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Weekly Digest: Hating Web Hosts, Blog Herald WordPress Wednesdays, and WordPress Plugins

Welcome to the second from , a one-stop buffet of tips, tricks, and techniques on WordPress and blogging. If you missed it, check out last week’s edition.

Released once a week, to add the new category to your feed, you can use this link:

RSS - Lorelle on WordPress Weekly Digest Category Feed http://lorelle.wordpress.com/tag/weekly-digest/feed/

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What’s Happening with Lorelle on WordPress

This past week’s articles from included:

I Hate My Web Host got a lot of attention this week. I’m so thankful. I really hate one of my web hosts, not this blog’s host, . I need to make a change for my other blogs. The biggest gripe I have against them is their too low limit on database usage. I overload the database after publishing a post. There’s no reason. The tips and answers I’ve received will help me decide how to choose my next web host. I want one that I can be proud to shout its name out loud and highly recommend.

Next week, I will put together a summary of their recommendations, so if you have some advice on finding a perfect web host for a WordPress blog, one with a lot of options, flexibility, and great customer support, let me get your input now so it can be added to the recommendation list.

WordPress Plugins: Code Marathon Party and Plugins I Wanted Released swung up into the most popular post of the day on WordPress.com as people flocked to find out about the Code Marathon Party, which was probably not exactly what they expected. Travis of REM State decided to have a code marathon party over the weekend, inviting friends and fans to cheer him on through 48 hours of updating his WordPress Plugins, including one of my favorites, In-Series WordPress Plugin for connecting articles in a series. He got a ton of visitors stopping virtually by to keep his spirits up and to help him through the long weekend of code. What an amazing and supportive community we have in WordPress.

The response from the WordPress community on my request for WordPress Plugins I wanted at the end of my month long series featuring WordPress Plugins has also been amazing. The following new WordPress Plugins have been developed to improve the handling and capabilities of your WordPress blog:

With this much enthusiasm for WordPress Plugins, I may consider coordinating a week or month long event later this summer to help a variety of WordPress Plugin authors update and release new WordPress Plugins with a WordPress Plugin Marathon. What do you think? Want to get in on the planning? Let me know.

My post on a WordPress Thumbnail Size Limit Hack was extremely popular this week, but it served a very small demographics. It was for those publishing very high resolution, extremely large images. Since most people do not deal with such huge images, I wondered why the traffic was so high on this post.

My guess is that people thought this would be a “fix” for automatically creating thumbnails of the images they upload. WordPress 2+ currently automatically creates thumbnails with much improvement in the latest version. There are also many WordPress Plugins for images which also offer a variety of thumbnail control and options, including thumbnail sizing. Maybe they were looking for a better way of creating thumbnails on their blog. Is this an issue for you? Should I write more on this topic?

SOBCon07 iconThe Successful and Outstanding Blogger Conference is also getting a lot of attention, with people flying in from all over the country. I will be finalizing my plans next week regarding my attendance and involvement in the conference in Chicago, May 11-12. It’s slated to be an amazing full day of workshops by top blogging and web professionals on community building and new interactive technologies to help you build your blog and your blogging business. Space is very limited for this unusual and exciting conference. Will you be there?

Most Popular Articles on Lorelle on WordPress

The most popular articles on my blog this week were:

New Arrivals on Lorelle on WordPress

Which bloggers and sites are bringing readers to Lorelle on WordPress?

For my month long series featuring WordPress Plugins, I had collected about two years of posts published by WordPress users which described their favorite WordPress Plugins. My casual research showcased your favorite WordPress Plugins, but Staska took this further and actually visited every one of those Plugin reviews and created a spreadsheet listing users Top 30 WordPress Plugins in Blogosphere. Thanks, Staska!

Download Squad picked up Staska’s list and wrote The Top 30 WordPress Plugins List Made By You reference both of our lists.

DigiZen: Un Blogfesor Aprendiendo wrote “Serie de Lorelle Sobre Plugins Para WordPress” about my WordPress Plugin series, which brought in a lot of Spanish readers from around the world.

BloggingPro picked up on my hunt for a new web host and added some questions I wish I’d asked from my readers on what makes a good web host a best one:

While I am sure everyone has a recommendation on which host to pick, I am more interested in why people pick a certain host. Did you deal with their customer service early on, and have a great experience? Were you given a test account? What made you pick a host, other than cost?

Smashing Magazine wrote “83 Beautiful WordPress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen” and included a resource link to my article on Designing a WordPress Theme From Scratch.

This isn’t the first time something I’ve written caught the eye of Smashing Magazine. Last fall they wrote Web 2.0: Buzz-Monitoring and Tracking and pointed visitors to the popular 100s of Resources for Finding Content for Your Blog. Smashing Magazine has become a huge traffic driving blog on the web with great information on web design. In addition to their other great topics, check out their Free Font of the Week.

Want to know where my readers are visiting from my blog? The most frequented external links from this blog this week are:

Other Exciting Lorelle on WordPress News

My first guest article on Problogger was Blog Translations: The Next Web Frontier, about the issues of blog translations and how far ahead and behind the technology of translation is on the web. The next article is scheduled for April 2, 2007.

I have several other guest blogging gigs lined up and will be announcing them soon. I’m also thinking of having guest bloggers here on Lorelle on WordPress. Any recommendations? Who would you like to hear from on this blog?

