The recent shutdown and reopening of URL-shrinking service Tr.im drew a lot of attention to one of the most troubling questions about short URL sites: when one of them shuts down, what happens to the links? To avoid worrying about what a URL shortener might do with your links, you might want to scope out la petite url, a Wordpress plugin for creating tiny links using your own domain name.

La petite url creates links to your Wordpress pages using 5 lowercase characters, something like yoururl.com/nfpqd. This way, your domain name stays in the URL, letting people know which site they're clicking through to. You can also automatically display a short link next to each post, making it easier for readers to spread your links. The disadvantage? Unless you have a tiny domain name, your shrunken URL is going to be significantly longer than the ones you get from ow.ly, bit.ly or tr.im.

For non-programmers, creating web forms to collect information from a website can be a real hassle. For example, what if you wanted to put a form on your blog to allow people to contact you, without exposing your email address to the nasties lurking online?

If your blog is on WordPress and you're looking for a solution to this problem, give Cforms II a try. Cforms II is a WordPress plugin that instantly gives your blog very full-featured form creation and management capabilities. Out of the box it comes with a few pre-configured forms like the previously-mentioned contact form, as well as a newsletter subscription form, tell-a-friend form, online booking form, and a sign-up form, among other variations of contact forms.

Cforms II is oddly hosted on what at first appears to be a blog supporting a cook book. Delicious Days is actually a blog run by a couple, Nicky and Oliver. Nicky is a foodie, and the site appears to belong primarily to her, and Oliver is the techie, so it seems likely that Cforms II and the two other WordPress plugins hosted at Delicious Days are his handy work.

Have you ever wished that you could have someone edit your blog posts for typos, spelling errors and grammatical mistakes? Most of us aren't lucky enough to have someone dedicated to catching and fixing our every mistake.

Rather than asking one person to edit for you, why not effectively enlist the help of all of your blog's readers? That's what the folks at Brave New Code figured, anyway, when they decided to create the gooseGrade WordPress plugin.

The concept is simple: install the gooseGrade plugin on your site. Then when readers are visiting your site and they see something that could be corrected, they click on a Grade This button on your site and enter the correction they believe should be made. As the site's owner you have the final say as to what changes to apply, so this isn't a tool that is going to let people insert spam all over your site.

While the concept is interesting, I have doubts that people will take the time to edit someone else's work online, in particular I have doubts that people will take the time to understand that they even have the capability of suggesting edits. This tool would have to be baked-in to a major blogging platform like WordPress.com or TypePad before I think enough people would understand what is going on to actually make use of it.

I kind of wish that it was, actually, because the idea is appealing. It's just going to take a lot for this idea to reach the critical mass it would need to become successful.

[via Panache]

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.

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:

1. Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.
2. Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.
3. Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it.
4. Puts the site in maintenance mode.
5. De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.
6. Upgrades wordpress files.
7. Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.
8. 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.