If you’re young enough to have watched the hit 80’s TV show Doogie Howser, M.D., then you must remember the scene at the end of each episode. Doogie Howser, played by Neal Patrick Harris, would go to his ancient IBM PS/2 and write his reflections there. In fact, it has been jokingly said that he was the first blogger.

Now you can do a Doogie Howser and ramble with your daily thoughts with a simulated IBM PS/2 interface! Go to Twoogie to channel his prodigious wit into your own twitter-feeds. Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

CommentLuv is a great way to reward your blog readers who leave a comment on your blogs. If your commenters leave their blog URLs on their posts, this plugin would parse the URL for the RSS feed and automatically find and include in the comment the latest blog post of your visitor.

This encourages your visitor to leave more comments because there’s automatic link love given to your commenters. So, in a sense, everyone wins: you will get more comments (which improves your Google standings) and your visitors will get link love and it will definitely increase clickthroughs for them and (if you use the DoFollow Plugin) their pagerank would also improve.

CommentLuv is available for WordPress and Wordpress MU, and is compatible for WordPress versions 2.6 and up.

To install CommentLuv, you have to first download it from here, then unzip it. Open up your favorite FTP client and upload CommentLuv to wp-content/plugins. Once the upload is done, you need to go to your plugins page and activate it.

Once it’s activated, you’ll be able to go to the settings page and if you wish, change some settings of the plugin. The plugin will auto-configure for your comment form. If you have a nonstandard comment form or a plugin type comment form, you will need to enter the name or ID values for the author, url and comment fields.

When you’ve finished doing those steps, you visitors would be able to automatically leave the latest posts of their blogs on your blog. CommentLuv also comes in a Drupal version as well, for you non WordPress users.

Download CommentLuv for WordPress here.

• 3 Comments

As the year ends, it’s time to see which plugin developers created the most sought-after WordPress plugins for 2008. Fortunately, W-Shadow.com has compiled a list of the top WordPress plugin developers using rankings from the number of downloads from the wordpress.org plugin directory.

And here are the top 10 Wordpress Plugin Developers for 2008:

1. Michael Torbert
   961 306 downloads. Co-author of All In One SEO Pack (originally created by Uberdose).
2. Matt Mullenweg
   921 827 downloads. Everybody knows Matt, the main WP dev and author of Akismet.
3. Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan
   775 220 downloads. Author of WP-Polls and other cool plugins.
4. Arne Brachhold
   628 350 downloads. Author of Google XML Sitemaps, etc.
5. Andy Skelton
   449 345 downloads. Author of WordPress.com Stats. Another dedicated hacker.
6. Alex Rabe
   429 705 downloads. Author of NextGEN Gallery, etc.
7. Oliver Seidel
   361 918 downloads. Author of cforms II.
8. Joost de Valk
   328 036 downloads. Author of Sociable, Google Analytics for WP and numerous other tools.
9. Donncha O Caoimh
   246 752 downloads. Author of WP Super Cache and other assorted plugins.
10. Vladimir Prelovac
    244 963 downloads. Author of Smart YouTube, various SEO plugins, and more.

Special Mentions

• Most plugins by a single author : Viper007Bond has 25 plugins hosted on wordpress.org.
• Highest version number : cforms II version 9.4 by Oliver Seidel. This plugin also has the highest number of user ratings - 419 votes.
• Longest plugin name : Sliding Post - Slides latest posts with Carousel effect (55 characters) by dasinfomedia
• Shortest plugin name : mu by Mark Bockenstedt. That’s not WordPress MU - “mu” is an obscure microblog updater plugin.

Check out the top 1000 as well!

• 3 Comments

One of the most common ways your WordPress blog can be compromised would be by brute force attacks. A brute force attack is the most widely known password cracking method. This attack simply tries to use every possible character combination as a password. To recover a one-character password it is enough to try 26 combinations (‘a’ to ‘z’). Luckily, a WordPress plugin is there to protect your blog from such attacks.

Login LockDown records the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. This helps to prevent brute force password discovery.

Currently the plugin defaults to a 1 hour lock out of an IP block after 3 failed login attempts within 5 minutes. This can be modified via the Options panel. Admisitrators can release locked out IP ranges manually from the panel.

