WordPress.org

The WordPress development team had a very successful meeting last Thursday, where they solidified their plans for WordPress 3.1.

The finalized goals for WordPress 3.1 are “to have a very short dev cycle, a decent amount of testing time, and a release in mid-December. Low on new features, heavy on ui and code cleanup, and avoidance of schema changes. Save the big ideas for 3.2 where we’ll have the liberty to implement those ideas in PHP5. No schema changes and no big new APIs.”

Besides bug fixes and code cleanup, users can look forward to a new wordpress.com inspired admin bar and theme browser, as well as post templates and styles, and a separate network dashboard.

The team plans to halt new feature submissions on October 15th, followed by a primary code freeze on November 1st, and a string freeze on December 1st. The beta period will begin November 15th until the estimated final release date of December 15th.

Keep in mind that this will be the last major release to support PHP and MySQL 4. If your hosting provider has not yet switched to PHP 5.2 or higher and MySQL 5.0.15 or higher, it’s time to start bugging them.

Personally, I’m really looking forward to seeing what will come of the development team’s focus on bug fixes and code cleanup with this release. What are you looking forward to in WordPress 3.1?

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If you’re planning to launch a social network or online publishing service, it’s important that you have a plan in place for dealing with spam. At some point the bad guys will find a way to take advantage of your hospitality, and you need to be ready to deal with them before they take over.

I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating. If you’re launching a web site that allows users to publish content, you will very quickly be invaded by spammers. There are two basic types of spam that you need to be aware of:

1. Direct spam. Spammers will try to use your service to communicate directly with your users. They’ll send large volumes of comments, forum replies, direct messages, friend requests, contact forms, and generally abuse whatever messaging services are available.

This kind of spam is relatively easy to detect, because it involves making large volumes of form posts or api calls. You can catch it by monitoring for unusual patterns or volumes of submissions (and indeed Akismet can do this for you – ask us how). Contrast this with the second type, which is:

2. Parasite hosting. Spammers will use your service as an unwitting web host for their advertisements. They’ll create a handful of blog posts, forum threads, user profiles or wiki pages with images or links to their network of spam web sites. Spammers call these “buffer pages” or buffer sites. Importantly, they won’t spam your users with links to those buffer pages. They’ll be very careful not to do anything to draw your attention to them – often they’ll do their best to disguise them as harmless content. Instead, they’ll go elsewhere and send direct spam to the users of other services with links to the buffer pages on your site.

In other words, users on (say) Facebook and Twitter will be bombarded with spam messages containing links to pages on your web site. (Conversely, users on your site will be bombarded with spam containing links to buffer pages hosted elsewhere).

At Akismet we’re all too aware that few social sites are prepared for handling both types of spam. In fact some almost seem to go out of their way to make it difficult to report spam. Since Akismet monitors spam on millions of web sites, we’re able to detect both direct spam and parasite hosting. Sadly, even when we go out of our way to try to alert webmasters to spammers abusing their services as parasite hosts for porn and malware, many fail to respond.

Which brings me to the single best piece of advice I can give anyone who is planning on launching (or already runs) a social network or interactive web site:

Make sure you publish a working email address for abuse reports!

Don’t rely on a web contact form (when they break, failures often go un-noticed). Don’t rely on a flagging system that’s available only to your users (reports about parasite spam won’t come from your users). Don’t use a special form or button that only supports reporting a certain type of content or a single page at a time (spammers will hide in places you don’t expect them, and an important spam report might include hundreds or thousands of URLs). Use a good old-fashioned email address – abuse@yourdomain is best – and above all, make sure it’s monitored by people who are in a position to act quickly.

If you do run a social network, and you do have an email address for abuse reports (kudos!) then feel free to contact Akismet and tell us your address. If we do discover spammers hiding on your network we may be able to alert you, and of course we’re happy to provide advice for fighting the bad guys.

