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,

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,

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,

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,

blogHelper has released a new WordPress plugin, Most Popular Categories by Posts that displays a list of the most popular categories in a particular time period based on the number of poss assigned to your categories.

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, plugins, WordPress, categories,

After all the hype of being able to use WordPress as a CMS, blogHelper has posted 5 Reasons Not to Use WordPress As a CMS:

Im not saying WP cant work great as a more web site-ish CMS (Im devoting a whole series on Using WP as a CMS after all!), nor am I trying to be a wet blanket, but there are a few things you really should consider before taking the plunge.

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, WordPress, blog design,

Episode 5 of the WordPress Podcast has “gone to air” and covered the following:

* WordPress 2.0 has been downloaded over 1 million times!
* WordPress.com turns one year-old.
* Technorati’s state of the blogosphere.
* Interview with Jason Van Orden, host of GothamCast, Internet-based Business Mastery and the Podcasting Underground, and author of Promoting Your Podcast. Mentioned in the interview:
o How to Podcast Tutorial
o Tee Morris‘ Podcasting for Dummies companion podcast
o PodPress plug-in
o FeedBurner plug-in
o Podcast411
o The Daily Source Code

For more information and how to download run (don’t walk!) over to the WordPress Podcast

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, podcasts,WordPress,