Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.

Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.

Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.

Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).

Video

Related posts:

1. Wordpress 2.8.1
2. A quick look at Wordpress 2.5 Beta
3. SEO Plugins for Wordpress

News

Mark Little (needs no introduction to Irish people), is about to leave RTE, talks about the future of news, and the role of social networking, a very well presented piece, worth a full watch.

Mark Little, Presenter of RTE”s Prime Time and a former RTE Washington correspondent, will give a lecture on the future of News Media, to the IIEA’s Digital Future Group.  Mr Little recently announced his decision to take a year’s leave from RTE to set up his own global online news service. LINK & video below

Related posts:

1. What’s new in wordpress 2.9
2. No more Sky News Ireland
3. Google Personalizes news to suit readers tastes

Buy and Sell

With everyone feeling blue, here is a shameless plug for a new website I am working on. It’s a buy and sell website, currently for free you can place your own advert and sell some of your stuff, in exchange for some dosh (or do a trade) to buy nice Christmas presents for yourself or your loved ones. Or go shopping if you fancy some of the stuff on there!

I suggest using it to sell all those unwanted Christmas “gifts”.

How to place an ad

1. Click on the ‘Place an Ad’ button and complete the form. Remembering to include as much information as possible.

• Choose a category for your ad.
• Choose a title for your ad.
• Insert price.
• Location where the item is, it is important to note that this will create a google map for your ad which will pin point the location of the item on the map.
• Description of your item

• Complete your contact details, include phone number if your want this published on the ad.
• Add an image – Including an image can increase the possibility of selling the item.
• If your would like to make your ad stand out select ‘Featured Listing’, this costs an extra 2 euro.

2. Once you have completed the form, click on submit ad.
3. You will then be prompted to click on the paypal button to submit payment, all our ads only cost 1 euro and will stay active on our website for 90 days!
4. If you have made a mistake, you can edit the ad by clicking on the ‘Manage my Ad’ link.
5. If you are unsure send an email to hello@chest.ie

Related posts:

1. Wordpress advertising plugin – OIO Publisher
2. Funny Friday with Funn.ie
3. Oh Christmas Tree…!

Based on what the wordpress experts are saying here is what you need to do.

Upgrade wordpress to version 2.8.4. Do this now, and come back to read the rest later. This is serious you MUST UPGRADE.

If you are not sure what version you are using, you probably need to upgrade now! You can usually see a warning telling you your version is out of date. Or scroll to the bottom of the admin screen and you will see the version number.

If you are scared upgrading will damage your plugins or theme, then sorry! But if you are hacked, and there is a number of WP hacking going on, you have been warned!

It is essential that you upgrade.

As always backup wordpress. And please tweet this warning. I now hand you over to the experts for a full explanation.

Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.

Read the rest

Related posts:

1. Irish Blogs refuse to upgrade their blog software
2. A quick look at Wordpress 2.5 Beta
3. Wordpress 2.07

For me when I am trying to solve a problem with my wordpress blog, get some widget working, formatting a post, I go searching for the answer. For the genre I write in usually in my blogs, inspiration comes in the form of solving a problem! Because if you can answer a question, or even ask one, you have your inspiration for your post already.

There is nothing more satisfying than figuring out how something works! Sharing that information in your blog can be so helpful to others and also satisfy the human need to share information. I have often found a blog post that answered a simple question, while I was looking everywhere for the answer.

Of course blogging is not only about answering a question, it is about sharing ideas and views as well.

But solving a problem is always a good topic to write about, it always makes me more interested in writing blog posts.  I created this chart for myself as a guide for my blog topics I write in this manner.

Answer a question

For topics I write in this manner I find the following makes for a more interesting post, if you are trying to write about a question you answered, you solved a problem.

The question

• You have a question that you need answered.
• The question must be your question – Of course you can answer any question, but I find if you are passionate about solving the problem that passion is reflected in your post!
• If you cannot solve the problem you can take your blog post in a different direction. You can ask your blog community to help, or try to solve yourself and blog the results.

The answer

• You have researched the problem and solved it.
• You have tested the results.

Creating the post

• Write about your results.
• If you found the solution great, if not still blog and share with your community promoting interaction within your blog.

Just one of my ways for writing a particular type of post, feel free to share yours! How do you find inspiration for your blog posts?

