Tom Coburn raised an interesting question yesterday under our “How do you host your blog?” post. What I’ve always wondered is how website owners have any luck at all getting revenue from their websites? With that question in mind, do you monetize your blog? If so, how do you do it? Do you display ads, charge a subscription fee, offer premium services, or something else entirely?

Blankfolio is an easy way to create your own portfolio theme. Bootstrap is a raw atom theme built around Twitter’s Bootstrap CSS framework. Butterscotch Ripple features an attractive, warm design using various colour tones of the caramel and butterscotch families. Green World is a high impact theme using several complimentary tones of green, including a bright, almost neon green.

Some big news hit recently about Automattic’s investment in WP Engine, a fully managed WordPress-specific hosting provider. So often, we’re caught up between just the blogging service WordPress.com or installing WordPress on any hosting provider, that it’s easy to forget that there are hosting providers like WP Engine and Page.ly which combine the best of both worlds. This raises an interesting question for today. How do you host your WordPress blog? Do you use a straight blogging service like WordPress.com, a WordPress-specific managed hosting provider like WP Engine, did you install WordPress yourself on a general hosting provider, or do you manage your own server?

New plugins Ultimate TinyMCE beefs up your visual tinymce editor with a plethora of advanced options: Emoticons, Tables, Styles, Advanced links, images, and drop-downs. Updated plugins bbPress is forum software with a twist from the creators of WordPress, available for the first time ever as a plugin. Posts 2 Posts allows you to create many-to-many connections between posts of all kinds.

bbPress 2.0.1 has been released. This is a ver important security fix which corrects an issue on forums with anonymous posting where a logged-out user could edit topics and replies. Along with bbPress’s new plugin architecture comes the easy updates. To update your installation from bbPress 2.0 to bbPress 2.0.1, simply apply the update like any WordPress plugin.

Akismet, the most popular WordPress anti-spam plugin, has launched a parter program geared toward developers who urge the use of Akismet among their larger clients. Akismet is free for most users, but sites which make a substantial amount of income on their own are asked to pay a small amount for the service. Given that most of these sites are built by third-party developers, designer, or consultants, the program is designed to share a percentage of the purchase with the referring individual if the referred user chooses to sign up with a paid Akismet plan. The program is open to applicants, so feel free to apply for registration now. And, if you have never used Akismet, today’s the perfect day to start.

New plugins beCounted creates a multiple item count up widget based on annual statistics showing the number of occurrences since the page was loaded. Scribendi.com Editing and Proofreading Services allows you to add professional editing to your WordPress publishing process. TrafficAnalyzer can be used to determine the number of visits to each posts / pages available in the site. WP-Aletheia: Feedback allows you to easily gather feedback from your clients. Updated plugins FoxyPress is a custom plugin made to integrate FoxyCart e-commerce functionality into your WordPress website. Social Media Tabs allows you to add Facebook, Google +1, Buzz, Twitter and RSS profiles and feeds to any widget area with stylish sliding tabs.

Notice anything different about Weblog Tools Collection? The name of the post probably gave it away. This blog is rocking in speed and deliverability! How you ask? Thanks to the fine work of the people over at Cloudflare.com CloudFlare is a free(mium) service that was recommended to me by our own James. He had heard about it in conversations with some folks over dinner and wanted us to try it out. While this blog has gotten loaded over the years with JavaScript from various sources and code cruft of years, it has also gotten quite slow as a result. It is not the server (though Spam storms never help) and MySql running on the same server does not help. I had added caching thanks to WP Super Cache and had tweaked most of the settings to be tolerable on the server. I had even tried a CDN at one point […]