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wordpress

Significantly Speed Up Your WordPress Blog in 9 Easy Steps

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Improve WordPress SpeedYour blog’s loading speed affects more than just user experience but is now a factor used by google to determine an overall ranking for your site. The reasoning is clear: according to Google and other search engines’ goals, which is to provide the most relevant search results from sites that offer the best user experience. Site speed is definitely something we cannot not ignore and should take advantage of every opportunity to improve.

Here are 9 effective techniques and tips that can be easily implemented to make your blog lightning fast.

1. Disable Unused Plugins

This is one of the easiest things we can do to reduce load times. I know many of us get carried away trying out the thousands of cool plugins available but we need to bear in mind the fact that they use system resources. Assess whether you need the plugins that you have installed and determine if they necessarily serve a useful purpose. Also, deactivated plugins that are not deleted can possibly create loopholes and back doors that hackers can exploit so delete them and maintain security for your blog. [Read more…] about Significantly Speed Up Your WordPress Blog in 9 Easy Steps

Automattic Launches VaultPress, Back Up Service for Self-Hosted Blogs

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Automattic has announced its new service that is aim to help self-hosted WordPress blog owners ensure that their blog properties are safe and secure. The new service called VaultPress is an online backup service built on the Automattic grid which in case you’re not aware is serving more than 10 billion WordPress.com blogs and 250 million monthly visitors.

VaultPress would ensure that your blogs and sites are completely secure no matter what happens to the server where it is hosted.  The service will secure your plugins, themes, comments, posts revisions  and of course every bit of content of your WordPress blogs.

Despite the complexity of what it can do, using VaultPress will be surprisingly easy. It’s actually your usual WordPress plugin that you can install on your blogs.  And you can always add additional blogs easily anytime you need to.

And once you get VaultPress running, it will continously monitors and stores updates to your blogs and sites. Everything that you do – write, edit, and upload will be simultaneously reflected in your VaultPress backup.

Sounds wonderful, right? Unfortunately, VaultPress will be offered as a Premium service.  Monthly fee is expected to be around $10.  But hey, it’s not really a big sum of money considering that it will safely secure that your blogs will always be online.

VaultPress is about to go on close beta state. If you want to be part of the beta testers, you may sign up here.

Will you register your blog on VaultPress once it goes public? Are you willing to pay for it?

WordPress for iPhone 2.3 Now Supports Geotagging for WordPress.com Blogs

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WordPress has just released version 2.3 of its mobile application for iPhone. Biggest new feature is geotagging support for WordPress.com hosted blogs via a very intuitive interface. This means that you can now add geographic location to each and every post that you are going to publish on your WordPress.com blog.

Unfortunately for self-hosted WordPress blog, the feature is not activated yet. But you can still geotag your posts and it will be saved, possibly for display later on when a plugin to provide geotagging display is enabled for self-hosted WordPress blogs.

In addition to geotagging feature, the new WordPress for iPhone app also comes with a couple of improvements on user interface.  The bug on “more” tag was fixed and it now allows you to load more posts and pages in excess of the default number  of posts allowed as specified in your blog settings.

Incidentally, the WordPress for iPhone folks are excited to report that in only months since they have released the app, it now has 250,000 download, up from the mere 20,000 downloads it got in November 2009. Quite an achievement indeed, although if only all of the WordPress.com bloggers have their iPhone and iPod Touch and will do mobile blogging, then that number would shoot up some more.

Anyway, the new WordPress for iPhone app version 2.3 was supposed to be available here. But I have no luck in finding it from both my country’s Apps Store nor at the U.S. App Store. Did you get it?

BuddyPress Now Available for All WordPress Installation

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BuddyPress, a social networking add-on that previously worked only with WordPress MU installation is now available for all WordPress installs.  I’m really excited about this development as I’ve always wanted to try out BuddyPress for a long time now.

With BuddyPress 1.2 on your standard WordPress install, you can now start letting your blog readers create extended profiles, display activity streams, discussion forums, private messaging and groups within individual posts on your blogs.  What’s good about BuddyPress 1.2 is the fact that you can turn off some of its features which you don’t like to have.

Integrating WordPress on your current blog installs is easily done as well. It only takes three steps which you can follow here. After installing, you  may need to tweak it a bit to work well with your blog’s overall theme.

In addition to the features we mentioned BuddyPress also now includes permalinks for each action in the activity streams. Likewise, users will now be able to “favorite” activity items as well as send @replies to other users. Truly, a powerful social networking feature.

For requirements, you need to have at least WordPress 2.9.1 or better yet upgrade your install to 2.9.2 if you haven’t done so yet.

Kevin Rose Cooks Up New Blogging Platform, “Tiny”

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WordPress has long established itself as the go-to blogging platform, and with good reason. It is free. It is easy to use. It has a multitude of features. Newbies don’t have to be so tech savvy to use it. Experts have the freedom to play around with it as much as they want. Sites such as WP Themes have a plethora of themes any blogger (of any level) can pick from. It really is an all-in-one platform.
Tiny

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Then again, when something has been dominant for a long time, new ideas often crop up to disrupt the scene. And this might just be what Kevin Rose of Digg fame might be on to. [Read more…] about Kevin Rose Cooks Up New Blogging Platform, “Tiny”