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WordPress Wednesday News: WordCamp Recovery, Stats Plugin Updated, Edublogs is Two, WordPress.com Will Be, and More WordPress News
The Blog Herald
The Blog Herald

WordPress Wednesday News: WordCamp Recovery, Stats Plugin Updated, Edublogs is Two, WordPress.com Will Be, and More WordPress News

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August 1, 2007

WordCamp is still in the news as participants process all the incredible information they learned and absorbed from the successful weekend conference. Edublogs.org turns two, and WordPress.com will be two next month, babies of WordPressMU. A new version of the popular Automattic WordPress Stats Plugin has been released due to a security vulnerability. The Sandbox and Plugin Competitions have ended with some great goodies for all. And more WordPress fun and news.

WordPress News

Happy Birthday, Edublogs! turns two today. The first of the multi-user versions of WordPress to hit the web. turns two years old next month. Edublogs founder, James Farmer’s to provide free blogs to educators and create an interactive community for teachers has grown from a dream to over 50,000 bloggers on the free service. Wow! Edublogs’ birthday bash begins with a roll-out of a new look for the site and a lot of new features and improved services. Congrats to James and all of the Edublog team, and to all of the wonderful teachers who make the world a better place by educating the young and the old. Thank you!

WordCamp 2007: News and reports about the successful conference a couple weeks ago is still rolling out. This week, I’ve posted a summary of the general events and WordPress-related news and information from the conference on the Blog Herald, and more reports and information are coming in through the site and Patrick Havens’ great work on the WordCamp Report.

For those still tracking down the live blogging reports, the ones that are getting the most attention, other than those by the WordCamp Report, are ones done by Stephanie Booth of Climb to the Stars and Tris Hussey of Blog World Expo

The caricatures of WordCamp participants are still rolling out, sponsored by David Klein of Body ABCs, a chiropractor and blogger from San Diego, and created by cartoonist, Orie Roberts of La Jolla, California. Want to see mine? Click the photograph to see the caricature of me. It’s wonderful. Thanks again, David, for the fun addition to the conference.

THANK YOU to All Who Helped WordCamp Be the Success It Was: Mucho cheers, applause, hugs, and kudos to all who pitched in to make WordCamp the successful weekend conference. It took a lot of work to handle the 400 participants or more, with registration, setup, food, speakers, coordination, and timing. Big claps for all involved. It was amazing. Thank you!

WordPress on Your Calendar: While subject to change, the following are dates you need to put on your calendar regarding WordPress releases, as found on the WordPress Roadmap:

  • WordPress 2.3 – August 20, 2007 (at least ready for testing then release) – to include tags and improved caching among many other new features under the hood.
  • WordPress 2.4 – December 1, 2007 – to include a new WordPress Administration Panel interface, improved caching, and a lot of bug fixes and improvements.
  • July 2008 – WordCamp 2008 in San Francisco (okay – this is speculative but it helps to plan ahead)

WordPress Competitions: The Weblog Tools Collection Plugin Competition and The Sandbox Designs Competition is over and we’re eagerly awaiting the winners and summaries of all entries.

The New WordPress Store: Matt Mullenweg announced the new WordPress store is online and open for business. There are red WordPress t-shirts for men and women with a variety of sizes, with more fun WordPress stuff coming soon.

Akismet Auntie-Spam Greasemonkey Script: Engtech’s Akismet Auntie-Spam Greasemonkey Script has been updated with some nice features including hovering over the “super compressed” spam displays a preview with an option to mark it as not spam and the ability to edit the script with keywords that you want pointed out to you as NOT SPAM. The latter is brilliant for bringing to your attention your blog name or keywords or even friends which tend to get marked as spam when they aren’t. This is absolutely brilliant.

Akismet Auntie-Spam Greasemonkey Script is only for Firefox with Greasemonkey installed. You can read my review of it for more information, but basically, it recognizes when you are on the Akismet spam panel on WordPress and WordPress.com blogs, and automatically reduces or compresses the comment spam so you can read 10-20 per screen instead of 3 or 4 huge link filled comment spams. Your eye goes quickly down the list to check for false positives and has improved my checking of comment spam by more than 300%. I spend more time with the good things on my blogs and not the comment spam evil.

Don’t Blog as Administrator on Your Blog: Donncha O’Caoimh offers a great tip for all WordPress bloggers. Don’t blog as the administrator on your blog. Create a user profile for yourself. Two reasons, the feeds may not list you as the author but the administrator in the byline, and if you are out blogging and step away from your computer for a moment, your blog isn’t exposed to someone who can come in and make drastic changes or do harm. A contributor or author permission level lacks access to the more harmful activities that can be done behind the scenes. Good tip.