Installation instructions:

1. Extract loginlockdown-1.2.zip into your wp-content/plugins directory into its own folder (note: not the root plugins folder, as this may cause the activation routine to fail).
2. Activate the plugin in the Plugin options.
3. Customize the settings from the Options panel, if desired.

Requires at least WordPress 2.5, tested up to 2.5.1, however, I’m using it on my WordPress 2.7 blog with no problems at all.

Dowmload Login Lockdown here.

• 2 Comments

WP Review Site turns WordPress into a powerful review site engine. It allows you to easily create niche review sites about anything and everything you want, be it products, computers, gadgets, music, movies, services, websites, restaurants, hotels, credit cards or even beer.

WP Review Site combines has these features:

Add a star rating system to your comment forms - This enables visitors to your WP blog do more than just leave comments: they can write a review and rate it via mousing over star icons. You define the categories, and your visitors can rate between 1 to 5 stars. And WP Review Site is completely customizable to fit your blog’s design; you can display rankings as you see fit, whether you use tables or CSS.

And WP Review Site lets you sort reviews by weighted average rating: you can set it to display reviews by the highest/lowest-rated, and not in chronological order. You can even choose to not show the rating system in some parts of your site. WP Review Site even has various sidebar widgets for you to add a list of top rated items to your site’s sidebar, or a list of recent reviews with the average rating that user left.

And what makes WP Review Site even better for me is that it already comes with seven themes preconfigured to work with the plugin:

• WP Review Site
• WPRS: Aqua Featured
• WPRS: Award Winning Hosts
• WPRS: Bonus Black
• WPRS: Double Silver
• WPRS: Green Featured
• WPRS: Ocean

And even better, WP Review Site has already got its own affiliate link management system that will let you configure your links easier. Instead of inserting the URL for the same anchor text over and over, you can set your review blog to automatically insert affiliate links.

What I don’t care for, however, is the fact that the customization features of WP Review Site is spread over two options pages. I’d like to have everything in one configuration page.

For $97 dollars, you’d get free upgrades for life along with all the features mentioned above.

Pros:

• WP Review Site does the work of many different plugins to make WordPress work as a powerful affiliate review site.
• It comes with seven preconfigured themes
• Affiliate link management system is powerful

Cons:

• Too many separate options pages
• Switching themes would clear the sidebar of widgets

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If you are on a lot of social networking sites and you wish to make it easier for your blog readers to follow you on those social networking sites, then the Lifestream plugin may be right for you.

Lifestream displays your social feeds and photos much like you would see it on many of the social networking sites. Read the rest of this entry »

• 2 Comments

The new Dashboard in WordPress 2.7, with the left hand navigation, has been found by many people, me included, to be the Dashboard the best one yet. However there are those who prefer the old topbar navigation of WordPress versions past.

This is where Ozh’s Admin Drop Down Menu come in to be very handy. Originally meant as a way to reduce clicks and to make navigation faster, the plugin retains the topbar navigation and has a lot of new features for WordPress 2.7 users.

According to the plugin author, “When WordPress 2.7 and its new and optimized user interface came, I thought there was still room for improvements: a horizontal menu gave the admin area more of a “desktop application” feel, and I think it’s superior to a vertical menu.” Read the rest of this entry »

• 3 Comments

A little bit of news for those who have been waiting for it: WordPress 2.7, dubbed “Coltrane”, has been officially released.

This is probably the most anticipated version of WordPress yet, and I won’t blame those who are excited for it. The new Dashboard, the new icons, and the new features make 2.7 the best WordPress yet.

Every aspect of the new interface has been consulted with WP users through a lot of surveys 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.

And new features have been included in 2.7 as well: 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. You can even customize any page in WordPress through drag-and-drop.

And most importantly, you will not have to install WordPress manually again. The new built-in upgrade feature will automatically notify you of new releases, and when you’re ready it will download them, install them, and upgrade your blog with a single click.

According to Matt Mullenweg, the community was so involved with every step of the process. Over 150 people contributed code directly to the release, the highest number yet, and that is the reason why 2.7 is such a huge leap forward.

So if you haven’t tried 2.7 yet, don’t be afraid, just go ahead and install Coltrane on your blog. You won’t regret it.

You can download 2.7 from here.

