Disqus offers web publishers the ability to spruce up their comments sections with advanced features including threaded comments, avatars, and ratings. Perhaps the most significant advantage Disqus offers over the default Blogger, Wordpress, TypePad or Moveable Type comments features is the fact that users can sign up for one Disqus account and leave comments on thousands of blogs and web sites.
There's just one problem (for web publishers): Up until now, user comments were stored on Disqus servers, not on your web page. That means search engines didn't notice any information left in comments on your site, which could hurt your page rank. Today, Disqus took the first step to address this shortcoming with a new Wordpress plugin.
The new plugin is much more tightly integrated with Wordpress than the old version. First up, the comments are now indexable by search engines since they are stored both on your site and on Disqus servers. Second, it's now easier to import and export comments. And third, you can now moderate comments using the Wordpress Admin interface. No need to login to a separate web page. Improved plugins for other blog platforms should be coming soon.
The Disqus web site has also been redesigned to make it easier to navigate through comments. It's also easier to follow comments left by a particular user.
If you're a good, upstanding netizen, odds are you have accounts with half a dozen social networking service or more. You may only use one or two services, but if your friends or colleagues pressured you into signing up for LinkedIn, Plurk, or Pownce, you probably filled out an online profile before promptly forgetting about it. And now that you've moved, changed jobs, or gotten married, the profile is woefully out of date. Atomkeep can help.
Atomkeep lets you synchronize your profile information across more than 20 different services including Digg, YouTube, Blogger, Wordpress, Jobster, Facebook, and Twitter. You can choose from a huge list of category elements to fill out and when you hit the sync button Atomkeep will send that information to your social networks. You can sync with all of your networks at once or just select the ones you want to update from a list.
The coolest part of the service is the fact that you don't need to fill out your Atomkeep profile at all if you don't want to. It can import your profile from another service and merge it with your profile from other locations. So if your Facebook profile is already pretty complete but your Last.fm profile could use some work, Atomkeep can import the former and use the information to fill in the blanks on the latter.
Without a doubt, WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms currently available for people who want to install and maintain their content management system on their own server. I mean, what's not to love? Free, powerful, and easy to use - it's the whole package.
But for all of its positive attributes, WordPress certainly doesn't get everything right. Take, for example, the email notifications that the blogging platform generates. They're ugly, right? Full URLs make for a muddy reading experience.
To be honest, I really wasn't aware how ugly those emails were until I saw what a difference the Clean Notifications plugin makes. It tidies up and re-arranges the information in notification emails to make them much easier on the eyes. Give it a try, and let us know what you think.
Only a few months after its last major release, the WordPress crew has just unleashed WordPress 2.6 into the wild. While the changes with this update aren't as visually sweeping as those ushered in with 2.5, but they do add some great new options and optimizations. WordPress encourages users to upgrade, as the old 2.5 branch will no-longer be maintained, and they have outlined the upgrade process here or you can use the fantastic automatic-update plugin.
We've been playing around with 2.6 on our local installs since the first beta was released, and we think this is a very, very solid release.
The WordPress team posted video showing off some of the new features:
Timelines are a great way to provide an overview of events. But what's even better is a timeline that generates content automatically based on information you probably already have.
Dipity takes automated timeline creation to a new level. If you have (and quite frankly who doesn't) a Blogger, Flickr, WordPress, YouTube, Twitter or any of the other supported social networking site just enter in your user name, URL or an RSS feed and dipity will do the rest.
You can view your timeline in years, months, weeks or even one day. Dipity also let's you rate your events so that those with higher ratings are displayed more prominently than others with lower ratings.
You're free to embed your timeline on your own site or list them on dipity's searchable directory.
If you ever wanted to see your online life sprawled out in front of you, dipity is one way to go about it.
Back before the days of FriendFeed, it was pretty common to see people post things like, "Just wrote a new blog post. What do you think?" to Twitter. That's a good way of getting your link out there, but if anybody actually wanted to answer your question, they'd probably do it in the comments, not in Twitter. Chirrup is a way of tweeting back at someone and commenting at the same time. A neat trick!
Installing Chirrup is as simple as uploading a bit of PHP or installing it as a Wordpress plugin. Most webhosts support this, and the HowTo on the Chirrup site has straightforward instructions for getting it working. Once it's set up, Chirrup will grab any replies to you that contain a URL from your site, and associate the right comments with the right pages. It also knows how to unpack TinyURLs, which eases character-count concerns considerably.
