Here are the features available in our free version:

• Upload as many Competitors as you like.
• Add as many Groups as you like.
• Use the shortcode generator to show Group based contests.
• Easily edit your Competitors.
• Display a transition message.
• Customize colors to your theme.
• Easily customize displayed text.
• and more…

If you’d like to rate it please do post a review as well. We love hearing feedback and look forward to making the plugin better in the near future!

You can see the test site here.

Please take a few seconds to re-tweet this, thank you:

Released the Hot or Not Plugin on WordPress.org weborithm.com/hot-or-not-plu… #hotornot #wordpress

— Weborithm.com (@weborithm) March 12, 2013

Of course if you want to go for the Pro version, you can download ShowDown right here.

How did 2012 look for Weborithm?

Not too bad.

The New

We launched a WordPress Themes club, a Hot or Not plugin and other random bits of code across other verticals.

The Renewed

WP Auctions went through some major changes and continues to steam forward with thousands of new users.

The Late

We put to rest two projects which we thought would be great additions to our portfolio. But other factors laid those ambitions to rest. In hindsight, it was the right decision to make at the time. Sometimes letting things go gives you the premise you need to re-focus.

The Up-Coming

With new directions and the zeal of a new beginning (well, in calendar terms at least), Weborithm aims to bring you even better products and a possible new direction for this site.

But for now, we’d like to wish you all a very Happy New Year and a successful 2013!

New Features

1. Disable clicks on vote: We’ve added a feature in where you can specify a “Transition Message” to show right after a vote has been placed. While the vote is being tallied, and the next contest load, your visitor will not be able to click on any element on the page. You can customize the “message” shown via the settings tab.
2. Hide IP address: You can now hide the IP address of the last voter on your contest.
3. Hide Group name: You can now hide the Group name on your Hot or Not contest and Battles.
4. Style Battles Next Button: Style the “I cannot decide” button on your Battles via the styling tab in the plugin.

Bug Fix

1. The text field for the Hot or Not “Next” text did not update when edited separately. It does now.

So there you have it, a cute little update to the plugin right before the end of the year.

Don’t forget the new add on we released for ShowDown, User Submit.

It allows your visitors to upload their own competitors and costs only $15! A worthy addition to use with the plugin and increase user attachment to your site and your contests.

Check out User Submit add on.

So when Ryan wrote to us saying how the plugin has helped him out with his site, we just had to share it with you:

To generate some interest in our launch for www.StudioWars.com, a Fantasy Movie League (think Fantasy Football meets Hollywood, I decided to include Showdown battles as a featured part of our website.

The first week we conducted a battle for the “Best Movie Portrayal of Mars”, the next battle we did the following week was “Best Computer Animated Movie” which was shared to Facebook and Twitter and generated 655 page views and was a great success.

The third battle is where we got smart, we created a “Sexiest Male Character in a Movie” and loaded it with a bunch of contestants. We then sent this link out to a couple of mom bloggers. In roughly 1 day we generated over 2500 page views on just that one battle (on a three week old site with no links or advertising!).

Combine this with the page views for the results pages and how much activity we have generated on Facebook and I would say that Showdown has given our website a jump start that is more than we ever hoped for.

In our first month since launch we have generated 1500 visitors with just over 10,000 page views with a big thanks to Showdown.

We are also trying to figure out how we could use this plugin to promote some of our other websites.

Thanks again for this great plugin!

- Ryan

We’re happy that ShowDown has been able to help Ryan jump start his website, and we’re sure it will continue to do so. Find out more about ShowDown here and see how it can help you increase your website traffic.

Did you know: That you can include affiliate links for your competitors to help you make money!

Digi Magazine Theme

A one of a kind magazine theme, Digi, gives you many interactive options for showing your content. Easily customize your home page by showcasing up to 5 different categories. The theme comes with our usual set of options that offer you flexibility to show/hide elements as you please.

View the Demo

Features include:

• Showcase 5 featured homepage categories
• Social media ready, just drop in your links.
• 50 amazing Google fonts to choose from!
• Customize static and hover link colors.
• Upload your own logo.
• Use WordPress or Facebook comments.
• Left or Right sidebar options.
• prettyPhoto powered image popups.
• …and much more!

Join ThemeSpace

Digi is available from ThemeSpace, our WordPress and HTML themes club. For the current price of $35 you get membership for a year, which gives you access to all of our present and future themes! Free updates included!

Click here to learn more about ThemeSpace

Preview

Click to preview

Join ThemeSpace Today

Here’s a list of the plugins on my site right now:

1. Akismet
2. Ad Rotator
3. cforms
4. Google XML sitemaps
5. Jetpack
6. Platinum SEO Pack
7. SyntaxHighlighter Evolved
8. WordPress Database Backup
9. WordPress Download Monitor

Plugins like Platinum SEO Pack “could” be replaced by implementing some of the most common optimization features in custom meta boxes and having it available per Post/Page. The rest of SEO depends on your content anyway.

