By now most of the WordPress users must be aware of the new version that is available for download. I was having fever so I could not blog about it earlier (I am getting better now).

The new version (WordPress 2.2) includes over two hundred bug fixes and new features like Widgets integration and infinite comment stream that brings in another comment in the background when you delete or spam a comment on your Edit Comments page.

Continue reading ‘WordPress 2.2 Released’

Few days back I had mentioned the Top 5 WordPress plugins that help increase comments on a blog. Here are some more plugins that can help.

• WP Ajax Edit Comments: This plugin (for WP 2.1+) allows users and admins alike to edit comments on a post. Users can edit their own comments for a period specified by the Admin, and Admins can edit all post comments. This plugin can help reduce typos on reader comments and at same time encourage more comments from them.
• Get Recent Comments: This highly configurable plugin displays the most recent comments in the sidebar. You can make the plugin to link the recent commenter’s site along with an excerpt of their comment. Linking to the commenter’s site can encourage them to comment even more.
• Live Comment Preview: This plugin will display a live preview of your readers comments as they type. To install the plugin, just activate it!
• Comment Quicktags: This plugin inserts a quicktag toolbar on the blog comment form that will help your commenter’s to easily make thier comment in bold or italics, or to insert links.
• MyAvatars: This plugin displays the reader’s MyBlogLog avatars besides their comments. This may not help in increasing comments much, but readers may like seeing their avatars on your blog

Do you know any more plugins that can help increase comments?

Most blog readers are lurkers, inorder to encourage them to comment and make your blog more active try installing the WordPress Plugins listed below:

1. Show Top Commentators: This Plugin encourages discussion from your readers by displaying their name (linked to their site without a nofollow tag if desired) and number of comments on the sidebar. The Plugin also gives you the option to reset the list every hour, day, week, month or year.
2. Brian’s Threaded Comments: This plugin adds a ‘Reply to this comment’ link to every comment. When you use the reply link, your comment is placed directly under the comment you replied to. This plugin helps increase comments, makes it easy for people to reply to comments and prevents readers from scrolling down to look for answers to their questions.
3. Subscribe to Comments: This plugin allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments. This encourages readers to come back and take part in the conversation.
4. Comment relish: This plugin sends a thank-you email to your blog’s first time commentators. This encourages them to come back again and comment regularly.
5. Link Love: This plugin turns off nofollow for all commenters who have made at least 10 comments. The number of comments is configurable by changing a variable in the plugin.

Continue reading ‘Top 5 WordPress Plugins That Help Increase Comments’

There is a security update release now available for download for both the 2.1 and 2.0 branches of WordPress and is highly recommend for all users of both branches.

These releases include fixes for several publicly known minor XSS issues, one major XML-RPC issue, and a proactive full sweep of the WordPress codebase to protect against future problems.

These frequent updates are beginning to annoy me. I guess I am lazy to update

SEO Title Tag is my favorite Search Engine Optimization plugin for WordPress and I recommend all WordPress users to install it. The plugin allows you to easily optimize the title tags across your WordPress-powered blog (for not just the single post pages and homepage) and since Title tags are one of the most important on-page factors for search engine optimization, this plugin can be very helpful.

Continue reading ‘SEO Title Tag 2.0′

The robots.txt is a simple text file used to tell search engine bots which pages on your web site should be crawled and indexed. Neil Patel wrote a post on the Link Building Blog that on his personal blog he created a robots.txt file so he could remove any junk pages and duplicate content from the search engines. After doing this, his web site traffic went up 11.3%.

Continue reading ‘Create A Robots.txt File And Increase Your Search Engine Rankings’

If you upgraded to WordPress 2.1.1 in the past 3-4 days, download the new version (2.1.2) and update your blog again because your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker!

Only WordPress 2.1.1 seems to have been affected, so if you have not upgraded to WordPress 2.1.1 you should be fine. If your blog is running 2.1.1, please upgrade immediately and do a full overwrite of your old files.

For further details check out the WordPress blog.

MyAvatars is a plugin for WordPress that displays the readers MyBlogLog avatars besides their comments. In my opinion MyAvatars is much better than Gravatars as I think most of my commenters use MyBlogLog rather than Gravatars.

To test this, I activated Gravatars for some time on this blog and found that very few commenters were using Gravatars. When I activated MyAvatars, I was happy to see most of my readers faces

MyAvatars is easy to install, just download the file myavatars.zip, extract and copy it in your plugin directory preserving the folder name and then activate the plugin.

You will then have to edit your comments.php file and add the following code inside the comment’s loop

<?php if(function_exists("MyAvatars")) MyAvatars(); ?>

The disadvantage of using this plugin is that it can increase your page loading time by loading all those MyBlogLog Avatars

Permalinks Migration is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website and even without affecting your search engine rankings.

It does this by generating a “301 Redirect” or a Permanent Redirect when a user or spider visits your site through old permalinks and redirects them to the new permalinks of the same post.

I found this plugin via Everton’s blog who recently changed his permalinks using the Permalinks Migration plugin from something like this

www.connectedinternet.co.uk/2005/12/05/652/

to a better Permalink Structure like this

http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk/2005/12/05/post-title/

A good permalinks structure will help you improve your search engine rankings, so if you currently use a bad permalink structure like

http://www.example.com/?p=57

you can safely change your permalink structure to a better one using Permalinks Migration without fear of losing your traffic and pagerank

WordPress 2.1.1 has been released with about 30 bug fixes, mostly minor things around encoding, XML-RPC, the object cache, and HTML code and Version 2.0.9 includes a security update.

Download WordPress 2.1.1 from here and version 2.0.9 from here.

Continue reading ‘WordPress 2.1.1 and 2.0.9 Released’