If you love writing, but hate the grunt work of blogging - like inserting relevant links, tags, and images, Zemanta might be for you. It's available as an add-on for Firefox or Internet Explorer, and a plug-in for Wordpress or Movable Type, and it automatically adds some useful stuff to your blog posts in progress on most of the major blogging platforms. It suggests links and applies them to the relevant words in your post with one click, and it also provides tags and a gallery of Creative-Commons-licensed Flickr photos you can drop in.
Zemanta currently supports Wordpress, Movable Type, LiveJournal, TypePad and Blogger, so the majority of blogs should be able to make use of it. It might be too blunt an instrument if you've got a really specific linking scheme going on at your blog, but for a post like this one, it came in handy: it automatically linked the word Zemanta to zemanta.com. Hey, we were going to do that by hand anyway. More importantly, it also grabs links to stories from places like CNN, the New York Times, and Technorati.
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.
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.
BlogBackupOnline plans to end its public beta next week with the launch of version 1.5. Most existing users won't notice much difference. BlogBackupOnline will continue to scan your site daily and perform a complete backup of your Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, or other blog for free. But some customers with larger blogs will be prompted to sign up for a paid subscription.
The cutoff point is 5MB. While this might not sound like a lot, in our tests, we managed to backup nearly 400 blog posts while using less than 4MB. Users who need more storage space will have the option of purchasing 50MB for $49.95 per year or 1GB for $99.95 per year.
Users who haven't hit the 5MB point yet will be upgraded to BlogBackupOnline 1.5 automatically when the new version is launched. Anyone who's already over the 5MB limit will get a 6 week grace period to decide whether to upgrade.
Automattic, the company behind the WordPress blogging platform, is becoming known for buying up some of the most creative WordPress hacks out there. They've already snapped up the global avatar service, Gravatar, and added a handful of quality themes by Chris Pearson to their selection of default templates. Now Automattic is taking WordPress into the arena of social networking by hiring designer Andy Peatling and acquiring his BuddyPress plugins.
There's a placeholder page at BuddyPress.com right now, with the Automattic logo and a simple description of what BuddyPress does: transforming "a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform." For an example of what that might look like, you can check out Peatling's work on chickspeak.com, built on BuddyPress. If you're a designer who likes the power and flexibility of WordPress, but you need to get outside the basic blog and put together a full-on social network, user profiles and all, this could be a great solution.
Couldn't make it to Future of Web Apps in Miami? No problem, we've got you covered. Wordpress.com's Matt Mullenweg just left the stage after dropping mad science on what it takes to scale a major league web application.
There's no way we could summarize everything Matt said on the how and why behind scaling Wordpress.com but, here are a few (rough) notes:
Do the easy things first. For example, before throwing more hardware at your application, try building a proxy wall with Squid.
And we're back! After a brief hiatus (sorry about that!), the Squadcast returns, this time with tips on how to trick out your WordPress install to make it as "bloggerrific" as possible. Grant and Christina catch up with uber-WordPresser Alex King to talk about why so many bloggers swear by WordPress.
The Squadcast's The Five takes a look at five of Download Squad's favorite WordPress plugins. Download this episode (mp4) (iPod, iPhone, Nano, AppleTV, Quicktime, VLC)
WordPress users might have noticed an upgrade notification in their Dashboard's today. This version, dubbed WordPress 2.3.3, has been released as an urgent security update.
The problem? Well for blogs with registration enabled, a hole in the XML-RPC implementation was found that could allow a user to edit the posts of other users on that blog.
The WordPress team has two update solutions. If you just want to update the xmlrpc.php file, you can download it here and import it directly to your main WordPress directory (overwriting the file that is in its place now). If you want the full 2.3.3 update, which includes a few minor bug fixes in addition to the XML-RPC exploit, download it here and follow the usual upgrade protocol.
Additionally, if you use the WP-Forum plugin, be aware that it is being actively exploited as a target for SQL injections. Please disable and delete the plugin until a fix is released.
Only a few months after its 
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 
WordPress users might have noticed an upgrade notification in their Dashboard's today. This version, dubbed 