Six Apart is closing the doors on Vox, a blogging service they launched three and a half years ago. You have until September 30th to export your content from Vox, or you’ll lose access to it. Yikes!

They helpfully included a link to WordPress.com’s importer help page. WordPress.com has a Vox importer. What isn’t immediately obvious is that you can use WordPress.com as an intermediary on your way to a final destination. That is, you can import your Vox blog to a temporary WordPress.com blog, and then do an export from WordPress.com. Now you’ll have gold: a WordPress export file. You can take this file and import it into a standalone WordPress site, or a plethora of other blogging tools or services.

I recommend that everyone who has Vox content they want to save do this. Mark your WordPress.com blog as private if you don’t want that to be its final destination — just do it (and soon!) so that you have a copy of your site in a useful and portable format.

BlogTimes is an old school Newspaper style WordPress Theme, based on a three column fluid layout, enabled with cufon fonts with beautiful typography for the headlines, options panel, and a custom front page slider.

Dark Tuts is a very clean WordPress theme that has been designed with blogs in mind. This theme has an HTML5 doctype, clean and valid code, 3 color schemes (blue, green, red), 3 different ways to add post thumbnails, the ability to change thumbnail sizes via the theme panel, 1 advertisement spot and tons more features.

Quick-Vid is a simple blogging theme with slick design elements.

Semanu is powered by the 960.gs css framework with multiple widgets and a 3 column layout.

Syailendra is an adsense (advertising) ready theme with multiple widget positions, threaded comments, theme options, drop-down menus, and custom menus.

WP Perfect is a two column SEO optimized WordPress 3.0 ready theme. The theme has a jQuery-based options page that lets you change basic settings easily.

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Oh yes.

This is why I love going to WordCamps. Silly stuff like this that you can laugh about later.

Last night around 10:15 decided to head out for dinner, and somewhat randomly picked the Cuban restaurant Guantanamera because it was nearby. Sat down in a booth near the bar, facing the band, and ordered some mojitos. Over the din of the other diners I thought “hey this house band isn’t half bad.”

Within a few minutes of listening it became very apparent that beyond “not half bad” they were actually really remarkable. What a treat! Ordered a steak and sank in, letting the music (and mojito) flow over me. A half hour later a lady from one of the front tables got up to sing with the band — which isn’t always a good thing. They started on The Man I Love and it was sublime. The song started out as a ballad but then they kicked it up to a fast afro-Cuban beat, and the singer scatted over the beats for a good 4-5 minutes. It turns out it was Janis Siegel of the Manhattan Transfer! I felt particularly fortunate as I had been bummed to miss the Manhattan Transfer show at the Montréal Jazz Festival in June, but here, of all the most random places, was one of my favorite members performing at a small family joint in Midtown West.

Janis sat down after one song but a string of similarly talented musicians came in and out of the band until the restaurant started to close down. I didn’t recognize any of them but the music was so good.

There was a recording device above the band that was collected by a fellow who I caught up with outside the restaurant as he was hailing a taxi. His name was Paul Siegel and he’s the co-president of Hudson Music which is a music education group (with a website powered by WordPress). I learned the percussionist leader of the house band was Pedro Martínez and Paul follows and records him several times a week at different venues. Apparently Guantanamera is a long-time musician hang-out where even folks like Eric Clapton sat in with the band.

Only in New York.

On the new Chic & Geek website (no relation to Chic Meets Geek events) I was invited to do a “Questionnaire de Proust” style interview which has just been published in French. Lots of little tidbits that I’ve never talked about before. (Translation here.)

I overhauled my Tweet Tweet plugin for WordPress yesterday so it would work with the new Twitter OAuth mechanism. This morning I made it possible to download your older tweets, up to the max limit of 3,200 tweets that Twitter allows.

It’s still a work in progress but I want to get a new release out as soon as I can for current users who are using the basic auth that doesn’t work any more. If you’re feeling adventurous give the development version on the download page a go and tell me what you think!

