Top Themes and Plugins

Find Your Spam Magnets

admin — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:00:47 +0000

So, you’ve got WordPress, Akismet, and more spam comments than you can keep track of. Wouldn’t you like to know which posts are drawing the most spam attention? Well, Ozh has the perfect script for you!
Simply upload the script to your WordPress root directory and enjoy a listing of your most prominent spam magnets, complete with “a pretty interactive pie chart.” Use the script to track down and close off your spam magnets, research the keywords catching the spammers’ attention, or just do it for fun.
When I ran this script on my blog, I found two spam magnets that shouldn’t have had open comments in the first place, and all of my posts mentioning the WordPress Support Forums were drawing the most attention from spammers.
Here are the results from Weblog Tools Collection (spam comments are deleted on a regular basis, so this only includes the most recent spam […]

Original post by James Huff

Technorati Tags: blog

WordPress Theme Releases for 09/07

admin — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:00:21 +0000

The Mill is a simple, yet elegant, two-column WordPress theme.

Misty Morn is a grey-based WordPress 3.0 child theme for Purple Pastels with custom image and attachment templates, thickbox enabled image attachment pages, and additional page templates for pages without comments and pages without the sidebar.

My Valentine is a pink-based WordPress 3.0 child theme for Purple Pastels with custom image and attachment templates, thickbox enabled image attachment pages, and additional page templates for pages without comments and pages without the sidebar.

Steampunk is a steam punk inspired theme built under the Themeatic Theme Framework environment with clean and SEO friendly HTML/CSS code.

Sun City is a darker WordPress 3.0 theme that makes use of orange, green, blue and other primary colours to provide a visually rich display.

ZenLite Black Mandarin is a darker child theme for the single column ZenLite theme.
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Original post by James Huff

Technorati Tags: blog

Protect Yourself from Parasite Spam with Akismet

admin — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 13:00:35 +0000

If you run a social network or any kind of online publishing service, you will be hit by spam, if you haven’t been hit already, and Akismet wants to help.
When most people hear about Akismet, they often think about WordPress, but Akismet is actually available for over twenty additional systems and platforms, including Movable Type, Drupal, phpBB, PunBB, and libraries for PHP, Python, and .NET.
If you’re running, or planning to run, a social network or online publishing service, the Akismet team wants you to know that they can not only protect you from direct spam, but from parasite spam as well, as long as you can give them a way to contact you.
Akismet’s pattern and volume monitoring abilities make direct spam easy to filter, but ever since the dawn of forums, spammers have opened accounts for the sole purpose hosting their spam on your site. Thanks to Akismet’s pattern […]

Original post by James Huff

Technorati Tags: blog

Doomed Vox blogger? WordPress to the Rescue!

admin — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 22:33:55 +0000

If you know of someone, or are yourself a blogger on Vox, you should know already that Six Apart has announced plans for closing the service. Users have until the 30th of September to get their data our of Vox and into other blogging and/or CMS platforms if they so choose.
Mark Jaquith has a great suggestion on how to Import a Vox blog into WordPress or almost anything else. In short, he suggests that you import your Vox blog into a vanilla WordPress.com blog and then export it out as a WordPress export file. Then you actually have a bunch of choices of what to do with your blog. PS: Be sure to mark your WordPress.com blog as private before importing if you do not intend to make that your final destination.
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Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, feed

Original post by Mark Ghosh

Technorati Tags: blog, blogger, blogging, feed

WordPress Plugin Releases for 09/05

admin — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 15:35:01 +0000

New plugins
List Yo’ Files adds the ability to list files by file name for a given folder with hyperlinks to each file making it downloadable.
Readable Names forces commenters to write their names in the language that your blog uses.
WP-comment-master enhances your comments with AJAX posting and pagination.
WP-WikiBox allows you to get a Wikipedia article summary for a keyword in any language, inline with your posts and pages, with a simple shortcode.
Updated plugins
IE6 Upgrade Option displays a warning message, simply and politely informing the IE6 user that their browser is out of date, and provides links to download newer browsers.
Vimeo Quicktag enables the user to embed a customized Vimeo video into the blog content.
WP-Stats-Dashboard displays your blog’s stats graph plus your blog traffic, social engagement and social influence directly in your dashboard.
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Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, feed