• 4 Comments

I’ve used various plugins and webapps for measuring my site statistics on my WordPress blogs. Each one has its own merits and disadvantages of course, but whether you choose a plugin that will give you stats from an external server or one that will render reports from your own database, it’s really up to you. I, for one, prefer using WordPress in-server plugins to check my stats. Nothing beats real-time updates. I’ve gone through lots of plugins, but for now I am loving every bit out of WP-StatPress.

According to the site, WP-StatPress is the free plug-in for WordPress dedicated to the real-time management of statistics about blog visits. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, etc.

As you can see, data is presented in a way that is easily understood right away, especially by the novice. This is what makes WP-StatPress stand out. Upon opening WP-StatPress, you immediately see a graph showing your traffic for the month, something that other plugins lack. There is even a “Spy” function, that will let you check who is currently on your blog and what pages are they visiting.

StatPress also includes a widget one can possibly add to a sidebar, or you can use PHP if you’re not into widgets. And this is what sold WP-StatPress to me: it can automatically delete older records to allow the insertion of newer records when limited space is present. It will help you fight database bloat that’s present in other plugins. It can halp you trim down your database without going to PHPmyadmin.

If you like what you see, you can try and download WP-StatPress here and leave a comment if it works the way you want it to, or if you want it to add more features.

UPDATE: Apparently WP-StatPress is no longer updated by the developer. Thankfully, Pascal was able to point us to a fork/continuation of the WP-StatPress project, StatPress Reloaded.

• 6 Comments

Microblogging service Pownce, once touted as Twitter’s heir apparent, is closing down on December 15. The Pownce team has joined SixApart, and they will be bringing their technology with them. The team is now working on an export tool that will let users transfer their posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress. Leah Culver writes on the Pownce blog:

We?re very happy that Six Apart wants to invest in growing the vision that we the founders of Pownce believe so strongly in and we?re very excited to take our vision to all of Six Apart?s products. Mike and I have joined Six Apart as part of their engineering team and we?re looking forward to being a part of the talented group that has created amazing tools for blogging and publishing.

Even though they will be coming up with an export tool soon, those who paid for Pro accounts have been told that they will be emailed soon with more information. On the Six Apart blog though, they’ve announced that Pownce Pro users will get a year’s TypePad pro account for free. As for the Pownce team, they seem to have settled into Vox. Leah Culver and Mike Malone has made Vox their new home. So Pownce is closing, Leah and Mike are joining Vox, but will the community join in? Six Apart hopes so. What’s your take? Leave your opinion in the comments.

• 4 Comments

With WordPress 2.7 release date looming as close as ever, the WordPress team has released the 2.7 Release Candidate 1. RC1 ushers in the final leg of development for 2.7. RC1 contains 280 commits since beta 3, includes the new and polished UI everyone’s excited for, plus the icon set that won in ProjectIcon. And the new login page looks good too.

While we self-hosted WordPress users impatiently wait for the final 2.7 build to come out, the lucky guys on WordPress.com will be getting 2.7 on December 4 at 8pm Eastern Time. That’s 5pm Thursday in California, 1am Friday in London (UTC), 8am Friday in Jakarta, noon on Friday in Sydney. If you’re not too sure about your timezone, you can check it out here.

If you want to test it out, you can download RC1 here. Make sure to backup your blog first before you upgrade.

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We all love Akismet, the powerful anti-spam plugin that we all use on our WordPress blogs (even if it fails sometimes). We all know that Akismet has been ported over to over 20 systems and platforms, namely Movable Type, Drupal, phpBB, Blojsom, Bloxsom, Geeklog, Nucleus, b2evolution, PunBB, Expression Engine, Coppermine, Lifetype, Simple Machine Forums, Phorum, tDiary, MyBulletinBoard, PostNuke, Joomla, and EZ Publish.

But if you notice the list of blogging/forum/CMS software up there, you will notice that Textpattern is missing. While not necessarily the biggest blogging software out there, Textpattern is not without a fanbase of dedicated users, and I find myself liking Textpattern’s lightweight, simple, no-frills layout.

It comes as no surprise that Michael Manfre was able to develop an Akismet plugin for Textpattern. The plugin is in every way like Akismet on WordPress, and in addition to checking all comments against the Akismet server, it will notify the Akismet server about false positives or false negatives when you change the status of a comment.

