I’m sure that many of you have seen that Wordpress 2.6 has been released, whether it be from other blogs you read or that nagging little message that the Wordpress Dashboard displays every time your version is slightly outdated.  I’m sure you have also heard about all the good things that come with this upgrade.  If not, I’ll go over them real quick…

WordPress 2.6 Upgrades:

1. Post Revisioning - If you’re writing a nice, long article on something, I take it you save your post from time to time to prevent you from losing it should something bad occur.  Lets say you save the article at point one, then work on it to point two, where you save it again.  Then you go to point three where it is saved again.  By the time you reach point three, you look over your work, and really don’t like where it’s going or how it’s written.  You would like to start back at point one.  With previous versions of Wordpress, this would be impossible.  Well, not anymore in 2.6!
2. Gears - No doubt the Wordpress admin panel is very user friendly and offers dozens of neat features to site owners - however in version 2.6, the admin panel is getting a nice update.  WordPress 2.6 makes use of Google Gears when available to speedup and cache static files that are loaded every time you visit your WordPress admin panel.  This will undoubtedly make your posting time quicker and more efficient.
3. Multiple Check Boxes - Though it seems like such a minor thing, this has been something that many Wordpress users have asked for, the ability to select multiple check boxes in the admin panel (using Windows ‘Shift’ key).  You could select multiple posts to remove or select a few plugins to activate or delete at once.
4. Config File - The wordpress wp-cofig file keeps all of your database information in it and Wordpress calls to it anytime it needs to connect to your server.  Though it’s really not a problem to have this file in your root directory, Wordpress version 2.6 allows you to move it around to anywhere you want.  I guess this would give you a better sense of security.
5. Theme Previewing - You can now preview what your site would look like with a specific theme applied before you actually go and apply it.  This I can see will be very useful iin many ways.
6. Other Small Updates:

• Customizable default avatars
• Plugins grouped by ‘Active’ and ‘Not Active’
• More ‘Press This’ features
• External JavaScript upgrades to TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI

Official Wordpress 2.6 Video

With all of these benefits, anyone should feel a certain want to upgrade right away.  I usually wait a few weeks for them to get all the bugs out and release 2.6.1, but if you feel you want to upgrade now, let me direct you to this page where you can find an article on some great plugins that make updating Wordpress a breeze.  But HOLD THE PHONE…

Should I Upgrade Right Away?

If you were to ask me this question, I’d probably answer ‘No’.  I’d base that answer off of the fact that it is usually a good idea to let others test out new programs and updates and let the developers fix all the bugs and glitches that these users find.  But with version 2.6, I have another reason.  I have seen (via Digg and other popular-news sites) that there are reports of people having their database wiped clean after installing version 2.6.  Other reports include plugins killing themselves, notably very popular ones, such as the ‘All-In-One SEO Pack’ and ‘Top Commentators’.

If I were you, I’d give the developers time to fix up 2.6 before I upgrade.  I know I don’t feel like having my entire site deleted just for the hell of being able to select multiple check boxes .

Hope you found this article helpful!

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Hey there everyone.

Notice anything new about the site?

I hope to God you said yes…

Yeah, I added a new flash banner to the site, which only appears on the homepage. It features an animated and compact version of the main header with one of my rock characters, Green, going on a “stroll” through New York City. The .swf uses cookies to tell if you’ve already seen the animation through, and if you have, it won’t play every other time that you visit the site. So if you want to see it again, just hit the ‘Replay” button! I think it came out pretty well.

Alrighty. Time to get on topic. Story time. So sit back and be prepared to be told a story.

I woke up yesterday morning and went online at my usual time of around 8am. I usually check up on my daily comics and favorite blogs at this time. This is also the time that I usually write ForTheLoses’ daily post.

Anyway, I woke up and went onto ForTheLose to find that there was already a very noticeable increase in traffic, especially for so early in the day. I didn’t think much of it and wrote my post for that day. I then went on with my day with stuff like taking a shower and eating breakfast, you know, those things. I came back to the site around 11am to find that the traffic was already past the daily average for the entire day. This is when I became curious.

I checked out the Wordpress Stats plugin I have installed and what I saw shocked me (in a good way). Apparently, a page on the popular social media network StumbleUpon was sending tons of traffic my way. I was pretty baffled, but at the same time, pretty freakin’ happy. I turned to making my own account on StumbleUpon and searching for where exactly all these users were finding my site from. (I found the url to the stumbled ForTheLose.org page, which is here.) What I couldn’t figure out (and never did) was why yesterday? I saw that ForTheLose.org was stumbled 3 months ago with not even a single hit being returned. Then, all of a sudden, boom!… 500+ unique visits in one day… Maybe one of you guys can let me in on how exactly this works.

After I figured out how I was getting all of this traffic, I began optimizing the site a little bit. I had already uploaded the new flash banner on the home page (which if you ask me, I did on the perfect day… it gave a good first impression to all the new visitors). If you haven’t noticed, I also added shnazzy Digg It and Stumble It buttons to the bottom of each post to help you guys favorite the content you find on the site. I then went around the site and spent around 30 minutes stumbling and digging all of the posts on the site. Yeah, it was a long and boring process, but I got it done.

At 6pm when I checked up on the site again, I noticed there were 14 people online at the same time. For such a small website, I thought that was really cool. As I looked over the site and its pages, I noticed that that number grew. I became intrigued and kept refreshing the page and taking screenshots. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The below pic illustrates what I saw.

