FTC says bloggers must disclose payments and freebies when reviewing products or risk being fined $16,000: This morning, the Federal Trade Commission published their Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials with changes that affect testimonial advertising, bloggers and celebrity endorsements. Though these are guidelines and not regulations, bloggers could face civil fines up to $16,000 and advertisers could also face fines. Interesting to note is that there are no guidelines on how to disclose relationships and this has no effect on blogs, corporations and relationships outside of the US. The new rules would apply to any transfer of value in exchange for publicity but seems very watered down in its execution. TechMeme is full of reverberations, but is there a lot to worry about for the everyday blogger? My question is, have you ever received money or gifts for your posts? Have you been offered products in exchange for writing reviews? […]

New Plugins Wp-Thumbie Wp-Thumbie is WordPress plugin to display thumbnail related posts. Relocate Theme Style Filters WordPress output to allow you to relocate your theme stylesheets Pierre’s Wordspew A plugin that creates a live shoutbox, using AJAX as a backend. Users can chat freely from your blog without refreshing the page! Source Codes in Comments Allow users to post source codes in comments using [code][/code] tag. No syntax highlight at the moment, it just replaces the special characters. Twit-update This plugin lets your twitter followers know when you edit a post. Updated Plugins WP Super Cache WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly. WP-TwitterSearch Displays the latest results based on a twitter search. Options include setting multiple search terms […]

WordPress provides users to automatically ping other sites when you link to them using trackbacks. In addition to that you also have an option to allow others to send pingbacks to you.

Spam is everywhere you don’t want it to be. Are you dealing with spam correctly. Here is how you can deal with spam easily and effectively, in your WordPress blog and everywhere else.

New Plugins Cute Profiles Cute Profiles is a free WordPress Plugin which will bring all your Social Profiles at one location i.e. either left or right side of your blog pages in a well decent floating manner, saving your sidebar or footer space for ads or other important data and widgets. Rest of the details related to features, screenshots, installation, usage and support are provided on Plugin page. XEN Carousel Call out sections of your site by easily creating a carousel of images, associated to posts or pages, for display on your home page or anywhere on your site. The carousel purposely does not come styled, but is instead semantically marked up with #IDs and .classes to make it easy for you to integrate it into your theme without much effort. Updated Plugins Be in the loop! Easily add any HTML, CSS, JavaScript or PHP to the beginning or end […]

As a plugin developer I find the hardest part of the process to be coming up with new ideas that I can turn into a plugin. Sure, there are tons of places out there that list lots of ideas but, I’ve found that it’s hard to find a good idea that will actually make a useful plugin which will appeal to a large audience. Most ideas that are out there floating around are very specific and some would only be useful to only a very select few. I’ve been searching non-stop for the better part of a month now and have yet to come across an idea that would actually be very useful and also feasible. I want something that I can complete in a decent amount of time and would also leave room for lots of improvement. So, today I’m here to ask you, the user, what you want. […]

At last check, there were 6,769 plugins available on the repository. Many of these plugins overlap each other providing similar or the same exact functionality. Over the past few months, I’ve heard developers tell me about particular plugins which were gaining in popularity in the repository were nothing more than ripoffs of their own creation. But, plugins on the repository are filed under the GPL meaning modifying and redistribution of code is completely valid. To make matters worse, many of the plugins that make use of another plugins code do not contain any form of credit acknowledging the plugin author or where the code came from. I know this because I’ve taken a look at the source code of some of the plugins in question and if you didn’t know any better, they wrote the entire thing themselves. While I could ask the same questions regarding themes, I would like […]

Adsense Ready Three column, widget and gravatar ready theme with Google Custom Search integrated. Rente Two column, widget ready, fixed width theme Gray and Square A gray, square and smart WordPress theme with eight color schemes Are you a theme author? Submit your theme to get listed in these posts.