The plugin adds a lot of extra options to your post editor including the ability to:

• Search your blog for posts, edit them or insert links to them into the current post
• Insert Flickr Images
• Insert Youtube videos
• Search and link to Wikipedia
• Search Google
• Search News
• Google Blog Search
• Insert a Google Map

Once installed, you will have a new Insights toolbar in your post editor, which you can use to add Flickr images, youtube videos and more.

Here is an example of how you can add a Flickr image to your blog post:

Adding a YouTube video:

You can see more screenshots at Vladimirs blog.

I think Insights is a great plugin and I am sure many of you will find useful. I recommend checking it out

Link : Insights

I came across a new plugin today from Thomas Teisberg called WP Chameleon. It’s a simple plugin which lets your readers choose which colour to view your blog in. You can see an example of this in action at Linux Loop

Please note that this plugin requires the visitor to have javascript enabled. If it is disabled they will simply see the default theme colour.

Link : WP Chameleon

Before being accepted we had to provide WordPress with a haiku, a strange request but one which we obviously adhered to. Here is our submission:

Themes for everyone,
Functional yet Beautiful,
One Price For Them All

What do you think of it? Considering I have the poetry skills of a drunk snail, I’m quite impressed that my haiku was accepted

Kevin

Yesterday a vulnerability was discovered: a specially crafted URL could be requested that would allow an attacker to bypass a security check to verify a user requested a password reset. As a result, the first account without a key in the database (usually the admin account) would have its password reset and a new password would be emailed to the account owner. This doesn’t allow remote access, but it is very annoying.

If you are using 2.7+ then you should be able to update WordPress directly from your admin area. If you are using an older version, I recommend downloading and installing the latest release.

Better safe than sorry!

Kevin

For the next 3 days membership prices will drop to:

• 3 months membership – $49 $29 $20
• 6 months membership – $79 $49 $35
• 12 months membership – $99 $69 $50

With 4 themes in our collection that works out at $5 per theme with our 3 month membership package however we are planning on releasing our 5th theme within the next few weeks and our 6th theme shortly afterwards so you really are getting great value with this promotion.

Please note, this promotion is only valid today, tomorrow and Friday. On Saturday 1st August prices will increase to $49 for a 3 month membership, $79 for 6 months and $99 for 12 months. So I encourage you all to take advantage of this great promotion before it’s too late!

If you have any questions about any of our themes please let us know

Kevin

Unfortunately, by default WordPress lists all pages when you search a blog. Which means that pages which are hidden can be found by visitors by accident.

Thankfully, this is a plugin which can help with this. Simply Exclude lets you exclude pages, posts and categories from search results. It adds an option underneath every post and page to exclude it from the search archives.

The plugin also allows you to exclude posts from the home page of your blog, from archive links and even from your RSS feed.

If you are looking for a way of removing a post or page from a certain area of your site (without actually removing the article itself), I recommend checking this plugin out

Link : Simply Exclude

Here are some of the major changes :

• Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
• Dashboard memory usage is reduced. Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
• The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
• A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
• Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.
• Translation of role names fixed.
• wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title.
• Upload error messages are now correctly reported.
• Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed.
• Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed.
• SSH2 filesystem requirements updated.
• Switched back to curl as the default transport.
• Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload.
• Stricter inline style sanitization.
• Stricter menu security.
• Disabled code highlighting due to browser incompatibilities.
• RTL layout fixes.

You can download the latest version through your blogs admin area or directly from the link below.

Link : Download WordPress 2.8.1

According to Shaun :

• Regular commentors will get a dofollow link that passes link love – with this, you really reward regular contributors.
• Those with less than say 3 comments will not get a link at all (although you can modify this) but when they do hit 3 comments, hey presto, link love, and with anchor text value!
• Pagerank won’t evaporate through nofollowed links from link droppers because they won’t be links!

I think this is a good idea for a plugin and it should increase the number of comments on most blogs. However, like all plugins which reward commenters, it is obviously open to abuse. Most of the people who spam my blogs with poor comments just to get a link to their blog do so several times so I’m not keen on sending PageRank juice to them.

Also, I’ve had some fantastic on off comments before. Shouldn’t these people be rewarded?

That aside, there’s no denying this is an interesting plugin and I’m sure many of you will be downloading it in order to reward your regular commenters

Link : Custom Link Love Plugin

Though there are some great image hosting sites out there which let you upload images for free, I always prefer to upload images directly to my own hosting area.

This obviously uses up more space on my server however it ensures that my posts are never changed without me knowing it. And when you hotlink to images on someone elses website, there’s always a chance that the images can be removed without you knowing about it which means your posts would look incomplete. If an image is central to the post itself, the post would essentially be useless and you could lose a lot of traffic.

I’ve noticed that many WordPress bloggers run into some problems whilst trying to upload images to a brand new installation of WordPress. Thankfully, it is very easy to set up.

1. Create An Uploads Folder – The first thing you need to do is create an uploads folder. You can create this anywhere though I usually use the default location, which is wp-content/uploads.
2. Make your Uploads Folder Writeable – You then need to make your uploads folder writable. To do this you need to CHMOD the uploads folder to 777 i.e. make the folder writeable for the owner, group and the public. You can do this directly through the file manager or via your FTP client. Via a FTP client you can do this by right clicking the folder and selecting ‘change file permissions’ (it is something called CHMOD). After you have done this, WordPress is able to upload files to this folder and create subfolders directly as well.
3. Set The Uploads Folder Location In WordPress – Once you have created the uploads folder, you need to tell WordPress where it is. In all new versions of WordPress you can do this at www.nameofyourblog.com/wp-admin/options-misc.php. You need to ensure that there is no backslash at the beginning or end of the url location, as doing so may stop your blog from writing to the folder (this is actually a common problem for new WP blogggers). So for example, you would enter wp-content/uploads and not /wp-content/uploads or wp-content/uploads/. If you are sure you have entered these details correctly and WordPress is still having a problem uploading files then double check that there is no backslash at the end of the WordPress address in the general settings area.

If you follow the above steps then you should now be able to upload images and files to your WordPress blog. If you are still having problems uploading files then it’s likely that a plugin which you are using is causing some sort of conflict. If this is the case you should deactivate all plugins until you have determined the source of the problem. You can then reactivate the plugins one by one to ensure that you find which plugin is causing the problem.

If you are having problems with any of this, please let us know and we will do our best to help you out

Kevin

My favourite plugins are simple, plugins which have no bells and whistles but make WordPress work better and make you wonder why the plugin features aren’t already integrated into the main script. I came across such a plugin today called Align RSS Images.

The plugin fixes a problem which WordPress has with displaying images in it’s feed. Bloggers can currently align images in their posts using the standard WP CSS classes however these classes do not work on your feed.

Taking last weeks ‘Launch Competition Winners‘ post for example. Without the Align RSS Images plugin the post is displayed like this :

After we have activated the plugin though, the post now looks like this in our feed :

Note, the author does point out that the using styles in a RSS feed isn’t ‘exactly standards-compliant’ however it seems to work fine in all RSS feedreaders so I don’t believe it’s a problem.

You can download Align RSS Images directly through your WordPress admin area if you are using the latest version of WordPress. Alternatively, you can download the plugin directly from the link below

Link : Align RSS Images