99% of the OAuth code was ripped from Alex King’s Twitter Tools which in turn uses Abraham Williams’ twitteroauth.php library and OAuth.php from oauth.net. Thank you all for doing the heavy lifting required!

Related Posts

• Tweet Tweet
• Tweet Tweet 0.1 for WordPress
• TechLudd Cork 2008

Lorelle VanFossen has published a recap of her Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins session given on August 29th at OpenCamp in Addison, TX.

To Lorelle, “a mind blowing WordPress Plugin is one that breaks the rules. It is unique and original in its implementation, and pushes WordPress. It might not be a Plugin that everyone must have on their site. It might not be a Plugin that even interests you. What these will do is to get you to look at the incredible diversity of Plugins available.”

Her recap not only briefly covers the topics discussed during her session, but she also lists all of the plugins that were featured, and that list is well worth exploring. Even if you think your blog couldn’t possibly use any more plugins, you might find something that you (or rather your blog) just can’t live without.

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On September 8th, I’ll be at the Tampa Bay WordPress meetup to talk about WordPress custom post types. If you’re a WordPress developer or themer in the area, you should stop by! The meetup is at 7pm at CDB’s Southside in South Tampa.

WordCamp Portland is on September 18th and 19th at Webtrends. My talk is called “Swan Dive! …into the Best WordPress of your Life,” and it’s all about using WordPress to its fullest. Everything from hosting to scaling and everything from upgrades to insider ninja moves will be covered.

Since last year when we wrote about “WordPress in Demand on Elance“, WordPress has surged into the top ten, and now is the sixth most in demand skill on Elance!

Online publishing dominates this list. It’s exciting that the ever evolving WordPress, built on it’s PHP, MySQL, and CSS stack, continues to be the web development platform in demand.

Elance’s 2010 Q2 Online Employment Report also includes a single profile, that of Ron Z Zvagelsky, highlighting his success as a WordPress Expert on Elance.  Represent!

I really enjoyed attending WordCamps in Houston, Savannah, and Salt Lake City the past few weeks. You can always find upcoming WordCamps here, and I’m currently planning on attending Jerusalem (this Sunday), Portland (September 18-19), and Philippines (October 2). I’m looking forward to meeting more of the WordPress community and also answering your questions in the Town Hall sessions.

Around the time of the Thesis GPL debates, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg made an offer to send people free t-shirts. When I talked to him at WordCamp Savannah, he said that he had gotten about 300 requests. I got my care package right after I returned from the WordCamp. In addition to the shirt, it included some Gravatar and WordPress stickers, and a nice certificate, proclaiming that I am “One of the Three Most Important People in WordPress”. Of course, so are the other 300 people who got a certificate in their care packages. Awesomesauce.

Related posts:

1. Geolocation Plugin for WordPress
2. Analytics360 Plugin for WordPress
3. Customize Your WordPress Dashboard

New plugins

Facebook Like for Tags converts a standard Facebook Like button from a one-time sharing feature to a one-on-one relationship for ongoing updates and sharing based on tags (keywords) or categories defined by you, the blogger/author.

LBAK Google Checkout is aimed mainly at small projects that just want to sell a few things on their blog through Google Checkout and don’t want too much else apart from ease of use.

Pingdom Status lets you display your Pingdom monitoring data on your WordPress site, essentially creating a status page for whatever it is you are monitoring.

WP Tweetbox adds a highly customizable Tweetbox at the end of blog posts and pages.

Updated plugins

Relevanssi replaces the basic WordPress search with a partial-match search that sorts the results based on relevance.

WP-reCAPTCHA integrates reCAPTCHA anti-spam methods with WordPress including comment, registration, and email spam protection.

WP-SimpleViewer allows you to easily create SimpleViewer galleries with WordPress.

WP-Stats-Dashboard displays your blog’s stats graph plus your blog traffic, social engagement and social influence directly in your dashboard.