Download Monitor is great for the free designer downloads I use on my site, but I’m sure with some wizardry I could use a Custom Post Type and even implement a counter to track downloads. But I think I’ll keep it for now.

Some would say that 9 is too much as well, whereas some would probably have three times as many plugins installed. In my career as a web designer, I’ve seen my fair share of nightmares when I log into client installations…it’s just bewildering to see dozens (yes, dozens) of update notifications on plugins, some of which are not even activated!

—

Why do some people have an obsession with installing plugin after plugin to make their blog/website this super power of functionality? When in fact they are clearly doing the opposite!

Generally, most plugins will add some sort of custom JavaScript, CSS or HTML. The poorly coded ones will load multiple versions of  jQuery prompting you to wonder in the dark what’s wrong with your site, if you don’t have the technical capacity to figure it out…good luck! God forbid you get a white screen.

Now, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t install that totally awesome new plugin that allows you to add 50 social icons to all your Posts, but it might be a wise idea to disable any other plugins you might already have that do the same thing. You certainly don’t need to have plugins you are not using installed either, just delete them.

One of the keys to having a site that loads fast is by reducing the amount of server requests your site has to make, I feel mine makes too many as well and it’s something I plan on addressing. Google has been repeatedly saying that faster sites will be rewarded with better search engine placements, so take the time to evaluate your plugin library today and see what you can cut off, trim or substitute.

—

Check your site speed here.

Are you obsessed with plugins? How many do you use? Let me know in the comments.

But that’s not the point of this post.

The point is that it was automatically tagged for a copyright claim made by some random entity called “Music Publishing Rights Collecting Society“. Looking at their Facebook page, they write this about themselves:

You get the pleasure of posting videos
We get the pleasure of making money from your videos
It’s a win-win situation

We are the Music Publishing Rights Collecting Society. In other words, we are a society that collects rights from the publishing of music onto sites like YouTube.

Our mission is to file copyright claims so that ads will be placed onto certain videos, and we will be able to make money off of them. We do not seek to have anyone’s videos blocked in certain countries or disabled altogether, all we are trying to do is make a bit of money. That’s not so bad, is it?

A wide variety of people post videos containing content that belongs to our organization. We didn’t make the music ourselves, but nonetheless we can still make money from it.

Really?

So this is some random organization which somehow claims to collect “rights” from music being published on YouTube…yet they claim they didn’t make the music themselves but “nonetheless we can still make money from it”.

Wow.

I need to start my own “Society”, that’s not so bad, is it?

If I’m not mistaken aren’t the artists/publishers the main beneficiaries of their music, rather than some random group of people who claim nothing but do claim the overbearing right to your videos and slapping ads on them as soon as a tune is heard in the background? And, how did they exactly get the process automated in their favor by YouTube!

This is why copyright laws are broken, and more laws are not the answer.

My video below was quickly tagged with ads from AdSense, even though I don’t have an AdSense account, and I got the notice that my video was being claimed by the “Music Publishing Rights Collecting Society”. If your videos get automatically tagged with a copyright claim by this bogus society, who don’t think it’s “so bad” to make money off of your video, you can very easily contest it using the premise that it is being used within the fair usage clause.

Just follow the directions on the YouTube site to claim your video back. Here’s the response I got:

Bogus Copyright Claim

If your video has been previously claimed by this “Society” you can still contest it and re-claim the rights to your video. Don’t let these thugs stop or scare you, and for goodness sake let’s stop them from making money from our videos!

World Record for Sky Lanterns, Hyderabad March 25th, 2012

…Video will be back shortly…it was brought under a new copyright claim by another entity called “Whacked Out Media” who are based in Hyderabad, they supposedly provide management services of some sort. From what I saw at the event, I personally would not hire them.

I’ll be hosting the video somewhere else.

BLOGit!

Even though WordPress has evolved to be used for various types of setups, it’s still at its heart one of the best blogging platforms out there. So we thought it would be nice to introduce a simple, yet versatile, blogging theme.

View the Demo

Homepage

The home page NivoSlider works by pulling the featured images from each Post within the “featured” category. The five latest posts will be shown from this category on your home page.

Other features include:

• Show the footer or not and use 1, 2 or 3 widget areas.
• Social media ready, just drop in your links.
• 50 amazing Google fonts to choose from!
• Customize static and hover link colors.
• Upload your own logo.
• Use WordPress or Facebook comments.
• Left or Right sidebar options.
• prettyPhoto powered image popups.
• …and much more!

Join ThemeSpace

BLOGit! is available from ThemeSpace, our WordPress and HTML themes club. For the current price of $35, you get a membership for a year which gives you access to all of our present and future themes! Free updates included!

Click here to learn more about ThemeSpace.

Digi Magazine will be released as part of ThemeSpace in March, 2012.

How cool is that! Go ahead give it a try in your Gmail inbox.