Let Your WordPress Voice Be Heard: The section on WordPress is an open forum for you to have your say on the features you would like to see added or removed from WordPress. According to Matt at WordCamp, the Ideas list heavily influences which features are added or removed from WordPress. This is the place to have your say by rating the idea by clicking on the stars on the idea post and comment on the idea with your support, recommendation, or nay on the idea.

Here are some interesting ones to consider, vote, and have your say:

WordPress.com News

WordPress.com W logoWordPress.com Gets a Mini Makeover: The front page of WordPress.com has gotten a mini-makeover with a few new and improved graphics and features.

WordPress.com Turns Two in August: Anticipate a lot of fun and activity as WordPress.com turns two years old in August.

Time to Renew Your Extras in WordPress.com: If you signed up a year ago for WordPress.com Extras like CSS, extra storage, and such, it may be time to renew your annual subscription to your WordPress.com extra features.

Live Writer for WordPress.com: WordPress.com also announces “Windows Live Writer FTW”, and introduces WordPress.com bloggers to XML-RPC, a “communications” programming function that permits other programs to “talk” to WordPress. Windows Live Writer is a “desktop blogging client”, one of several programs that allow you to blog to your WordPress or WordPress.com blog from your “desktop” rather than through your browser. WordPress.com now has a Page about the benefits and usefulness of blogging with Windows Live Writer, including their support of extensions for WordPress that allows you to edit pages and quickly access your stats. Why not download Windows Live Writer and give it a try.

Moving To or From WordPress.com: Moving from one blogging system to WordPress.com is easy. So is moving from the free WordPress.com hosted service to your own full version of WordPress. For more information on moving your blog, see Importing Content, Improved WordPress to WordPress Importer, and Can I move my blog from here to another blog somewhere else … from the WordPress.com FAQ.

Honoring the Languages of WordPress.com Blogs and Bloggers: This week, it’s time to honor WordPress.com Blogs in Deutsch. To translate these into another language, you may use Google’s Translate Tools by copying and pasting in the link into the “translate web page” option.

  1. Randy Couture gegen “The Rock”
  2. Quo Vadis, Magic Universe?
  3. Tittenfummeleien mit der Bingo-Tante
  4. Bilder vom Golfevent am 27. Juli in Krefeld
  5. Das Gesundheitswesen
  6. Die liebe Schwiegermutter
  7. Der rätselhafte Zauberwürfel
  8. Prof. Dr. Klaus Marxen: Famos – Der Fall des Monats im Strafrecht
  9. Meine rechte Hand
  10. Pastilla von Hirse, Spinat und Fetakäse

What’s Hot on WordPress.com? The hottest blogs on WordPress.com were:

  1. CNN Political Ticker
  2. I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?
  3. Media Biz
  4. Web Worker Daily
  5. A Hot Mess!
  6. Scobleizer
  7. GigaOM
  8. Flickr Blog
  9. Music Videos
  10. strange maps

The hottest blog posts on WordPress.com were:

  1. Obama: Shift fight to Afghanistan, Pakistan
  2. lonelygirl15 finds a friend in MySpace
  3. Manchester United Goes Cradle Robbing
  4. The Way Men Hate Us
  5. T5DR ONLINE Impressions!
  6. Double Dutch – RvP & Amsterdam
  7. It’s As If Daunte Culpepper Likes Being Hit Often.
  8. How to Cope with Job Burnout
  9. Quick update
  10. Top 10 Facebook Apps (from two perspectives)

WordPress Plugins and Themes News

WordPress Plugins DatabaseVulnerability and Security Update for Automattic’s WordPress Stats Plugin: Andy Skelton of Automattic announces an immediate security update of the Automattic WordPress Stats Plugin, a mandatory upgrade. Andy’s posted news about the upgraded version, along with some annoyances that they are working on fixing.

Mashable Offers WordPress Administration Panel Plugins: Mashable offers WordPress Administration Panel Plugins, a list of more than 50 tools and Plugins for full version WordPress blogs. Many of these I reviewed and explored in WordPress Administration Panel WordPress Plugins, WordPress Plugins To Help You Administer Your Blog, and WordPress Plugins for Multiple Blogger Blogs in my month long series on WordPress Plugins.