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Liz Strauss gave a masterclass tonight; at least, that’s how it felt to both Frederick and myself. We talked about communicating with your audience, and Liz shared some experiences about open comment nights. We discussed positioning yourself and your blog, and how important personal branding can be.

She told us about feedback loops, and how to use them to listen to your users / clients / audience. She tought us to build our network before we need it, and why and how you should be treating your blog like a business, even if it’s just a hobby. Aren’t you curious yet? Start listening then. You’ll be a wiser man or woman for it at the end of this.

In Dallas, August 29, 2010, at OpenCamp I presented “Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins.” Here are the WordPress Plugins and more features during my presentation. Let me first define what my qualifications for a “mind blowing WordPress Plugin” were, as I had to sift through thousands of Plugins and then filter down to include the following [...]

The WordPress mobile apps for Android and BlackBerry have both been updated with some shiny new features, like a new comment notification system and improved VideoPress integration.

There’s no word yet on an update to the iOS mobile app, but the team still has its eyes set on making this one a major bug-fixing release.

These recent updates would not have been possible without your feedback and beta testing skills, so keep doing whatever you can to make each release better than the last!

Do you use any of the WordPress mobile apps?  I use the iOS mobile app and can honestly say that it has certainly simplified my life when it comes to moderating comments and making last-minute post corrections. How about you? Have the WordPress mobile apps added to or detracted from your WordPress blogging experience?

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Bombax is a nicely crafted theme with 5 different color schemes and configurable options such as right or left or holy grail or no sidebar, magazine style or traditional style, custom header, and custom background.

Lukoo is a simple and stylish theme based around the color green.

Modernist is a beautifully built yet transparent theme. It was designed with a focus on optimal typography in order to better showcase your content.

Twist of Ten is a simple clean CMS style theme.

Us and Them is a modern, clean, blog-style, 960 – 1200 px grid-based, smooth WordPress theme and features some cool jQuery plugins just out of the box as some neat tool-tips and accordions.

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A short hike up to Cecret Lake and along Sugarloaf peak in Little Cottonwood Canyon near Alta, UT. The Wasatch Mountains are a great place to be outdoors. Guest photographer: Sheri Bigelow.

Remember the old days when your computer would crash because you were running too many applications simultaneously? Well, you might be surprised to know that WordPress can fall victim to the very same thing.

You see, your server may be packed with 4 GB of RAM, but that doesn’t mean that all 4 GB have been allocated to PHP on your account. In fact, most decent hosting providers only allocate 32 MB to PHP under each account. Now, most WordPress installations with a good amount of plugins will run fine under 32 MB, but there’s always a chance that one more plugin or one seemingly innocent admin panel task (like exporting or importing posts) may put you over the edge, and you’ll see either a blank screen or the infamous error which starts off something like “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted.”

If you see a blank screen, refer to WordPress and the White Screen of Death before continuing.

Update: Thanks to Big Dave Zatz for reminding me that if you see this error either suddenly (no specific task was done to cause the error) or frequently, try deactivating all plugins to rule-out a plugin-specific issue and try switching themes to rule-out a theme-specific issue.

If you see the infamous fatal memory error, there are three things that you can do before asking your hosting provider for assistance. Which method you use depends entirely on your server configuration. If one method doesn’t work, try the next. Keep in mind that most hosting providers closely monitor memory overrides and don’t take too kindly to frequent use.

1. If you’re using WordPress 2.9.2 or lower, try adding define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M'); to your wp-config.php file. If you’re using WordPress 3.0 or higher, WordPress automatically does this for a variety of tasks, so there’s really no reason to try it in this case.

2. If you can edit or override the system php.ini file, increase the memory limit. For example, memory_limit = 256M

3. If you cannot edit or override the system php.ini file, add php_value memory_limit 256M to your .htaccess file.

If neither of these work, it’s time to ask your hosting provider to temporarily increase PHP’s memory allocation on your account. Keep in mind that most decent hosting providers allocate 32 MB to PHP under each account, and most decent hosting providers allow users to temporarily increase the memory allocation. If your hosting provider won’t accommodate you, perhaps it’s time to find a new hosting provider.