Related posts:

1. RSS feed tweeks to enhance reader experience & promote traffic to your website!
2. Does ‘rattling on’ damage your blog?
3. Forget launching a website – just launch a blog instead

The idea of this post is to explore the different tweeks  and additions you can make to your RSS feed to improve the overall RSS experience for your readers and drive traffic through promoting your content.

Firstly I would recommend allowing readers access to the full content of your posts in their feed reader. I have found that only publishing extracts and requiring readers to actually visit your blog to view the full posts, causes readers to become annoyed. I know the idea is to generate traffic to your website, but remember it is better to have a subscriber than not. Observers have noted the type of people who subscribe to RSS feeds generally tend to be those who know their field. Be honered there reading your content! Allowing them to read the full content of your posts, promotes them to become more interested in you and what you have to say.

Someone to watch over me

RSS sandwich icon by GeekMom Heather

Pretty much everyone uses Feedburner, and recently it was taken over by Google.  I use it to manage my RSS feed. With feedburner I can see how many readers I have  as well as getting a break down of what system they use to read my updates and also offer readers the ability to subscribe to my blog updates via e-mail. You can see all this in operation on my site right now!

I would recommend activating FeedFlare in your feedburner account which will allow you to build in interactive features to the feed. This means you can show your users how many people have commented on your post, thus generating some traffic back to your blog to read these comments.

Note:In order to use feedburner you also need the feedburner plugin for your wordpress blog (if your using wordpress).

This plugin makes it easy to redirect 100% of traffic for your feeds to a FeedBurner feed you have created. FeedBurner can then track all of your feed subscriber traffic and usage and apply a variety of features you choose to improve and enhance your original wordPress feed.

Related Posts Plugin

This is a wonderful addition to your website, if you don’t have the related posts plugin already give it a try. Not only does it supply related posts for your blog content, but it also does so for RSS feeds. This falls back into what I was talking about earlier, regarding giving away ‘free content’ or full posts. By adding related posts to your feeds your readers can now find assicated articles which are linked back to your website.

Polls

Polls are a wonderful form of interaction between the author and the reader, in regards to the feed, it once again promts visitors from the feed to your website, so that they too can vote in your poll.

Video

I am going to throw in this line about video, but it is a little redundant today. Previously most RSS readers did not support video players, so RSS subscribers had to visit your website to actually watch the video. However these days, readers do support this. Just a quick point really!

Widgets

With modern browsers it is easy to subscribe to a feed by clicking on the usually built in RSS icon, safari has one beside the URL bar. However there is no harm in popping an RSS icon into your sidebar, as I have done in a prominent place on my website. You can also show off how popular you are by placing a FeedCount badge on your widget.

These are just a few tips I can share with you based on my experience on  RSS feed tweeks. Please do share your views of RSS feeds, and any suggestions you may have for enhancing reader experience & promote traffic to your website!

Related posts:

1. 19 Great Wordpress Plugins – A List
2. Does ‘rattling on’ damage your blog?
3. SEO Plugins for Wordpress

So I decided to create an account with text link ads. I placed the code on the site under favourite links, and I sort of forgot about it.

In the mean time I was working hard on SEO, getting quality links, and of course most importantly the content. I had completely forgotten about the code. Soon after I got a few links submitted to advertise on my site. Months later I had all ten spots filled every month. Not bad for a celebrity website!

What are text link ads?
It really is as simple as it sounds. A text link; using a keyword – linking to the advertiser’s website.

Why use them?
They are used by advertisers because not only do they get traffic to their website, but they also get SEO kisses from search engines. You, the publisher will love this because it is a hassle free income generator, which is non- intrusive to your visitors and is a nice break from flashing advertisements!

There is one down side to this however, text-link-ads take 50% off the top. So if you are selling at 50USD you end up with 25. This does sound pretty high. But you must also consider how difficult to find these advertisers by yourself! Additionally new websites and websites with low amounts of traffic may find it difficult to enter the program. But there is an affiliate program which accepts new websites.

A tip for if you get signed up, don’t hide away the script which displays the text links the best place I found was in the sidebar, people have paid you for advertisement placement so you need to respect that. Shoving their ads to the bottom of the screen may not result in further adverts placed by them!

If you are interested in text link ads you can sign up . Do you use text link ads? If so feel free to comment below and let us know your experience with them.

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2. Roam4Free Website Review
3. Performancing Partners Launches!

