The Twenty-Five Most Valuable Blogs: At first I thought this was linkbait but a read through the article and the other content on the blog changed my mind. There is some analysis of each blog/blogging company with details about the company, guesses on revenues and page views, future prospects, operating margins and employees, advertising statistics and finally a comment on property valuation as multiples of revenue or multiples of operating profits. From my quick glance I would say that the revenue numbers are not perfectly on the money but since these figures are almost never publicly discussed (except on make money online blogs) I guess there is some error built into the valuation. Daniel’s excellent Daily Blog Tips($1.8M) makes it into the list at number 18. The Gawker properties tops the list at a value of $150 million and other big names include TechCrunch($36M), Mashable($10M), GigaOm($8.4M) and RWW($5M). A few […]

When I recently wrote a post which pointed to an article that described a few things you should do with your WordPress blog immediately after having it installed, I noticed Collin made a comment in that, WordPress was like the Windows OS where as, it comes bundled with Internet Explorer for a browser while WordPress comes bundled with (albeit fantastic) Akismet for a comment spam blocker. With that in mind, here are 9 plugins that you can use either as stand alone replacements or in various combinations to combat comment spam. Not all plugins work nicely with others so be sure to read the installation manual if you decide to use any of these plugins on your own blog. 1. Comments For Cookies – This plugin adds a stylesheet to your blog’s html source code. When a browser loads that stylesheet a cookie is dropped. If that user then leaves […]

One Column Themes Rainbow Feather Rainbow Feather is widget-ready fluid one-column three-segment theme with vivid colors. The theme is available in 6 different languages. Demo | Release page | Download Two Column Themes Flower Grunge Flower Grunge is a widget ready two column theme with valid xhtml and css. The theme is made up of variants of the brown color. Demo | Release Page | Download Three Column Themes WP Wedding WP Wedding is a three column widget ready theme based on marriage. The header of the theme pictures a newly married couple. Quite useful if you want to advertise your marriage to your friends. Demo | Release Page | Download 33Module 3 Column theme with the sidebars placed to the right and left side of the content. The theme also has a large footer area. Demo | Release Page | Download

I’ve seen a number of people tell others that WordPress 2.5 will have little to no database schema changes. It looks like that is no longer the case as MichaelH has pointed out. Changes to database schema from Version 2.3 to 2.5. *Table: comments Changed ‘comment_approved’ to varchar(20) NOT NULL default ‘1’ Added KEY ‘comment_approved_date_gmt’ (comment_approved, comment_date_gmt) Added KEY ‘comment_date_gmt’ (comment_date_gmt) *Table: links Changed ‘link_visible’ to varchar(20) NOT NULL default ‘Y’ *Table: options Changed ‘autoload’ to varchar(20) NOT NULL default ‘yes’ *Table: posts Changed ‘post_status’ to varchar(20) NOT NULL default ‘publish’ Changed ‘comment_status’ to varchar(20) NOT NULL default ‘open’ Changed ‘ping_status’ to varchar(20) NOT NULL default ‘open’ *Table: term_relationships Added ‘term_order’ int(11) NOT NULL default 0 Thanks to MichaelH for putting these changes together. This information is especially useful to plugin and theme authors as it lets them know if their particular project will break.

Jason Blanton of BloggingTips has put together a nice little article which covers five things you should do after you install your self hosted WordPress blog. These five things include: Changing the permalink structure Change the default theme Update your ping services Activate the akismet plugin Burn your feed with FeedBurner One item that I would add to this list is to figure out which stats program or service to use. You can use WordPress.com Stats which is a detailed stats plugin or you can use something like Google Analytics or MINT. One thing that I wish I could do if I could start over would be to integrate one of these nice statistical packages as they really come in handy down the road. Jason mentions that this is only the first in a series of articles which will cover various things that you might want to tweak as you […]

Battle of the comment add-ons: Webware performs a comparison of six comment add-ons for WordPress and MT and puts together a list of the various features that each of them have to offer. Disqus comes out on top in their opinion.

Tony Scott has published an entry on his blog entitled WordCamp UK proposal. Inspired by WordCamp Dallas, Tony is looking at quite possibly holding the first ever WordCamp within the UK. His blog post will serve as a gauge of interest. So far, the topics of discussion regarding this event center around: Format: A little more structured, such as WordCamp Dallas 2008, or more BarCamp, as WordCamp Hamburg? Size: Number of attendees? Location: London or other city? Take into account travelling and accommodation. Sponsorship: Would be good to subsidize the event! If you would like to participate in or help organize the event, be sure to stop by Tony’s blog and leave a comment.

WordPress 2.5 and the Object Cache: This comprehensive article by Neosmart discusses the caching changes that are going into place with WordPress 2.5. The article has very pertinent links, explains the use and application of the various types of object caches in WordPress and how they are being changed and improved in this new version. I will not steal Neosmart’s thunder by revealing much here, but if you are interested in understanding the nuances, history and best practices of caching in WordPress (primarily Object Caching), head over to the link above. Worthy of mentioning however, is that I have never used any type of caching on this blog beside the occasional testing of code and plugins. I love the dynamic nature of the content that I help create and I cherish the highly dynamic nature of WordPress. That is one of the properties of this excellent tool that attracted me […]