WordCamp 2007 will be July 21-22 in San Francisco for fans and developers of WordPress. There is now an official page but there aren’t any specifics yet. It should be coming soon. This is the second annual meeting and WordPress users will be attending from all over the world, possibly even me. The turnout is expected to be at least double, if not triple, from last year’s event, so make sure you make arrangements as soon as possible.

I am so excited with the growing number of WordPress groups and meetups around the world. If you are involved or know of one, get them listed on my WordPress Events Page. I list the WordPress events I find in my WordPress Wednesday on the Blog Herald, too.

Blog Herald Columns

I’ve been writing a daily column for the Blog Herald for a few months, and this week, Quick Online Tips called attention to the WordPress Wednesday news I publish every Wednesday on the Blog Herald.

Though I read many feeds daily, every Wednesday I anxiously await a single (very long!) post. Its called WordPress Wednesday, written by Lorelle VanFossen on The Blog Herald.

Lorelle is well known for her authority on WordPress. The Blog Herald is an authority on blogging. On WordPress Wednesday, Lorelle blogs on Blog Herald on Wednesday giving an amazing round up of wordpress events, wordpress buzz and cool wordpress tips.

Putting this together every week is a joy and a pain, but I think there needs to be more consistent updates and information about this fabulous tool we love to use and abuse. It’s a lot of work, so I’m glad someone is looking forward to these newsy reports. Are you?

The WordPress news from the past few weeks include:

Other recent columns on the Blog Herald include:

Lorelle’s Linkworthy Links

Some of the fascinating bits and pieces I uncovered during the past week as I search for blogging and WordPress news include:

What Else is Lorelle Doing?

I’ve been interviewed recently as a “blogging expert” and will be announcing those publications when they are released. As an “expert” in online web writing and publishing for almost fifteen years, it’s fascinating to watch my title change. It’s an evolution in name calling.

From some of my other blogs, including my popular and Family History Blog, recent articles and highlights include:

Definition Zone

Trackback: Trackbacks are defined as a “means whereby different web sites can post messages to one another not just to inform each other about citations, but also to alert one another of related resources.” If trackbacks are enabled on your blog and the receiving blog, when you include a link to a post on another blog, an excerpt of the information and a link to your post is sent to the referenced blog, letting them know you “talked about” their post and connecting the two together. Using the trackback option on your WordPress or other blog Writing Panel, you can also manually send a trackback to another blog.

There have been a lot of discussions lately about whether or not trackbacks are “dead”. For the most part, this is in response to comment spammers using trackbacks to spread their spam. Blaming trackbacks is no different than blaming comments for comment spam. A good comment spam fighting tool like stops comment spam and trackback spam. By turning off trackbacks, I believe we are letting comment spammers win. Trackbacks continue to be relevant and important elements on the web.

Discussions on blog trackbacks of interest include:

This is the of .
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This entry was written by Lorelle VanFossen and posted on March 30, 2007 at 5:32 pm and filed under Weekly Digest with tags , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

7 Comments

  1. Mike
    Posted April 1, 2007 at 1:58 am | Permalink

    Hey Lorelle,
    Sorry if this is in the wrong post, but check out AN Hosting for a great hosting plan. I currently use Dreamhost, but I’ve heard so much great stuff about AN that I’m going to switch soon. http://www.anhosting.com/

    Reply
  2. Marek Wawrzyniak
    Posted April 18, 2007 at 11:55 am | Permalink

    Hi, thanks for lots of cool info. Do you know of a plugin for wp 2.1+ which will let me hide selected categories from displaying in the category list on the sidebar, and from the UTW tag cloud. I use Asides category which I sure dont want showing in the list of category list, it also messes up my UTW tag could.

    Reply
  3. Lorelle VanFossen
    Posted April 18, 2007 at 12:44 pm | Permalink

    To not show categories on your WordPress blog, you will need to edit the template file for the sidebar, typically sidebar.php, and set which categories to exclude following the directions at:

    wp_list_cats for Versions pre 2.1
    wp_list_categories for post 2.1 versions

    Reply
  4. Steve Renner
    Posted May 4, 2007 at 5:06 pm | Permalink

    It amazes me how the blogging techniques are advancing at such a rapid pace. Thanks for all the great tips on WordPress plugins.

    I see that I have a long way to go……

    Steve

    Reply
  5. Rudy
    Posted May 12, 2007 at 12:09 pm | Permalink

    I must agree with Steve….

    Thanks for the great info!

    Reply
  6. Haralambos
    Posted June 13, 2007 at 12:10 am | Permalink

    Sorry :(

    Reply
  7. fit1nrg
    Posted July 4, 2008 at 11:20 pm | Permalink

    http://www.fitnrg.com is a fitness and diet tracking site. It tracks your daily calories, exercises, body weight, activities, plan meals, etc. It’s a free site with many members who are committed to health, fitness, and weight loss.

    Reply

2 Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. By Kyle’s Cove » Blog Archive » The Value of Trackbacks on March 31, 2007 at 7:59 am

    [...] past week as people discuss the value of trackbacks.    Steve Rubel feels they are dying.   Lorelle responds by saying: There have been a lot of discussions lately about whether or not trackbacks are [...]

  2. By Weekly Digest: Guest Blogging on Problogger, WordPress Plugins, Getting Naked, and Relationships « Lorelle on WordPress on April 6, 2007 at 4:56 pm

    [...] of tips, tricks, and techniques on WordPress and blogging. If you missed the last two, check out last week’s edition and the previous [...]

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