I have no problem with these updates; part of twitter is exploring the internet using shared information. A report conducted by sysomos.com had a number of findings, most interestingly:

We found that 32% of all tweets made by the most active Twitter users were generated by machine bots that posted more than 150 tweets/day. The actual percentage of machine-generated tweets among the most active users is probably higher than 32% because there many bots that update less than 150 times/day.

The report also outlines who tweets the most. There is a few of what you would expect such as @foxnews (no comment), @nytimes. An more interestingly @alyssa_milano!

Do you use a tweet bot to send out your blog updates? I know I do! The full report here makes for some interesting reading, sadly Ireland does not make the list of Twitter’s 5% of most active users.

Related posts:

1. Twitter: Do you tweet celebrities?
2. John’s Tweets on 2009-06-28
3. John’s Tweets on 2009-05-03

When it comes to your blog - presentation is  pretty important. 

Updated: Poll added

People say not to judge a book by it’s cover, but we all do it conscious or otherwise! I like to think this is relevant, remember what people say about first impressions.
There are a number of popular blog authors on the internet who stick with the default theme of their chosen content management system. In my opinion  it is important to be as unique in your website design as you are in your content, and ignoring design is an unfortunate oversight.

Getting a custom made theme is not cheap, in fact in can be very expensive, and if you don’t like the free themes out there not to worry. There is middle ground between custom themes and free themes. 

You could go from a premium theme like I did.

Premium theme designers tend to give greater attention to detail to their premium designs than to their free designs and offer many great  styles and layouts. Most of which you can customise with your own logo and tweak some of the colours and layout if you are CSS minded.

The theme will not be unique to just you, others can buy them, but there is not as many users as there is with the free themes, additionaly many of premium themes such as the woothemes.com allow you to change the style of the premium theme with a click of a button, add your own design elements and you are as unique as you can afford.

Advantages to having a premium design that reflects your tastes include:

• Creates a unique blog identity.
• Creates a visual link between your content and site design.
• Allows additional customisation features, depending on requirements.
• Does not have to be extravagant and can still reflect your content.
• Support, unlike free themes – premium themes usually offer support and help documents.
• Updates, as the content management systems such as wordpress updates, it may break things in the design, some themes keep up with this and offer theme updates.

I mentioned woothemes  a moment ago and yes I love their themes, so much so that I use their design on this website and also on my humour website, as well as two others. Their themes are premium themes that you can also customise, using their build in options menu in wordpress.

The great thing about this is the themes come in different flavours, so if you select one theme you like you can select from a range of patterns and colours. They also have a few FREE themes  if you don’t feel like opening your wallet, but in my opinion they are well with it.

Here is the theme I use on this website, which I immediately feel in love with when I first saw it.

Papercut Theme for Wordpress

Paper Cut by WooThemes

Papercut is a grungy news theme with beautiful alternating stylesheets, built-in widgets, and layout control via a hand crafted theme options page. It’s the perfect out-of-the-box solution to give your website a stylish new look. Irrespective of your preferred style; Papercut will have one you like.

Check out their other themes here. Remember if you don’t like Woothemes, there are other premium theme sites out there, google is your friend!

Take part in my poll

[polldaddy poll=1899526]

Related posts:

1. Wordpress advertising plugin – OIO Publisher
2. Dear Wordpress – Thank you!
3. Wordpress 2.7 – Whats to come?

Core Security Technologies notified us that admin pages added by certain plugins could be viewed by unprivileged users, resulting in information being leaked. Not all plugins are vulnerable to this problem, but we advise upgrading to 2.8.1 to be safe.

I have noticed in wordpress, an issue the odd time with the text editor, and apparently this fixes this issue.

A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.

Other fixes to wordpress  include:

Link

Related posts:

1. What’s new in wordpress 2.9
2. Wordpress self hosted blogs attack warning!
3. WordPress 2.1.3 & 2.0.10

What I have noticed is there is a large amount of people sending tweets to celebrities, fruitless tweets that are never answered or acknowledged. In the celebrities defence they often have thousands of followers so how could they answers every one.

Even worse I noticed people having one ended conversations with celebrities. Twitter is all about joining in the conversation, but is there a point of constantly tweeting celebrities when they never answer?

Without debating the reasoning behind this utter madness, I give you today’s poll.

Do you Tweet Celebrities?

[polldaddy poll=1759714]

Related posts:

1. One quarter of all tweets generated by bots!
2. Not on Twitter, maybe you are out of the loop?
3. Twitter – Show me the money!

