Wordpress
WordPress 2.7 Released Finally
Next Generation of Wordpress is finally here. WordPress 2.7 is finally released.
The first thing you’ll notice about 2.7 is its new interface. From the top down, we’ve listened to your feedback and thought deeply about the design and the result is a WordPress that’s just plain faster. Nearly every task you do on your blog will take fewer clicks and be faster in 2.7 than it did in a previous version.
Next you’ll begin to notice the new features subtly sprinkled through the new interface: the new dashboard that you can arrange with drag and drop to put the things most important to you on top, QuickPress, comment threading, paging, and the ability to reply to comments from your dashboard, the ability to install any plugin directly from WordPress.org with a single click, and sticky posts.
WordPress 2.6.5 Released
WordPress has released version 2.6.5 of their blogging software. This is a security release so everyone must upgrade.
The security issue is an XSS exploit discovered by Jeremias Reith that fortunately only affects IP-based virtual servers running on Apache 2.x. If you are interested only in the security fix, copy wp-includes/feed.php and wp-includes/version.php from the 2.6.5 release package.
2.6.5 contains three other small fixes in addition to the XSS fix. The first prevents accidentally saving post meta information to a revision. The second prevents XML-RPC from fetching incorrect post types. The third adds some user ID sanitization during bulk delete requests. For a list of changed files, consult the full changeset between 2.6.3 and 2.6.5.
WordPress is skipping version 2.6.4 and jumping from 2.6.3 to 2.6.5 to avoid confusion with a fake 2.6.4 release that made the rounds. There is not and never will be a version 2.6.4.
Managing a Multi-Author WordPress Blog
More and more blogs seem to be transitioning to multi-author set ups and as they do I’ve been asked increasingly for information on how to manage these types of blogs.
If you have a multi-author WordPress blog then you’ll want to check out a great post at Hongkiat - 35 Tips Tricks To Manage and Handle Multi-Author Blogs.
The post is packed full of useful tools and plugins that will help make the task of managing more than one author on a blog a lot easier - enjoy.
Vote It! Wordpress Plugin
Think of it as the Digg This button taken to the next level. Instead of just placing a Digg This button on your blog posts, Vote It! Wordpress Plugin can place any social media button into your articles.
Social media sites like Digg are a great way to get traffic to your blog. Hitting the front page generally means thousands of new visitors checking out your article. Many webmasters dismiss the value of social media traffic because it’s very hard to convert. However, any traffic can be monetized if you know what you’re doing.
Using Technorati API On Your Blog
In my effort to remove all badges from my front page and decrease the load time, I have now moved to using the Technorati API to display Technorati info. It looks like this:
The code is almost as easy as the code to display your FeedBurner subscribers. You’ll need to create an account with Technorati and then get your API key. That page will also tell you how much queries you’ve made that day, and what your daily allowance is.
This is the code, including caching:
$technorati = get_option("technorati"); if ($technorati['lastcheck'] < ( mktime() - 600 ) ) { $apikey = "apikey"; $endpoint = "http://api.technorati.com/cosmos?key=".$apikey; $request = $endpoint."&url=yoast.com&limit=10"; $snoopy = new Snoopy; $result = $snoopy->fetch($request); if ($result) { $pattern1 = '/([0-9]+)<\/inboundblogs>/'; $pattern2 = '/([0-9]+)<\/inboundlinks>/'; $pattern3 = '/([0-9]+)<\/rank>/'; preg_match($pattern1, $snoopy->results, $matches); preg_match($pattern2, $snoopy->results, $matches2); preg_match($pattern3, $snoopy->results, $matches3); $technorati['inboundblogs'] = number_format($matches[1]); $technorati['inboundlinks'] = number_format($matches2[1]); $technorati['rank'] = number_format($matches3[1]); $technorati['lastcheck']= mktime(); update_option("technorati",$technorati); } } echo "<h3>Technorati</h3>"; echo "<p>".$technorati['inboundblogs']." blogs linked ".$technorati['inboundlinks']." times in the last 6 months, ranking it as ".$technorati['rank']." among all blogs.</p>"; ";
That’s it ! Let me know if you’ve got any questions !
Make Your Blog Digg Proof with WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. The plugin in an improvement to WP-Cache, which delivers pages without accessing the database. However, WP-Cache still loads the PHP engine to serve the cached files.
WP Super Cache gets around that. When it is installed, html files are generated and they are served without ever invoking a single line of PHP. How fast can your site serve graphic files? That’s (almost) as fast it will be able to serve these cached files. If your site is struggling to cope with the daily number of visitors, or if your site appears on Digg.com, Slashdot or any other popular site then this plugin is for you.
WordPress 2.6.3 Available for Download
WordPress has released a security update to their blogging software. A vulnerability was discovered in the Snoopy library. WordPress uses Snoopy to fetch the feeds shown in the Control Panel Dashboard.
Although this seems to be a low risk vulnerability for Wordpress users, the company wanted to get an update out immediately. 2.6.3 is available for download right now.
Because this is a security issue, all WordPress users must upgrade. Fortunately, this new release updates only two files. If you don’t want to download the entire WordPress program just to get the security fix, you can download the following two files and copy them over your 2.6.2 installation.
Replacing two files is a lot easier than upgrading an entire WordPress installation. This has been the easiest to install update yet.
13 Reasons Why I Like Windows Live Writer
Writing a post while connected to the Internet has the chance of you being tempted to check for new mails or to check your earnings or being disturbed by someone wanting to chat with you. To focus on writing a better post, I would suggest disconnecting from the Internet and to use a desktop blog editor instead of the writer provided by the blog platform you use.
Many bloggers still don’t use a desktop blog editor and don’t realize that they are wasting a lot of their precious time waiting for their blog platform’s writer to load when a desktop blog editor will let them write, preview, save and publish a post very fast.
There are many desktop blog editors available like Windows Live Writer (WLW), Ecto, w.bloggar and Qumana. Being a Windows lover, I use Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer. Below are the reasons why I like it.
14 Tips on how to increase your Blogs Page Views
Maya has a very useful post that gives us 14 tips on how to increase a Blogs Page Views. Here I have listed them with my own comments.
First of all why would you want to increase your blog’s pageviews? Some reasons Maya gives are
Stickiness - the more pages a reader views the increased chance of them coming back are.
Revenue - more and more of the ads that we are running on your blogs are impression based ads (i.e, the more times the ads are seen the more that is earned).
Let me list Maya’s points with my own comments.
One Theme Gets Updated with More Features
An Energetic Overview of the Features
One Theme is essentially a powerful premium WordPress theme that not only dresses up the appearance of your blog or website, but it also offers a number of enhancements on the user interface front. The WordPress dashboard gets jazzed up with more user-friendly fields for AdSense integration, Analytics stat tracking, FeedBurner integration, the ability to quickly upload new header images, and so on.
While you could certainly take a gander at the features page to get a full list of what you can expect from One Theme, it’s probably a lot easier (and a little more entertaining) to watch the video embedded here. I’m not entirely positive if the video was there the last time I’m looked, but it’s on the One Theme website now.
