 UI Survey #2 – Jane Wells of Automattic published a second survey, this time asking users to decide on where to put the search box, where to put the add new post button/favorites menu and how to label the future publish/edit timestamp function. The survey was open to the first 5,000 respondents. The results of the survey will not dictate the final product but will be weighed heavily on the outcome. - http://wordpress.org/development/2008/09/wordpress-2-7-survey-no2/

More WordPress.com VIP Members – If you don’t think WordPress is a serious platform, think again. The UK Royal Navy has chosen to be part of the WordPress.com VIP program along with the NFL. Thats right, the National Football League is now using WordPress.com. Other big names that have recently joined the VIP network include Martha Stewart, Mark Cuban, Jason Calacanis, and Hackaday.

Plugin Of The Week - Insights – Insights was written by Vladimir Prelovac and is one awesome plugin. Insights brings a powerful new way to write your blog posts. It increases productivity and at the same time the appeal of your posts.

With Insights you can very quickly (in couple of seconds) do the following:

* Search your blog for posts, edit them or insert links to them into the current post

* Insert Flickr Images

* Insert Youtube videos

* Search and link to Wikipedia

* Search Google

* Insert a Google Map

Insights allows you to do all this using dynamic AJAX interface which loads the relevant information to your post in just a few seconds..- http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/insights

Popularity: 100% [?]

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