I have been offered 8 USD off the retail price for OIO Publisher for anyone who wishes to use it.I have used OIO Publisher before on my Mobile Phone blog, with success, and I got a good few advertisers using it, it has a paypal module so it can also manage payments.

I wrote some info on this product below:

OIP Publisher allows you to organise and manage all your advertising requirements from one central location. If you use wordpress, great, you can manage OIO Publisher from the admin panel. If you do not use wordpress, it also works as a stand alone product!

Why use it?

Money off voucher for OIO Published

Visitors to your website can place adverts directly on your website or blog using OIO Publisher, make a payment and their advert can go live instantly, or if you prefer you can approve them first!

You can use as many ad sizes as you wish, and it even works with google AdSense! Got more than one website? No problem, you can use this across all your websites.

If you have not sold any ad space, you can configure OIO Publisher to instead show a banner until the space is ready to be sold.

The most recent edition of OIO Publisher also has a built in theme system. This means your customers get a nice designed system in which to purchase adverts and make payments on the OIO system.

Sorry, I have been unable to find a down side to OIO Publisher, managing your own ad system gets rid of the middle man, meaning the profits are all yours. The price is not bad at all at 47 USD, I can also offer a 8 USD discount to johnmryan.com readers for the month of July 2009.

If you are interested in OIO Publisher click here, and if it is still July 2009, please use the following discount code! Quote “RAINMAN-JOHNRYAN” for your discount.

OIO PUBLISHER

install OIOpublisher as a Wordpress plugin or a standalone platform

sell all forms of text ads, banner ads, and paid reviews

custom purchases also allow you to sell digital products

display ads on any website you like using php or javascript

installation is simple using the web installer, no more manual file uploading

entirely automated, all ad purchases and expiration’s handled automatically

click and impression tracking, plus weekly ad reports emailed to advertisers

If you want to use this offer click here

Please note the discount is only valid for the month of July 2009

Related posts:

1. Buy & Sell FOR FREE- Beat the recession
2. Dear Wordpress – Thank you!
3. Wordpress 2.7 – Whats to come?

I remember a good few months back an Irish blogger wrote about an Irish airline and a glitch he found on their website, some of the comments in relation to this particular post on his website were discovered to be from the Irish airline staff themselves and they had – shall we say some negative comments to make.

What shocked me most about this incident was one of these comments criticised the blogger for using the wordpress blogging platform which was running his website, using some phrasing along the lines that it was amateurish.

Perhaps it is an irrelevant comment by a person who was making the comment out of anger and ignorance, but I thought to myself, name something better? Seriously! Describe to me blog management software that is flexible, adoptable, user friendly – used by millions from the likes of myself to British billionaires and Prime Ministers, and did I mention that all this is FREE!

Thank you – wordpress people, for bringing information to millions of people and providing the authors of this information with a wonderful platform for doing this!

Despite my wonderful words of gratitude in the above statement, I decided to shoot myself in the foot and try another platform. Mostly so I had a relevant basis of comparison for this post, and because I am geeky like that, ok the geeky thing was the main reason…

Having installed Movable Type blogging platform last week on my server, which I did also use 5-6 years ago and had terrible problems with rebuilding posts and such, I found myself lost – back to wordpress it was. I came at it with an open mind, but could not find any reason to switch platforms, for me it offered no wow factor which would make me interested in using it.

I am not going to make this a post about which platform is better – of course this is a huge can of worms and a preference for the individual, but rather I am going to briefly outline why wordpress is the blogging platform of choice for so many people!

From the one click install technique, (and yes I know you need to set up the SQL database and config file first, but after you ace that – you’re well on the way), to easy to install plugins and themes, your blog is ready for its content. So perfect for any beginner who wants a self hosted solution.

To boil all the features down into one short paragraph, you can make wordpress into your own baby.

The design and features you can use are endless, and the amount of people on hand that offer their services when you can’t figure it out is endless* (* sometimes at a price – like anything else), the amount of free designs and plugins to extend functionality that is on offer is so great you really don’t have to splash out on often expensive designs if you don’t want to or cant afford it. I wrote a post outlining some great plugins which compliment your installation greatly, you can find it here. Having mentioned support I being to think of a somewhat negative point, there has to be one, right?

Support! Wordpress should offer a support package, which would undoubtedly be in great demand. I understand wordpress does offer premium services on there hosted wordpress.com site, but for self hosted blogs paid support would be great.