That’s right. There were 50 people on ForTheLose.org at one time. This is the point in time that I became aware of the fact that I was salivating all over myself. I snapped out of it and looked at Wordpress Stats again. Not only did ForTheLose.org already have 300+ hits from the original stumbled article, but it also had 90+ hits from one of the articles I stumbled that morning! I refreshed a few times and noticed that 90 quickly entering the 100’s. Then then 110’s. I couldn’t believe that all of this traffic was from two posts that had been submitted to a social network. It was really unbelieveable.

By the end of the day, ForTheLose had received over 840 unique visits. I couldn’t be more happy at this outcome. This is great publicity for the site and I hope many of the people that visited the site yesterday have bookmarked it or even subscribed to the RSS Feed.

I started Google’ing around, looking for similar “incidents” on other blogs. I found quite a few articles on the subject, and have concluded that this is a semi-normal occurrence. If you write quality content and put care into your work, your viewers will promote your stuff on their own. Though, it is reasonable to say that pictures and videos are the types of media that get more attention then posts and news articles. Nonetheless, this is how so many people find success with social networks. I can tell you this whole experience definitely made me rethink my ideas on sites like StumbleUpon and Digg.

I hope you guys enjoyed this post and have learned something from it. If you really liked it, why don’t you stumble it ?

Stumbleupon.com can create such a surge of traffic to your site, you’ll think something is broken. That’s what happened to me the first time someone stumbled one of my pages.

- DebtPrison.net

If you liked this post, don't miss out on other good ones in the future, bookmark our RSS Feed. Also, if you're feeling kind, Digg this post or give it a thumbs up with the StumbleUpon toolbar or by using the buttons below. I appreciate any help you guys give out!

As someone who has become very fond of the Wordpress interface after creating numerous themes for the CMS, I’ve come across many-a-tips from the professionals. (Yes, Wordpress professionals. Got beef?) They all have their opinions on what plugins they could live and couldn’t live without. I being the bored curious little beaver that I am have tried out most of these plugins to test how efficient they really are. I’ve finally settled down on my own “Best Plugin” list, and here it is.

Akismet

This plugin is probably number one on everyone’s list. I can’t tell you how great this freakin’ little thing works. Askimet, once activated, works in the background quickly scanning all of the comments made to your blog and concluding if they are spam or not. So far with this small blog, its blocked 30+ spam comments with 100% accuracy. I don’t know what I’d do without it. It comes with every download of wordpress, you just have to activate it.

Download: http://akismet.com/

Wordpress Stats

This is a very useful tool for the aspiring web developer. Wordpress Stats lets you track almost every aspect of your site that you could imagine. It shows you real-time unique visits to your site as well as your all-time most popular pages and posts. It also displays yesterday and today’s most popular pages and posts as well as the search terms that are used to find your site, ranked by most commonly used. It shows you where people are being referred to your site from and even what links users are clicking on your blog. With this knowledge and a little tweaking to your blog, you should be able to improve user-friendliness on your site and effectively increase your number of hits.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/

OIO Publisher

I made a great blog post about this a few weeks back, but I’ll give a quick summary here too. This plugin is for those of you that monetize your wordpress blogs. By installing this plugin and getting it set up correctly, all you have to do is sit back and watch advertisers buy ad spots on your site directly… you don’t have to do anything. This plugin sets up a little “store” in your site where advertisers use a purchase form to buy ad space on your site. It takes care of billing the customers and offers them subscriptions, so you can keep your advertisers for much longer than normal. It does cost $37, but if you google around, you’ll find a coupon code for it somewhere. I spent only $20 on it, but it paid for itself twice over in less than a week.

Download: http://www.oiopublisher.com/

Most Popular Posts

This is a really overlooked and nifty little plugin. Scenario- you write an epic-as-hell post. The people love it. It’s driving all this attention to your blog. Time goes by. You make more posts. This epic-as-hell post is now sitting on page 6, rotting. No one knows it exists anymore. The post slowly contemplates suicide as it moves to page 7. All your hard work put into this post is now all for not.

Sadly, this story is all too common in the blogging world. Great posts that bloggers make, once they exist the front page, are lost forever. That’s where this plugin comes in. Install it and put the widget in your sidebar and you are good to go. It keeps all of your best posts right there in plain sight for everyone to see. Never again will you lose out on all the hits you should be getting because a few of your great posts aren’t frontpaged anymore.

Download: http://www.macalua.com/2007/02/01/top-posts-by-category-plugin/

All-In-One SEO Pack

This is a pretty useful tool for those of you that want to increase attention to your site. (SEO = Search Engine Optimization.) So many blogs are not getting the publicity they need in google searches because their website isn’t properly set up to be effeciently crawled by google spiders. They lose out on a countless number of hits because they don’t rank well in the eys of search engines, and thus are usually displayed on page 5 or 6, when, if they had proper SEO, they might be on page 1 or 2. This is a very useful tool and is very easy to set up.

Download: http://semperfiwebdesign.com/

In other news, expect a tiny, itsy, teeny, wittle update to ForTheLose’s looks a little later today.

Have a great Wednesday!

If you liked this post, don't miss out on other good ones in the future, bookmark our RSS Feed. Also, if you're feeling kind, Digg this post or give it a thumbs up with the StumbleUpon toolbar or by using the buttons below. I appreciate any help you guys give out!