The few, the proud, the Download Squad. Think you have what it takes to join us in world domination covering software and the web? We're looking for a few great bloggers to add to our team.
We won't give you a corner office. We will not offer you a company car. Health care? Dude, you're better off hitting up Clinton or Obama. What we can offer you is a contract, the same pay as every other Weblogs, Inc blogger and a chance to be seen by an enormous number of readers.
How can you apply to be a Download Squad blogger? It's easy! Write three original sample posts in the style and voice of Download Squad (First person plural -- the royal "we") and under 400 words each. Pithy, witty and sarcastic a plus. (Tip: When we say original, we mean new. Don't send us previous posts from your own blog!) Send your samples to
Download Squad's alumni includes a formidable list of blogging talent, are you up to the challenge?
Twitter users are increasingly starting to question whether the frequent number of Twitter accounts that are following them are actually people, or simply a form of Twitter spamming. The rule of thumb with that sort of question is usually that if you think something nefarious might be going on, unfortunately, you're probably right.
The next question that invariably comes up is, well, why? What benefit do these purported Twitter spammers get from friending everyone they possibly can? The answer is twofold:
1. There is a large number of very misguided people that seem to believe that the polite thing to do when someone follows you on Twitter is to follow them back. This is a ludicrous behavior. (As a quick aside, if one of the main things we struggle with in our high-speed, data filled lives is trying to keep a sane signal-to-noise ratio, and learning how to filter out the noise, why would we actively choose to follow random people's Twitter updates? What an incredible waste of time.) The thing is, this behavior can be and is exploited. If someone follows 20,000 random Twitter accounts, there is a very good chance that they will get at least 10% of those people following them back. Perfect! Now they have an audience of 2,000 people to spam, for free.
The WordPress team has released version 2.5.1 of the blogging software. The new version, which comes nearly a month after the initial release fixes a slew of performance and interface bugs, but also includes a very important security update. It is highly reccommended that all WordPress 2.5 users update their installations as soon as possible, especially if you allow open-registration (for user comments or for multi-author blogs).
In addition to the aforementioned security patch, 2.5.1 contains a number of fixes to issues that have plagued some WordPress users for the last couple of weeks.
The highlights include
Improvements to the Media Uploader
Performance tweaks for the Dashboard and the Write and Comments pages
TinyMCE has been updated
Layout fixes for IE users
Download the latest version of WordPress from their site and update your installations accordingly.
It's part of our culture to want to get more done in less time, so it's unsurprising RSS readers are so popular nowadays. But what happens when efficiency and productivity start to replace general happiness? Well, that's what happened to a long time web publisher/surfer known as Halsted (AKA Cygnoir), who recently became fed up with her RSS addiction.
"I dread opening my RSS reader these days," she posted the day before giving up on RSS. "Right now there are 876 unread items glaring at me, from a total of 269 feeds." As of this writing, the brave soul has managed to get through about a week without relying on a reader -- you laugh, but some of us are truly addicted!
RSS and other technologies are often praised for their ability to save time, effort, etc, but it seems many forget their limits when they get into the habit of turning free time into work time -- all the time. This gets us wondering: How many feeds is one too many, and -- for all the RSS addicts out there -- how often do you check your feeds?
If you maintain a blog, there's a pretty good chance you're addicted to statistics. Whether you typically get 5 page views a day or 5 million, there's something irresistible about clicking the refresh button on any site that will tell you how many hits you've received, how many RSS subscribers you have, and how they're interacting with your site. Feed Analysis is a nifty site that lets you take a look at your long-term RSS numbers. Just enter the URL for your RSS feed (or any site that uses Feedburner, it doesn't have to be your site), and Feed Analysis will spit out a couple of attractive, and useful charts.
You can get a graph showing your subscriber numbers over time. You can choose views ranging from 6 months to 50 months. If Feedburner is set up to track hits on your page, you can also compare your subscribe counts with your hits. And you can even break down your average subscriber numbers by the days of the week, although we're not sure how useful that information is.