To have someone on hand when something goes wrong, or when you have been trying to get something right for hours and it is just not working. Wordpress does offer support forums, which are of course not the same as dedicated support, don’t get me wrong there are some great people on wordpress willing to help, but a paid support service, would mean dedicated and fast responses where required.

Wordpress is easy to use, and it continues to evolve with the internet into a simple but extendable blogging platform. Dear Wordpress – Thank you!

Related posts:

1. 19 Great Wordpress Plugins – A List
2. A quick look at Wordpress 2.5 Beta
3. Wordpress Plugins Directory

Could it be  be that a company like Google is seeking to control much of the popular content on the internet, regardless of a company’s future financial ability? Does  Google just like to have the most popular sites in its portfolio. Or is that too obvious a statement?

Twitter looks to me like a company which will prove hard to monetise, the only real possibility may be  a premium account model where people can have some bonus features for a fee of some sort. Such a model is in use by the Flick.com photo sharing site, owned by Yahoo and seems to be doing nicely.

What makes Twitter such an popular service is that  surfers are actively using it for a wide variety of reasons. There is the is the celebrity factor – Those interesting MTV (sorry that’s MTV ONE) celebrities on our screens – the Paris Hilton’s of the world all have accounts, and where these people go there will be a bunch of folks following them, sending Tweets to Paris and hoping that she – Paris Hilton herself will acknowledge their existence. There is the casual user who often  gives the cringely horrible updates which often includes  terrible tweets that track every moment from lunch updates to the trip to the toilet afterwards!

A more interesting part of Twitter which is tied into its popularity is that many organisations and groups are using the service to push updates and stay in contact with their users! That may be where Twitter can offer the  premium services. Interesting Twitter was the first with updates on the new Irish Budget, beating RTE and even blogs with the latest breaking news, from trivial comments on politicians clothes to more serious updates on the budget.

Related posts:

1. One quarter of all tweets generated by bots!
2. Not on Twitter, maybe you are out of the loop?
3. Twitter: Do you tweet celebrities?

One of the best things about wordpress is the ability to extend its functionality by adding plugins.  The idea of this post is to provide a point of reference, a list, of some of the greats - selecting some plugins from this list should help you find that elusive, desirable plugin that you’ve been looking for. But there’s more, I would very much like you to comment on this list with your own suggestions, and we can go beyond the 19 plugins listed below.

All in One SEO Pack - I like to mix and match my SEO plugins, and I have written a list of SEO plugins I like before, however, if you would like one plugin to do all the work for you, give this one a try. I found this an interesting plugin, and it does work out of the box, but don’t let it be the only SEO plugin you ever use.

Google Sitemap - This plugin will generate a sitemap, which is read by the search engines, it is compatible with ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO – which are also notifed when you publish a new post.

Add This- Add this is nothing too exciting, its in the plugins simplicity I find greatness, placing the ‘Add This’ Social Bookmarking Widget on your site or blog, allows any visitor to easily bookmark it. One click lists all the popular social networking sites which you can use to bookmark. Its probably not the best bookmarking solution, but it is the easiest to use.

Akismet- I don’t think this anti-spam solution needs any introduction,  but ill give it one, Akismet comes with wordpress, and in my opinion is the spiders web for catching unwanted flies, or as the folks over at Automattic say  ”Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.”

Feedburner Feedsmith- Feedburner is a nice indication of who is reading your blog, well, who is subscribed to your feed to be exact – we have to assume some people still navigate the web also. “Feedburner Feedsmith is a plugin which uses Googles Feedburner site to monitor your feed traffic by  detecting all the ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track subscribers.”

Flickr Photo Album - Your flickr photos on your site! Although wordpress now has a pretty good gallery/media management tool, the Flickr Photo Album can pull in your flickr hosted photos so you can display them on your website. You can insert your images to posts or create a gallery of photos also.

Subscribe to Comments- There is talk in the wordpress community of this plugin being intigrated into wordpress itself. Subscribe to comments is a plugin that allows commenter’s on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments. The beauty of this is to create a continuing relationship with readers who can return to the post with additional comments, keeping the conversation flowing.

Twitter Tools- Alex King does some pretty cool plugins, and Twitter Tools is no exception, with this tool you can post your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter. It also has a write screen for creating new tweets. One draw back is if you edit an old post for whatever reason, it does post that as an update on twitter – which you may not want. It still is the a very good integration between twitter an your blog.

