Bloggers Magazine

WordPress 3.0 Thelonious Released

2010-06-22T11:09:04Z

WordPress 3.0, the thirteenth major release of WordPress is now available for download. Lots of bugfixes (1,217 in total) but one major changes : the merge of WPMU and WordPress and now you should be able to add multi-site functionality easily to your website. Enabling BuddyPress is also possible by adding the following line to wp-config.php :

define ( 'BP_ENABLE_MULTIBLOG', true );

WordPress 3.0 came with new default theme called Twenty Ten, in addition to new APIs that allow developers to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies.

More changes are available on codex page. Download from 3.0 wordpress.org or upgrade from your current wordpress installation.

Microblogging with WordPress and P2 Theme

2009-08-15T07:33:04Z

Automattic released this year a new version of their theme Prologue, which used internally in the company to keep each other up to date. Microblogging is getting more and more popular in enterprise environment as communication platform mainly. Since WordPress provides already the necessary tools for blogging, so it's obviously easier to add some restriction to make it suitable for microblogging. It's not only about limiting posts to 140 characters, but also by providing edit-in-place functionality with Ajax quick reply and live notifications on the home page.

That's everything you need to communicate without having to visit the dashboard. P2 provides also threaded comments, live tags suggestions, show/hide feature for comments, and handy keyboard shortcuts for more accessibility from your keyboard. An interesting new experience if you are looking for an easy to use microblogging tool and of course if you are already familiar with wordpress platform. See below a video from wordpress.tv showing different P2 capabilities. Demo is available here.

P2 is available in the themes directory, or directly under Appearance > Themes for wordpress.com users.

Create Your Own Twitter-like service with PHP and Laconica

2009-08-08T07:33:19Z

In the last two years microblogging tools knew a great expansion, mainly Twitter service which turned quickly into a giant communication platform with only 140 characters. If you are interested to run your own Twitter-like platform for your company or your community, Laconica is a great open source communication platform which provides a similar service to Twitter, Jaiku and Plurk.

Laconica is written in PHP and uses a set of PHP packages from PEAR in addition to other open source solutions such XMPPHP, PHP-OpenID, OAuth, Markdown, PECL Mailparse, in addition to the free open-source SQL full-text search engine Sphinx.

Laconica support plugins and API. Their API is compatible with Twitter API which make it possible to use with any of the software already available for Twitter such Gwibber, Twhirl, Witty, � in addition to many online services including ping.fm, twitterfeed. Laconica came also with a built-in Facebook application which will update your Facebook status automatically with your Laconica microblogging platform.

Tynt Tracer, What's Being Copied From Your Site

2009-08-03T10:44:57Z

TynT Tracer is an interesting solution which aims to help online content owners get credit for their content and drive extra traffic to their sites. The service is small,simple but very useful ! You to register first in the service then you will get a Javascript code to include in your pages. Once a visitor copy any content from your pages, the scripts will append a "Read more" link and an optional creative commons license if available.

Such tools could be more than useful in blogging/journalism since you can automate adding a link back to your site in addition to the ability to monitor your visitors engagements in the website. For this TynT Tracer offer an interesting stats tool that gives you actionable insight into what content your users find most engaging.

Be aware, Tynt Tracer track more than "copy" events, because even when you select and highlight any text in the page it will be recorded in their servers. This could be great for content owners to get lots of rich information about their readers, but it could be annoying for users especially if you notice that everytime you select a text a request is sent in the background.

If you feel that people are using your content without giving you credit, Tynt Tracer is for you. The service is totally free, and require only registration.

8 TipsTo Monetize Your Blog With Paid Posts

2009-07-22T19:08:00Z

Many bloggers were interested into monetizing their blogs and I was sharing with some friends lots of tips that I'll post here also, but this wasn't really our main focus especially that there are lots of great blogs such as Problogger and Performancing who are more specialized in this topic.

You probably heard about people making more than $10k from paid posts only and you are wondering if you are eligible to make such good money easily. Today I'm coming back with 8 tips to monetize your blog with Paid Posts, hope this will open your mind to new alternative that you don't know or still thrilled to experiment.

Wordpress 2.8.1 Maintenance Release

2009-06-24T12:41:48Z

Wordpress have just released version 2.8.1 with handful of bugs fixed; Notable issues that are fixed in beta 1 include :

Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won�t have to change.
Dashboard memory usage is reduced. Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
A problem where the rich text editor wasn�t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.

You can automatically upgrade to 2.8.1 by changing in version.php

$wp_version = '2.8';

To be replaced with

$wp_version = '2.8.1-dev';

Wordpress 2.8 come already with lots of improvements in speed, widgets interface, new syntax editor for themes, new themes interface similar to plugins, in addition to the new Screen Options on every page. More information and download http://wordpress.org/.

BuddyPress 1.0.1 Released - Wordpress MU Goes Social

2009-06-07T07:12:48Z

BuddyPress 1.0.1 have just been released, a great solution to transform WordPress MU into a social network platform. A great suite of WordPress plugins and themes, each adding a distinct new feature and allow social interaction between members.

All BuddyPress plugins can be themed to match your own style, in just the same way as a WordPress blog. The BuddyPress plugins are bundled with a default theme to get you going out of the box.

This point release fixes a number of security issues in the 1.0 version so it is a critical upgrade for everyone currently running BuddyPress. There is also a number of other bug fixes so please review the release history for more information.