Perhaps the most intriguing bit is a note at the top of the first chart that gives you an estimate price for a banner ad on your page. While you may or may not be able to demand the listed price on your blog, it's kind of fun to enter feeds for popular blogs and see how much money they could conceivably be making off a single ad unit.
Six Apart, the company behind the Moveable Type and TypePad blogging platforms is moving into the services and advertising businesses.
Last week the company purchased Apperceptive, a company with experience developing attractive blogs and web sites. Now anyone can sign up for assistance with their own blog at the Six Apart services page. The company is offering a variety of packages covering such things as pre-launch blog design, and tune-ups for existing sites. Each package will set you back $200, and you'll need to be using TypePad to take advantage of the services, but there's also a $200 migration package if you want to switch platforms.
Six Apart is also launching an advertising network that will group similar web sites in order to attract big name advertisers. Other blog advertising networks like Federated Media do the same thing, but Federated Media typically only accepts big name blogs. It'll be interesting to see if Six Apart can open up the process to smaller web sites.
Google has taken the beta label off yet another project that is significantly younger than Gmail, which remains in beta. Google Website Optimizer has been available to AdWords customers for the past year, but now the company is making it available to anyone who wants to test out different web site layouts.
Basically, the tool lets web publishers try out different designs on their web page to see which one performs best. Want to see which ad unit is more likely to get people to click? Want to see which RSS icon is more likely to get people to subscribe to your site's feed? Google Website Optimizer will let you set up an experiment and track the results.
It looks like torrents isn't the only business the Pirate Bay is concerning itself with. First there was image hosting and now there's blogging. BayWords is the site's foray into the world of blogging services, aiming to provide a service that does not want to restrict "uncomfortable thoughts and ideas" and let people say and link to what they want (as long as it complies with Swedish law).
Apparently one of the Pirate Bay captains, Brokep, had a friend who's blog was shut down by linking to copyrighted material. This inspired him to offer this alternative, which runs on a customized version of a multi user install of Wordpress. The site plans to continue adding features, updates, and themes, and encourages users to "blog your heart out."
If you've been looking for a place to take your blog, BayWords might offer a nice home, as long as you don't mind having "myname.baywords.com" as your address. Or maybe you just want to be able to tell people that your blog is hosted by Swedish pirates. Or something like that. Unfortunately, it does look like ads will be implemented eventually to cover expenses, but information on bandwidth or other stats are not available at this point.
Six Apart has released a new Facebook Application called Blog It that lets users write blog posts directly from Facebook. That in and of itself wouldn't be particularly exciting or useful. But here's the cool part. You can also associate Blog It with your accounts on multiple blogging and micro-blogging platforms so that you can update a series of blogs from one location.
Blog It supports TypePad, Blogger, LiveJournal, Moveable Type, WordPress, Tumblr, Pownce, Vox, and Twitter. Users can choose to simply use the application to simultaneously (or individually) update their status messages on Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, or other micro-blogging services. Or you can write a full blog post, have it show up on your various blogs, and send out a quick note through Twitter, Pownce, and your Facebook news feed to let your friends know you've got a new post up.
A few days ago Yahoo! announce it was purchasing IndexTools, a powerful web analytics suite that rivals similar applications from Google and Microsoft. Now IndexTools COO reports that the plan is to offer IndexTools free of charge. That's the good news.
The bad news is that for now, the free service will only be available to existing clients and partners who accept the new terms of service. Yahoo! won't be accepting new users until it rolls out the next version of the application and it's still too early to know when that will take place.
Eventually the free service could offer some serious competition for Google Analytics, one of the most popular free tools for web publishers who want to track reader statistics and optimize their advertising.
JS-Kit provides some of the simplest tools around for adding threaded comments, post reviews, and polls to your web site. All you have to do is install two or three lines of code to your blog or web site template and JS-Kit will do the heavy lifting. On the downside, since the code basically calls up a JavaScript application from JS-Kit's servers, some portions of your site might load a little slowly, and if JS-Kit ever goes down, there goes your comment system.