Wordpress Database Backup - I wrote about backing up before, this is a must have really, WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.

What Would Seth Godin Do- A message to new visitors, this plugin can be used to remind new visitors to subscribe to your feed. The default message, which can be changed says, ”If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!” After 5 visits the message disappears. You can customise this message, its lifespan, and its location.

Wordpress.com Sats- This places your blogs traffics stats on your WP Dashboard, it includes a graph and the stats most bloggers need, although it does require you to log in to view the stats, as its hosted on wordpress.com. “Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface. ”

SEO Title Tags- I previously developed a website that got an incredible amount of trafic (by my standards at least) , what surprised me was one of the most important thing search engines looked at was the title of your post. “Title tags should incorporate synonyms and alternate phrases to capture additional search visibility. Now, thankfully, there is a solution”.

WP Super Cache - This one is clever, and something I decided not to use, until I realised that one of my blogs really needed it. “This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts”. What all this seems to means, at the end of the day, is it takes the pressure off wordpress and speeds up loading if you have a good view visitors or many SQL queries running.

cformsII - contact form – Placing your e-mail address on your site ( I have done this  – tut – tut) can result in a sizable about of spam, placing a contact form on your site can alleviate this problem and also make your site more user friendly and professional looking. cformsII manages this task for you, it comes with many options which can be a bit confusing, so I would say to take a look at the documentation before playing too much with it.

Wordpress Automatic upgrade - There is much hype around this, and it does sound like a great plugin, so I have included it in my list, however I have not tried this plugin, and to be honest I am not going to, I am cautious about this and am going to wait for a wordpress version ( if that happens).

Similar Posts - No doubt you will have seen related posts on blog entries you have read, well here is a plugin that does just that, Similar Posts displays a list of posts that are similar or related to the current posts.

WP-Polls - Its time to take a Poll, if you don’t want to use one of the third party hosted polls that are out there,  WP-Polls should be what you need “WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted.”

WPtouch iPhone Theme - This one is coming soon to johnmryan.com – It does what you would expect it to “WPtouch formats your WordPress blog with an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects. The theme only shows when viewed from an iPhone or iPod touch.”

WP Security Scan- Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions. I tried this, not bad, what I did was turn it on, did a scan, and turned it off. As always be cautious when it comes to security.

Related posts:

1. RSS feed tweeks to enhance reader experience & promote traffic to your website!
2. Backing up wordpress – playing it safe
3. SEO Plugins for Wordpress

I wrote previously about wordpress upgrades and some of the changes we might expect to see in the near future. Aside from nifty new tools and layout changes the most important point about upgrading is to secure your website against any discovered vulnerabilities in wordpress or indeed whatever blog software you use.

Once a vulnerability is discovered your blog can be hacked, but you may never know  – with the hacker placing hidden commands in the code of your site.

Worryingly there is a large percentage of high profile Irish Bloggers who seemingly refuse to upgrade their version of wordpress, with a small few sporting text on the footer of their site telling everyone what outdated version they are using, to those people I can only say one thing, I hope you have backups of your content.

To remove the wordpress version from the footer look for and remove this line and any related text

< ? php bloginfo(‘version’) ; ?>

Its a pain – Yes it is a pain to upgrade, and although there is a plugin to automate the upgrade process  I would recommend waiting for wordpress developers to bring out such a feature.

I myself often hold off on the major releases until they sort out any kinks. But when serious security flaws or issues are announced don’t wait around for someone to mess up your work!

Having said this I tried to think of some reasons not to upgrade wordpress – and there all very valid points…

I have a life…

Warcraft wont play itself.

Those beers will be getting warm.

There’s too much porn on the internet – where will I find the time.

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With another successful version of wordpress out the door, the folks at wordpress HQ are already working on the next release. Indeed 2.6 saw many features included such as preview themes, plugin update notification… and so on. What can we expect to see in the next release?

Integrated subscribe to comments: Currently operating as a plugin it seems as though this popular comment tool has come to the attention of wordpress coders, the plugin may now be part of the wordpress core. Allowing e-mails to be send to people who comment on your blog (if they so choose of course), updating post subscribers when someone has added their comment to the post.

Keyboard shortcuts for comment moderation: This would seem to to be something similar to what Google has for their gmail service. For example press pressing the key ‘A’ would approve a comment.