So Textpattern users who want to protect their blogs from spam, download and use Akismet. WordPress and other CMS users have been using Akismet for years, and even if the occasional bad comment or two passes, it has proved that it is up to the challenge to protect our blogs from spam.

• 0 Comments

Those using Chitika to monetie their blogs should be glad to learn that there is a new WordPress plugin that will help you to easily manage your Chitika ads on your WordPress blog.

Chitika|Premium is a CPC search-targeted advertising solution brought to you by Chitika. It can be run on the same page as Google AdSense, or on its own as an AdSense alternative.

Chitika|Premium ads sample

This plugin allows you to easily change the display of your Chitika|Premium ads through a settings page in the WordPress admin interface. It allows you to change any of the following features:

• Ad size
• Link and text color
• Background color
• Display position (above or below your post)
• Channel

Installing Chitika|Premium is just the same as any other plugin. Download it first, then extract, and then you need to fire up your favorite FTP client, and log in to your WordPress installation. Then do the following steps:

1. Upload /chitika-premium/ directory to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin Chitika|Premium through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Go to ‘Settings’ > ‘Chitika | Premium’ to activate the display and add your username and change any display settings.
   If you are using a version of WordPress earlier than 2.5 your configuration screen will be in ‘Options’ > ‘Chitika|Premium’

If you have any problems using Chitika | Premium, don’t hesitate to contact the plugin developers.

• 2 Comments

Those who have switched microblogs from Twitter to Plurk have been disappointed at the lack of Firefox add-ons available. Need proof? Off the top of my head, without googling, I can name a few Twitter add-ons for our favorite browser: Twitterfox, Twitbin, TwitKit, Twitterbar and so many more. Plurk, on the other hand, has very little selections to speak of.

Personally, I’m not a fan of Plurk’s horizontal timeline scheme, and I try to use the mobile interface as often as I can. In fact, I was able to devise a way to use the mobile interface solely. I installed Mozilla Prism and made an application out of Plurk. But constantly updating it manually can be a pain. Read the rest of this entry »

• 3 Comments

WordPress 2.6.5 is now available for download. I know some of you guys aren’t too keen on going through another security upgrade and would want to hold off upgrading until 2.7 gets released. The Automattic team, however, is recommending that everyone upgrades immediately. But According to the update page,

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.

So there you have it guys. Don’t hold off upgrading because you want WordPress 2.7 to be your next version of WordPress. You can update to 2.6.5 by just replacing two files, wp-includes/feed.php and wp-includes/version.php and upload (overwrite existing files) them to your wp-includes folder.They are also skipping 2.6.4 to prevent confusion with a fake version that had fooled some people a few weeks ago.

You can download WordPress 2.6.5 here or you can use the Automatic Upgrade plugin if you’re not too keen on manually uploading the files.

• 0 Comments

Six Apart has launched the beta version of TypePad Connect, a Disqus-style commenting service that includes MyBlogLog-like profiles. The new comment service has a sleek new interface and great features like threading, easy pagination, OpenID sign in, email notifications of replies and the ability to reply via email. The comments are protected by TypePad AntiSpam.

TypePad Connect lets you style your comments so that it will look the same way with the rest of your blog. It also features a Gravatar-like profile picture system. Apparently TypePad Connect is a way for Six Apart to create a service that helps bloggers connect with their readers and other bloggers, in a more open, more powerful, and more meaningful fashion.

Typepad Connect is also integrated with the new TypePad Profiles. TypePad Profiles takes advantage of things you’re already doing and automatically updates itself, to keep your profile up to date and interesting. So if you have your Twitter synced to your profile, your status will be updated to reflect your current Twitter update. And finally, feeds, Microformats, and Open ID is also supported by TypePad Profiles.

These new profiles and comments are not just available for TypePad bloggers but for ANY blogger or web site for free. TypePad Connect is available for all of the major blog platforms. That means if you’re on TypePad, Moveable Type, WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger, you would be able to use this new service without paying a thing.

What do you think about this new service? Drop your thoughts in the comments.

• 1 Comment

Lately we’ve seen an increase in people that leave comments that are actually responding or even sharing their thoughts in the blog entry. But sometimes they include an off-topic link at the end of the comment.