As always, if you need further assistance, the volunteers in the WordPress Support Forums will be more than happy to help you.

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New plugins

Custom sidebars allows you to create your own widgetized areas and custom sidebars, and select what sidebars to use for each post or page.

LBAK User Tracking is a fully featured, page by page tracking plugin for your blog.

Simple SEO lets you optimize your web site or blog by changing the title and menu output for any page or post.

Term Management Tools allows you to merge terms and change the category hierarchy more easily.

UserAgent Theme Switcher lets you change the theme to be displayed according to the detected browser.

Updated plugins

The AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button helps people share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, and well over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites.

BackWPup allows you to backup your WordPress blog database and files.

eShop is an accessible shopping cart plugin for WordPress, packed with various features.

User Avatar provides a thumbnail area in Your Profile, for users to upload and crop new images in an overlay to be saved and stored to their profile.

WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm mobile devices.

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You may be wondering why anyone would want to do this. Think about it, you probably have hundreds of articles that you wrote years ago and when those same articles appear on Google search engine results, the dates appear next to the description.  You might think that this is great, users searching the web should be able to see when an article originally published, but research shows that users discriminate against older content just because it is old. An article that may be valuable despite its age would be subject to a user completely ignoring it and would click on the newer article, just because it was newer.

As you can see in the image above, the search results page lists the post date for the article followed by the description.

Do not confuse the intent here, if you are running a news site or writing about topics whose value is short lived then the adequate thing to do is to continue using dates. However if your traffic from search engines is suffering from users who refuse to visit an old article (and your topics are timeless) then you might want to consider removing the post date from your articles.

So how would you go about removing dates in WordPress?

Google is smart about locating dates on posts so you have to be aware of all the dates present on your WordPress site. Based on discussions on the web it appears that Google uses the post date when listed on a page and when the post date is missing, Google uses dates in comments and even within the post itself. So removing dates will take some cunning.

In order to remove the post date from the posts on your WordPress site you will have to remove the post date from your theme’s template file. In terms of indexing the post date, it appears that Google uses the post date from the single post and not the archive, so for the sake of users and simplicity we are only going to remove the post date from the “single.php” template file.

WARNING! Before proceeding with the modification of any template files, please make sure that you back up your files.

Remove date from single posts

1. Open the single.php file located in the theme directory in WordPress (usually server//wordpress/wp-content/themes/your theme name).

2. Locate the following line of code and remove it (or comment it out) from the template;

<?php the_time(); ?>

Note: The code used by the theme developer may vary from theme to theme and location so make sure you look for the <?php the_time within the single.php template to be sure.

3. Save the changes and refresh your website to see the modification. If the changes don’t appear right away make sure to clear the cache if you are using a plugin like WP-Supercache.

Remove date from comments

In order to make sure that Google cannot find a date on your blog post we will also need to remove the dates associated with comments. This can be a bit frustrating for users who want to follow a comment thread so it is entirely up to you.

1. Open the comments.php file located in the theme directory in WordPress (usually server//wordpress/wp-content/themes/your theme name).

2. Locate the following line of code and remove it (or comment it out) from the template;

<?php comment_date() ?>

Note: The code used by the theme developer may vary from theme to theme and location so make sure you look for the <?php the_time within the comments.php template to be sure.

3. Save the changes and refresh your website to see the modification. If the changes don’t appear right away make sure to clear the cache if you are using a plugin like WP-Supercache.

When removing these PHP functions make sure that you take into account the formatting of your posts and comments to ensure that the removal of this element doesn’t interfere with your theme’s design or break the code.

After these changes are made you will need to wait a couple of hours or days in order for Google’s index to reflect those changes. The variance in time is due to your site’s crawl rate so if your site is very popular and is crawled frequently you may see the update in hours. If your site still appears in the search results with the date, make sure you visit the page and search for the date, remember even dates within the content (originally published on [date]) will be used by Google to stamp a date on the site.