One click install for plugin’s: Not sure how this would work exactly, but it would simplify the install process for plugin’s, and would possible be connected to the next feature.

Plugin Browser: The ability to browse wordpress.org plugin directory within the admin panel? Sorry I cant see any information on this, but it would be an excellent addition.

Theme Update API: Acts the same way as the plugin API in 2.6, this will let you know when there is an update for your themes available, and also maybe allow you to update with one click install.

Of course a few of these may not come until a later edition. But do keep an eye on the wordpress development crew for updates. You can view a list of suggested updates on the codex here.

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Coming soon to an iPhone near you – Updated: Now released!

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If you have have used a desktop editor previously, you will most probably have given up on them, as many editors do all sorts of funny things to the text formatting, meaning when you try to publish the post you find it contains a great deal of unnecessary formatting tags. However some advances have been made to sort out this messy formatting and there are now a few desktop editors that actually work very well. Windows live writer is one such tool.

There has been a lot of criticism in relation to windows software in the past, this aside, windows live writer is simple to use, smooth to operate, works for many different blog platforms and is expandable using Plug-ins.

The most interesting feature perhaps is the way text formatting is displayed on the editor, which is set to reflect the CSS font used in your blog, giving you a feel for the final output, this is done automatically, but can also be disabled. Additionally there is also a preview function which will show you how the post will look on your site, without actually taking the post live. In fact there are four views on this desktop editor:

• Normal – Excludes CSS and shows a standard output.
• Web Layout – Includes your blog CSS formatting, as defined by your theme.
• Web Preview – Displays what the post will look like on your blog.
• HTML -Displays the code behind the post.

Windows live writer feels like a premium editor which is surprisingly free. Although created as a complement to Windows Live Spaces, the functionality to edit posts and pages on other platforms are included. Wordpress, Typepad, Sharepoint are all supported, but I have only tested on wordpress.

The plug-ins feature allow you to expand the editor, although there is a limited number of these, popular plug-ins such as the ability to insert Flickr images are available.

For those who prefer to make a few changes to their post on their platform editor, the desktop editor even comes with a ‘post draft to blog and edit online’ feature, allowing you to make those additional changes if you publish!

Do you use a blog writer, or do you prefer to use your platforms editor from your web-browser? Please comment and share your views.

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This did start me thinking about blog security, or perhaps more importantly if something did happen are my backups ready if the worst happens, and if so does this mean I can turn back the clock and have my blog fully restored. As a wordpress user there is a few simple options you can utilise, but no matter what software you use the following rule is golden.

Check with your web-host, how often do they do full backups of your sites data, meaning your database and all files you have associated with your website, and should you need access to these files to restore the data ,what is the required process. If you are in Ireland check out Letshost.ie who have a great backup policy. Some hosts have cPanel installed which will allow you to run a full backup also.

Step 1 – The database

The wordpress backup plugin, is a great tool for backing up your wordpress database – that is everything you have written on your blog, and the actual database that supports this. You can use this plugin to schedule a regular backup – which is e-mailed to you on a specified basis. Once activated you will find a backup option under the manage menu, I would strongly recommend against saving the backup to the server, as this may be publicly accessible, having it e-mailed is a good idea, or better still saving to your PC. I find deleting spam before backup is a great idea to speed up the download, particularly relevant for those with slower connections and you really don’t need a spam backup, easy to do if you use Askimet. Remember this backup process does not include any themes, plugins, images, or wordpress php and config files.

Step 2 – The files

Getting the rest of the files is the next part, using your favorite FTP client, such as FileZilla (free), log on via FTP to your wordpress installation and copy the entire folder including subdirectories, ensuring your themes, uploaded images, plugins and modified files are all in there, which they should be anyway, and copy to your PC. This process may take a while depending on the amount of data and your broadband connection.

The files should then be backed-up to a CD or external hard-drive , it seems unlikely but a server and a PC going down does happen. You should backup your wordpress database often using the schedule on the plugin (or manually if you prefer), unless you do not post very often, every week/month is a good starting point, and also backup your wordpress files, this – maybe once a month is ok, but if you make template changes and wordpress changes you’ll want this reflected in your backups and so backing up at that point is wise.

Points to note

You don’t need to become a backup freak, but just remember to do it, a simply entry to Google calendar to remind you when to do it is a nice idea, they even send you text reminders, you have no excuse really.

Unless you do both steps above you really only have a partial backup of your blog.

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