WordPress 2.8 Launched
Check out the video below, telling you all about the great new features of WordPress 2.8 “Baker”:
Great job guys! 
Launch details can be found here >>>> click!
Testing Issuu Plugin
[issuu layout=http%3A%2F%2Fskin.issuu.com%2Fv%2Flight%2Flayout.xml documentid=081222204013-6de50edec0bd458a984ecbe5d79e3ac0 docname=social username=mossman loadinginfotext=Social showhtmllink=true tag=social width=420 height=272 unit=px]
Very impressed with Issuu – the WordPress Plugin works brilliantly. Just click on the PDF to go full screen! (The document is from the excellent Peter Kim).
Mollom – an Excellent WordPress Spam Solution
January 1st 2009 – can you believe it? I thought I would start the new year as I mean to go on, and post about something useful, that you will find beneficial, especially if you blog, or look after the back end of blogs for clients.
Mollom spots high quality content and stops spam. It is an excellent solution for helping you get on with writing good content and not having to worry about the scourge of the web – spam adverts and comments! Hat tip to Anthony, who I met at The DO Lectures who told me about Mollom a couple of months ago. I’m now running it on most of my sites, and I’m very pleased with it. A little more info for you:
Mollom is a web service that analyzes the quality of content posted to websites. This includes comments, contact-form messages, blogs, forum posts, etc. Mollom specifically tries to determine whether this content is unwanted – i.e. “spam” – or desirable – i.e. “ham.” Websites that allow visitors to contribute or post comments are constantly being flooded with inappropriate, distracting or even illegal commercial messages, many of which are uploaded by automatic “spambots.” Mollom screens all contributions before they are posted to participating websites.
The nice thing about it? It just works. It’s a doddle to set up – you sign up, register your sites and for each site you get 2 keys – a pair. Then, depending on what platform you’re using, you can download a plugin. There are ones for WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, plus developer libaries. Once you install the plugin, it has a very easy to configure options page where you add the appropriate keys and you’re up and running.
Here are the install instructions for WordPress:
Installing the Mollom WordPress plugin
- Go to Mollom.com.
- Login with your Mollom.com account, or create an account if you don’t have one.
- Select “Manage sites” from the upper right menu at Mollom.com.
- Select “Add subscription” to create a new key pair for your website (or “edit subscription” to access a subscription for an existing site tied to your account).
- Download the Mollom plugin (wp-mollom) from the project page or from Mollom.com. Drop the wp-mollom/ folder in /wp-content/plugins.
- Disable akismet or other spam-filtering plugins you are currently using.
- Activate the plugin in your dashboard.
- Go to the ‘Mollom configuration’ panel via the Settings menu.
- Enter the public/private key combination you got after registering with the Mollom service.
Simple eh? There are a number of options which you can then configure, but leaving them as they are works fine. Since installing Mollom, I’ve stopped using Aksimet (the spam solution supplied by WordPress), and have had zero spam. Yes, nothing.
So, if you would like a very competent and professional solution to help you spend less time mucking about with spam on your WordPress blog, then Mollom is for you.
WordPress Add Media Issues
For a long time, I’ve had a BIG issue with my WordPress installation on this server, and it’s been a BIG one.
Not being able to upload any media.
So, yes, a right, royal pain. However the good news that it is now fixed and I thought it would be useful to let you know about it. There are 2 things you must do to make sure that you can upload pictures to your WordPress Blog.
1. Ensure that the permissions are set correctly on the wp-content folder/uploads folder on the server – you must make sure that the permissions are set to ’777′ or tick all the boxes.
2. You also need to make sure that you have filled out the appropriate info on the WP backend, see below:
I hope this will help anyone suffering from the add media problem!
Running on WordPress 2.7
A quick post to say a BIG congrats to the WordPress team for a superb release of “Coltrane”, WordPress 2.7.
Check the video out below for more details:
habari – new blogging platform
habari looks interesting. I don’t think it is going to rival WordPress just yet, but it’s new, getting a little press and perhaps offers users a choice when they are starting a blog.
Habari is different
While there are a number of technical reasons that highlight the differences and advantages Habari has over other blogging packages, a major component of what makes Habari different is its community participation model. Users who demonstrate a level of quality contributions to the project are granted more privileges within the project.
I’m going to keep an eye on this one and see how it develops.