The said comments aren’t spammy, but linking to off-topic sites isn’t something I consider good commenting behavior. In fact, comments like these give the impression that the person who did this was insincere and is only using my blog as part of SEO. Frankly, this blatant promotion annoys me at times, because there are way too many comments to edit and links to delete, and I don’t have much time for that. A plugin that will automate the process of removing links through a single mouse click would be a godsend.

Strip! by Markku Seguerra is a WordPress plugin that allows you hide links from a given comment. This gives you a button to strip any given comment of links, and unlike other plugins that offer a similar function, Strip! also gives you the option of restoring the links with the same button.

Strip! has been tested on WordPress 2.6, but may still work with older versions.

Installation of Strip! is easy: just upload to your WordPress installation using your favorite FTP client, and activate through the plugins page. You’d see the strip/unstrip buttons right away. I’ve been using Strip! on my personal blog since the time he unveiled it at WordCamp Philippines, and I’ve been satisfied with it so far. You can download Strip! from here.

What other commenting behavior do you find annoying? If you use other plugins to combat comment off-topic llinking, tell me about it.

• 2 Comments

Newly laid-off journalists can get a free TypePad Pro account from Six Apart, thanks to their TypePad Journalist Bailout Program. With the mantra “Because your Tumblr and Tweets, while clever, will not pay your bills”, SixApart aims to support online journalism. According to SixApart, “During a time when so many great journalists are worried about losing their jobs, we want to do what we can to help.”

Of course, a blog can’t replace a full-time writing gig, but it’s a start. A pretty good start, if you ask me, because those who try this program out get the following:

• A free TypePad Pro account worth $14.95 per month. This is the service that powers big-name media blogs. Professional technical support is even included.
• Enrollment in the Six Apart Media advertising program, ads “that pay a lot more than simple Google text ads.”
• Promotion on Blogs.com, to jumpstart traffic, and a very effective way for those in the Journalist Bailout Program to cross-promote their sites.

The only thing journalists need to do to avail of this program is to send Six Apart the link to their last piece for a newspaper, magazine or broadcast journalism venue to bailout@sixapart.com. They say that this program might end soon, but there’s no word yet on a definite date, and response to the program has been overwhelming.

 If they do want to get journalists to start blogging, this is a great start. Offering not only a free blogging platform, but also an advertising program to be able to profit from the blog is a brilliant PR move.

• 0 Comments

We all love WordPress, but sometimes it can get just really, really slow. And no matter how we look for the cause, sometimes there’s just no way to figure out what’s been giving your WordPress installation the hiccups. Thank goodness somebody came up with WP-Tuner.

WP-Tuner for WordPress is a powerful and easy way to answer hard questions about why your blog is slow or cranky. What’s causing the slowdown? Is it a plugin? Is it your host? This plugin will help you find out. One problem, though, with this particular plugin is that it’s not for the novice. Advanced WP users will be able to understand what the plugin tells them, but it may not be that obvious for everyone.

WP-Tuner is recommended to be used by:

• WordPress site administrators
• WordPress plugin and theme designers
• WordPress developers

WP-Tuner can also be used with a number of advanced ways, like hooking any WordPress action to it. You can even use it to time anything at all in WordPress.

Installing WP-Tuner is as easy as installing any other plugin: upload using your favorite FTP client, and activate via the plugins page. Be sure to read the plugin’s readme file and the associated help documents before using it.

Used with a bit of common sense, this powerful plugin will help blog administrators as well as software developers improve their WordPress blog performance.

• 5 Comments

The BlogStudio will automatically give a $1000 discount on all new design projects signed by November 30, 2008. Those looking to save some money without sacrificing quality for blog design can definitely check them out.

The reason they’re doing it, simply, is to challenge themselves. Founder Peter Flaschner says:

Why on earth are we doing this, you ask? Well, it?s simple really. Adam, Mike, and Lucia are super busy with some top-secret development work, leaving me with a bit of time on my hands. I?m sitting here feeling all guilty while the rest of the team is slaving away, so I thought I?d try a little experiment to see if I can single-handedly book a couple of new projects between now and the end of the month.

If you want to see their past work, you have to check out their impressive portfolio. You can contact them by requesting for a proposal, or by simply geting in touch with them.

• 0 Comments