Original post by James Huff

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, feed

Plans Laid for WordPress 3.1

admin — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 13:00:07 +0000

The WordPress development team had a very successful meeting last Thursday, where they solidified their plans for WordPress 3.1.
The finalized goals for WordPress 3.1 are “to have a very short dev cycle, a decent amount of testing time, and a release in mid-December. Low on new features, heavy on ui and code cleanup, and avoidance of schema changes. Save the big ideas for 3.2 where we’ll have the liberty to implement those ideas in PHP5. No schema changes and no big new APIs.”
Besides bug fixes and code cleanup, users can look forward to a new wordpress.com inspired admin bar and theme browser, as well as post templates and styles, and a separate network dashboard.
The team plans to halt new feature submissions on October 15th, followed by a primary code freeze on November 1st, and a string freeze on December 1st. The beta period will begin November 15th until the […]

Original post by James Huff

Technorati Tags: blog

WordPress Theme Releases for 09/03

admin — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:00:12 +0000

BlogTimes is an old school Newspaper style WordPress Theme, based on a three column fluid layout, enabled with cufon fonts with beautiful typography for the headlines, options panel, and a custom front page slider.

Dark Tuts is a very clean WordPress theme that has been designed with blogs in mind. This theme has an HTML5 doctype, clean and valid code, 3 color schemes (blue, green, red), 3 different ways to add post thumbnails, the ability to change thumbnail sizes via the theme panel, 1 advertisement spot and tons more features.

Quick-Vid is a simple blogging theme with slick design elements.

Semanu is powered by the 960.gs css framework with multiple widgets and a 3 column layout.

Syailendra is an adsense (advertising) ready theme with multiple widget positions, threaded comments, theme options, drop-down menus, and custom menus.

WP Perfect is a two column SEO optimized WordPress 3.0 ready theme. The theme has a jQuery-based options page […]

Original post by James Huff

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, news

Lorelle’s Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:00:40 +0000

Lorelle VanFossen has published a recap of her Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins session given on August 29th at OpenCamp in Addison, TX.
To Lorelle, “a mind blowing WordPress Plugin is one that breaks the rules. It is unique and original in its implementation, and pushes WordPress. It might not be a Plugin that everyone must have on their site. It might not be a Plugin that even interests you. What these will do is to get you to look at the incredible diversity of Plugins available.”
Her recap not only briefly covers the topics discussed during her session, but she also lists all of the plugins that were featured, and that list is well worth exploring. Even if you think your blog couldn’t possibly use any more plugins, you might find something that you (or rather your blog) just can’t live without.
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Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, feed

Original post by James Huff

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, feed

WordPress Mobile Apps for Android and BlackBerry Updated

admin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:00:59 +0000

The WordPress mobile apps for Android and BlackBerry have both been updated with some shiny new features, like a new comment notification system and improved VideoPress integration.
There’s no word yet on an update to the iOS mobile app, but the team still has its eyes set on making this one a major bug-fixing release.
These recent updates would not have been possible without your feedback and beta testing skills, so keep doing whatever you can to make each release better than the last!
Do you use any of the WordPress mobile apps? I use the iOS mobile app and can honestly say that it has certainly simplified my life when it comes to moderating comments and making last-minute post corrections. How about you? Have the WordPress mobile apps added to or detracted from your WordPress blogging experience?
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Original post by James Huff

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, feed

WordPress and the Fatal Memory Error

admin — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 13:00:06 +0000

Remember the old days when your computer would crash because you were running too many applications simultaneously? Well, you might be surprised to know that WordPress can fall victim to the very same thing.
You see, your server may be packed with 4 GB of RAM, but that doesn’t mean that all 4 GB have been allocated to PHP on your account. In fact, most decent hosting providers only allocate 32 MB to PHP under each account. Now, most WordPress installations with a good amount of plugins will run fine under 32 MB, but there’s always a chance that one more plugin or one seemingly innocent admin panel task (like exporting or importing posts) may put you over the edge, and you’ll see either a blank screen or the infamous error which starts off something like “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted.”
If you see a […]

Original post by James Huff

Technorati Tags: blog