Bloggers Buzz

From The Blog Studio, The WordPress Helper Sheet:

A few months back I had the idea to simplify the creation of Wordpress templates by creating a simple text document that contains my most used tags. Its basically just a text document, but its useful, and has increased the speed at which I create templates by 100%.

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, WordPress, Blog Design, Blog Templates,

Blogger has countered concerns about insufficient up to date information on issues and bugs with the launch of Known Issues for Blogger in Beta

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, blogger ,

Wordpress.com have wrapped up August and included was some impressive stats:

How about some stats? In August you guys created about 56k blogs, 57k users, 1.2 million posts, 188k pages, 1.3 million comments, 3.5k support requests, 196k file uploads, and around 45 million pageviews. (Not counting admin section, images, CSS, RSS feeds, etc.)

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, WordPress,

Blogger has redesigned their login boxes:

With that, we say good-bye to the combined Blogger / Google Accounts sign-in box on our homepage. Functional? Quite (though not everyone believes me). Well-designed? Not a chance. We’ve listened to the problems with our combined login box, and we have a solution.

The new login choice on the homepage should relieve any Google Accounts–related login trouble you may have. And if you’re like me and still haven’t been able to switch to the beta, you’ll be happy to find that your password manager will stop trying to fill in your Google Account login information on Blogger

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, blogger,

Matt at WordPress has issued a warning to splogs (spam blogs) created during SEO contests:

A few times a year someone decides to hold a search engine optimization contest to see who can get top rankings for various search terms on Google. As the number #1 hit for “Matt” on Google, I can totally understand the fun of this sort of endeavour.

However many times the contestants in these contests use less than kosher means of winning, such as spamming or creating dozens or hundreds of blogs all linking to the same website. (Sometimes called splogs, or spam blogs.) These blogs use up quite a few system resources, junk up the tags system, and can slow the site down for normal folks.
There are many blogs being created here by people wanting to use our blogs to try to win this contest. But WordPress.com is about blogging. It’s about communication, thoughts, news, and many other things in life. It is not about SEO.

These blogs are not welcome and will be removed when found.

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, spam blogs, wordpress, anti+spam,

Blogger has added a New Old Feature to Beta, Edit HTML view:

Blogger in beta initially launched without a few features — it’s still a beta version after all — and it turned out that one of the ones folks missed the most was having an Edit HTML view for their templates in the new Layouts system. I can sympathize with that myself. Complete template control was one of the things that originally made me choose Blogger over the other available options almost four years ago (and yes, that was before I worked here). That kind of personalization and customization is important to us here at Blogger, so I hope no one thought this feature was gone for good.

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, blogger, blog design, blog template,

WordPress.com has added Avatars:

On your profile you can now upload an image to be associated with your account, also known as an avatar.

We’re still rolling out the places these will show up, but for now you can see them in the comments section of this blog.

Why not upload an avatar and then leave a comment to show it off? Any ideas for how we can use avatars?

Update: You asked for it, you got it. There are now avatars in the latest posts, tag surfer, and my comments pages.

Update 2: There are now avatars in the forums.

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, wordpress,

blogHelper has continued the instructional series How to Use WordPress for a Portfolio Site covering:

• Most recent project(s)
• Featured project(s)
• Image-based project “tagging”
• Portfolio-Blog integration

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, WordPress, Blog Design,