Advanced BuddyPress features include :

- Extended Profiles
- Private Messaging
- Friends
- Groups
- The Wire
- Activity Streams
- Blog Tracking
- Forums

BuddyPress is already used by many websites such Volkswagen TDI Tank Wars, GigaOm Pro, Wanna Network?, Flokka ... and many others. You might check the online demo at http://buddypress.org/demo/. More information and download available at http://buddypress.org.

Asaph Microblogging Solution

2008-04-28T08:32:12Z

PhobosLab have just released the first stable 1.0 of Asaph, a new microblogging solution. Asaph focuses on collecting links and images from other pages. It allows you post content directly from any page you are on. Asaph is not a full blown blog and it does not aim to be one - it just does this one task, but it's pretty good at it.

You can watch the screencast (~5Mb) to see what Asaph looks like. The solution come with two predefined themes, require PHP5 and MySQL and is available for download under the terms of GPL v3. For more information check Asaph project's page.

WordPress 2.3.1 Security Release, The Upgrading Mess

2007-10-28T06:30:19Z

WordPress Released today version 2.3.1 fixing over twenty bugs including some security issues.

Tagging support for Windows Live Writer
Fixes for a login bug that affected those with a Blog Address different than their WordPress Address
Faster taxonomy database queries, especially tag intersection queries
Link importer fixes

So good luck to upgrade to the new version ! Even with the number of solutions available to help upgrading easily, it still a real mess !! Just wondering why there isn't a version like everybody to upgrade from 2.3 to 2.3.1 including only files that changed ? Is it that difficult to automate ? If you are upgrading from an older version be sure to remove the utf-8 from DB_CHARSET in your config file, this will save you lots of time looking around : "where these special caracters are coming from ? "

How (Much) Top Bloggers Earn Money

2007-07-18T07:11:10Z

BusinessWeek have an interesting article on how top bloggers earn money and there are many known figures on the list from BoingBoing, ShoeMoney, Kottke, TechCrunch, Mashable, Problogger... others that I don't know at all, but probably you'll recognize some of them. But what I find interesting on this article is not the "how" top bloggers earn but the "how much".

Many bloggers I estimated they earn much more than the numbers announced, such Problogger ($100.000 a year) and this is probably due to the nature of topics Darren is used to blog about on problogger beside his photography blogs, which I bet provides the highest revenue for him. I don't think this is the real list of top bloggers on earning, since many don't reveal their real revenue. $5.000 per month is a good revenue, but not that high ! But you will notice how all of them used to vary their revenue sources.

From cat pictures and celebrity gossip to tech news and politics, the stars of the blogosphere earn plenty of dough, regardless of subject. Some bloggers start their sites intending to make big profits. But most of the bloggers we talked to had more modest expectations, and saw their blogs unexpectedly turn into businesses as traffic picked up and ad dollars rolled in.

Get Your Feedburner PRO for FREE

2007-07-03T18:57:23Z

Well, here is a first good news after Google have acquired Feedburner : since today PRO features are available to everyone for FREE. This include the stats pro and the MyBrand feature. I think it's a great move today for blogger to adopt Feedburner, if you are not already using it. This will not only reduce server resources consumed by your servers but will provide you a set of functionalities to make maximum profit from your RSS subscriptions.

I was waiting for the PRO brand feature because I have more 20 blogs to syndicate and fees will pay me another more robust server. So now that the feature is free I just sent email as indicated in the website and waiting until someone get in touch to enable it. It will make our RSS served from http://feeds.phpmagazine.net instead of http://feeds.feedburner.com. I'm not sure how the Stats PRO will help me, but I'll give it a try and we'll see what Site Stats can add.

LifeType Ads Plugin Released and Ransom Paid

2007-05-13T21:05:14Z

LifeType team just released a new Ads Plugin highly requested by blog communities to create custom blocks for all blogs. Very useful plugin to add for example a top banner to all blogs with ads, subscription link or other. You can make your service similar to Blogger and get some support clicks to your main blogging platform.

To release this new plugin, LifeType team decided to make it a little fun with a "plugin ransom", users interested to the plugin donate money until donation reach 100 Euro. I'm very sorry Oscar to broke the game :-) If you bid higher it might happen ! So now the plugin have just been released under the GPL like all other components of LifeType. Big thanks to Oscar and all LifeType team for making such great work.

Get More Productive With WordPress, Delicious and Postalicious

2007-05-13T08:10:19Z

There are some great wordpress plugins that can definitely boost your blogging and make your blog more fun. Recently I was testing Postalicious, a Wordpress plugin that let you create posts from your delicious bookmarks. You may probably noticed many bloggers posting speedlinks with their latest bookmarks, this not only make your blog more active, but also help you share your favorite bookmarks with your readers.

Usage is pretty simply, all you need is a delicious account. I used to create a new delicious account for a new wordpress blog that I created for testing, but you can use your existent one. Then after installing the plugin you will have to configure it once with your delicious account setting and how you want post to be integrated in your blog. Finally highly recommended Firefox and Delicious plugin, then your bookmarks could be posted everyday automatically in your blog. Then you can enjoy !

Deep Secrets of Successful Blogging e-Book by Chitika

2007-05-12T06:30:47Z

Chitika announced in their recent newsletter an amazing new e-Book titled "Deep Secrets of Successful Blogging" (PDF) and including selection of 30 experts worldwide in the first 2007 Blog Bash event. An amazing reading for the weekend ! The list include : B5media, Gizmodo, problogger, emoms at home, daily blog tips, Tech buzz, seobook, pronet advertising, Bumpzee, LiewCF, and much more ! Definitely loved the articles and the presentation of every expert, and of course you'll discover lots of tips to make money with your blog and Chitika. Click the image below to download the PDF e-Book. Enjoy !