Though an off topic post, Carthik is a dear friend and a great WordPresser, so I think this is appropriate. My thoughts and prayers are with Carthik. He goes to school at the University of Central Florida and is preparing for the tropical storm Frances. I wish him luck and hope that he comes out of this natural disaster unscathed. Same goes for the millions of other Floridians. This has been a tough year for them.

Climb to the Stars (Stephanie Booth) >> Scripts for a WordPress Weblog Farm: Not a multi weblog install, but useful for some I hope.

Looking for a couple of Apple bloggers – The Unofficial Apple Weblog: Are you a blogger and an avid Apple user? Head over and apply. Via: Zeldman

Downhill Battle – Downhill Battle Labs – Blog Torrent: A blog incarnation of the formidable Battle Torrent. Please leave a comment if you know of integration techniques with blogging platforms such as Drupal, WordPress, PHPnuke and Indymedia. A good example site at Waxy. Via: Six Apart Professional Network

Movable Type 3.1 Still a Developer Edition?: Dr. Keith Robinson’s review of Movable Type 3.1, a very interesting read if you are interested in blog development.

WordPress Layouts: A Nice collection of downloads and test thumbnails for many WordPress layouts/themes. Some I have seen before, some are new to me. There are some nice links to other WordPress template sites as well. Via: Divclass

I recently ran into a couple of situations where I wished I could have stopped comments on my blogs without having to lose any of the other settings. A recent comment flood attempt comes to mind. Dougal came up with the wonderful Spammer Tar Pit plugin to temporarily stop the floods and that plugin gave me some ideas that I put together into another set of plugins. The “Stop Comments” plugin temporarily turns off comments for your whole blog without affecting individual settings for each of the posts. In other words, if at some time you want to stop people from commenting on your blog for a certain period of time, simply activate this plugin and all comments are dropped with a polite message. Once you are ready to turn them on again, simply deactivate this plugin and you are done. The “Take Down Blog” plugin is a one liner. […]

Word Statistics Plugin for WordPress: Measures and displays the readability indices and statistics of the post that is being edited. Carthik has a small writeup on these indices that is also worth reading. Via Wordlog