Now JS-Kit has added a new Score tool that lets visitors to your site give content a thumbs up or down. You can also install a Navigator widget which you can then place in a prominent position on your site to let visitors find the most popular stories quickly.
We know, it sounds too good to be true. A plugin that can automatically upgrade your WordPress blog? That's what we thought, too, until we tried it. Successfully. Twice.
The fact that WordPress Automatic Upgrade isn't a default part of WordPress 2.5 is a crying shame! It installs just as you'd expect: you download the zip file, unzip it, upload the resulting folder into your plugins folder and activate it.
Once activated, you have a new entry on your Manage page in your blog's WordPress admin, called Automatic Upgrade. When you activate it, it will walk you through the following eight steps:
Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.
Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.
Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.
Re-activates the plugins.
There is a fully automated mode, but we weren't quite brave enough to try that. Considering that we didn't experience so much as a hiccup on the two blogs that we upgraded to 2.5 using this plugin today (one was at version 2.2.1, and the other at 2.3.0), we're more than happy to stick to the manual mode which involves occasionally clicking the next button and downloading a couple of backup files once they're ready. Plus, it's nice to know what's going on in case there's a failure and you have to recover manually, and the plugin is great about giving verbose explanations as to what is actually going on.
If you're the more astute blogging type, it probably came to your attention a week or two ago that WordPress 2.5 was released. Depending on what kind of web space maintenance type person you are, you may or may not have upgraded immediately.
Today's big admission at Download Squad is that some of us, ahem, ignored the Upgrade Now! link for the last two weeks. It wasn't that we didn't care. It wasn't that we didn't think it was important. We usually love the opportunity to click on new buttons and thingamahoosies and break them see what they do. What was it, then? Was it laziness?
Pfft. Yeah. Probably.
But hot on the heels of the 2.5 release comes lots of talk and flurry about WP 2.6. It's something that would strike a lot of users as odd. Sure, developers have roadmaps, and plans, and direction for future releases well before current releases are completely polished. It usually takes a little more than two weeks for those sorts of things to be laid out on the table.
It would strike people as odd if they hadn't already laid their eyes upon the radically different 2.5 dashboard.
Triggit is a service for bloggers that lets you add YouTube videos, Flickr images, and text-link advertisements to your page without editing HTML or even launching your blog post editor. The system takes just a few minutes to set up, and once you've done so, you can add content to your blog in seconds.
We've put together a little video showing how it works. But in a nutshell, you add a bit of JavaScript to your site, and drag a bookmarklet to your browser toolbar. When you click on the bookmarklet, a toolbar will pop up that lets you add content to your site including videos, images, and affiliate ads from sites like Amazon and Wine Zap. You can do everything right from your browser toolbar. No need to launch WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, or any other blogging client.
Content you add using Triggit might load more slowly than other material on your site. That's because your site is basically sending a request to Triggit's servers asking which content to display.
Triggit supports Firefox and Flock. While there's no love for Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer users, at least Triggit picked a browser that works on all the major operating systems.
Looking for a way to post your email address online, but don't relish the idea of spambots picking up your address and sending you email ads for Viagra and anatomical enhancement pills? ReCAPTCHA Mailhide provides a simple tool for obscuring your email address.
All you have to do is enter your email address (and hope that the folks behind Mailhide aren't doing anything nefarious with it), and reCAPTCHA Mailhide will spit out a URL and some HTML code. Both take you to a page where you have to solve a CAPTCHA test like the one shown above to reveal an email address.
You can either provide a hyperlink to the URL, or embed the HTML code in your page. If you go the HTML route, visitors to your website will see a partial email address that looks something like b...@downloadsquad.com. When they click on the "..." a window will pop up asking them to solve the CAPTCHA. In other words, people don't have to leave your web site to get your email address. They just have to be able to decipher hard-to-read text.
The few, the proud, the Download Squad. Think you have what it takes to join us in 
The WordPress team has released 
We know, it sounds too good to be true. A plugin that can automatically upgrade your WordPress blog? That's what we thought, too, until we tried it. Successfully. Twice.
If you're the more astute blogging type, it probably came to your attention a week or two ago that 