Update WordPress Plugins Plugin: The WP-Plugins Tracker WordPress Plugin will compare Plugin versions on a WordPress blog with those in the wp-plugins-db.org Database.

This is brilliant and I hope that they link to the official WordPress Plugins Directory and long standing WordPress Plugins Database (wp-plugins.net). It has to in order for this to work across all blogs with all Plugins. Soon, the official WordPress Plugins Directory will have such a feature and the one that will succeed the most will link to the main Plugin databases, not just one.

Cleaning Up the WordPress Theme Viewer: Matt Mullenweg reports on cleaning up the WordPress Theme Viewer saying, “We’ve removed 2,107 themes so far, or a bit under 60%. Those themes had 2,243,735 downloads total, or about 1,064 downloads per theme. There are 1,737 themes still in the directory and those had 3,480,244 downloads, or about 2,003 downloads per theme.”

Interesting WordPress Plugins: The following are some interesting WordPress Plugins I’ve stumbled upon recently.

Most Popular WordPress Themes: The WordPress Theme Viewer has been cleaned up and now features 1,633 WordPress Themes with 6,053,132 downloads. The most popular WordPress Themes are:

WordPress Plugins Directory: According to the WordPress Plugin Directory, some of the the most popular and recently updated WordPress Plugins are:

See Also
Google search
Google Search: Enhancing User Experience After Reddit Blackouts

WordPress Techniques and Tips

Here are some featured articles and videos from around the WordPress and the , the online manual for WordPress Users, the source to turn to first for your WordPress help.

NOTE: If you would like your WordPress tip and technique included in this list, see Tips For Writing Good WordPress Tips.

WordPress Community News

WordPress Community graphicWordPress Community Podcast: The eagerly anticipated WordPress Community Podcast is having a little glitch in the system and was offline for a bit but it’s been fixed. We’re awaiting the report from Charles and Aaron on WordCamp 2007. Until then, you can still catch the Episode 27: WordPress 2.2.1 and WordCamp Schedule with some interesting topics on WordCamp and WordPress 2.2.1, as well as some reviews and announcements of some interesting WordPress Plugins.

WordPress Installed For Free: If you have problems installing the full version of WordPress, visit Installing WordPress for Free (aka Install4Free WordPress). This free, volunteer-driven service is limited to personal blogs only, and they help only with installations, not upgrades.

Looking for a WordPress Expert? Do you want a custom WordPress blog? Want to convert your website into a WordPress blog or use WordPress as a CMS? If you are looking for an expert in WordPress Themes, WordPress development, WordPress Plugins, or other WordPress-related expertise, check out the list of WordPress Consultants on , the parent company of WordPress, and the WP-Pro mailing list.

WordPress Events

The following are upcoming WordPress group meetings and meetups, and a few special blogging events you may want to attend. If you know of any I’ve missed, please post them or contact me on my WordPress Events Page or via email.

For a WordPress Meetup near you and other blogging events, check out the WordPress Meetup Group List.

Extra Tip of the Week

Are You Missing Out on a Powerful WordPress Feature? You are visiting a web page that you know you must bring to the attention of your blog readers. Do you then click back and forth between tabs with that page and your WordPress blog to write about it, copying and pasting links and blockquote content?

Why bother?

For many years, WordPress has made it easy to blog about a blog post or web page with a little Javascript bookmarklet called the WordPress Press It Bookmarklet. Featured at the bottom of your Write Post Panel, click and drag the link to your browser’s bookmark toolbar. When visiting a page you want to blog about, select the blockquote content on the page and click the Press It Bookmarklet. It will open a window for you, a minimized version of your Write Post Panel, with the link and the selected blockquote information inside the post area. Add your comments and then Save it or Post it to your WordPress blog with one click, just like normal.

Quick and easy blogging.

If you are already a fan of the WordPress Press It Bookmarklet, make sure you update it every time you upgrade WordPress as that may change with the new version.

Even More WordPress News?

For more news on WordPress, see:

Each Wednesday on is WordPress Wednesday, featuring the news around the WordPress Community. If you have a WordPress news item or tip to suggest, please contact me at this special email address: lorelleonwordpress@gmail.com

The author of Lorelle on WordPress and the fast-selling book, Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging, as well as several other blogs, Lorelle VanFossen has been blogging for over 15 years, covering blogging, WordPress, travel, nature and travel photography, web design, web theory and development extensively as web technologies developed.

View Comment (1)

  • thanks for all the tips and tricks, too bad im currently using dasblog, argggg with the amount of features on wordpress im almost starting to lean towards switching lately :(

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