Other solutions for the removal of comments and post dates

If you use a commenting system like Disqus or IntenseDebate that is based on JavaScript then there is no concern for the removal of the date from the comments template. If you are using an older version of WordPress or you feel a bit adventurous you could download the Date Exclusion SEO Plugin from the WordPress plugin directory, just keep in mind that the plugin hasn’t been updated in over 500 days and it’s officially compatible up to 2.71.

Will You Remove Dates from Your Posts?

I’ve mentioned some of the Pro’s related to removal of post and comment dates on your blog:

• Users searching for content on search engines are more likely to click on your link compared to others with older dates.
• Visitors arriving from search engines will not discriminate the age of the content and will instead focus on the content itself, which should increase readership, time on site, etc.

Of course, as with anything as radical as this there can be some repercussions:

• If you employ this “hack” and you run a news site, visitors will arrive, but will quickly realize that the content is dated and leave the site.
• Some users like to know when an article was published and may get frustrated if there is no publish date.
• If you decide to stay away from Disqus or IntenseDebate to manange your comments and remove the dates from the comments, users may be confused and frustrated because they can’t follow a comment thread or identify when it a particular comment was posted. In which case they respond by leaving the site or by leaving a nice comment.

If the content on your blog is timeless and you could increase the amount of traffic coming to your blog from search engines, would you remove the post and comment dates?

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The SXSW staff wants to hear your feedback on the proposed panels for SXSW 2011. Your votes on the proposed panels will account for 30% of the final vote, so start voting today!

Currently, there are ten WordPress-related panel proposals awaiting your feedback:

• Beyond Blogging: WordPress is a CMS
• Don’t Be Ashamed to Use WordPress
• Essential WordPress Search Metrics
• Knocking Out Application Layer and Open Source Threats
• Life After Blackbaud
• Making Money with WordPress (Without Working at Automattic)
• Web Development Simplified: Unifying Multiple Tools and Platforms
• WordPress: The Small Business Swiss Army Knife
• WordPress 3.0: The TV Series Publishing Platform
• Yahoo! and WordPress: A Marriage Made in Hell

Are you planning to attend SXSW 2011? Which panel proposals captured your interest?

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It’s that time of year to promote your SxSW panels. I’m slated for two WordPress panels I’d like you to consider voting for.

1. Beyond Blogging: WordPress is a CMS – much of the work that we do at Crowd Favorite is creating advanced CMS websites with WordPress. It’s what’s driven us to create the Carrington theme platform and Carrington Build.
2. Making Money with WordPress (Without Working at Automattic) – I’ve really enjoyed talking shop with Shane and Peter as we’ve gotten to know each other over the last few years. Though our shops are very different we have similar experiences and challenges. We’re all trying to create great things, support the community and support ourselves and our teams at the same time.

Both of these have great groups of panelists/moderators and I think they’d be great events at SxSWi for WordPress developers, consultants and users.

Thanks for your consideration.

Albizia is a dark theme with 5 different color schemes and configurable options such as right or left or holy grail or no sidebar, magazine style or traditional style, custom header, and custom background.

Columbus comes with a very clean and elegant design and some really great premium-like features.

Modern Wood features a beautiful dark layout with a wooden background and some amazing CSS3 features.

Third Style is based on the theme Twenty Ten, comes with 11 new header backgrounds, and supports six widgetized areas (two in the sidebar, four in the footer).

TL Tweets is a free WordPress theme, designed to be used as an archive for your tweets, while automatically creating new posts from your Twitter feed.

Webmagazine is a WordPress magazine theme built on the Twenty Ten default WordPress theme.

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WordPress is a powerful blogging platform with a large community volunteering its time to provide support to users in the WordPress Support Forums.

Last week, the WordPress Support Forums mailing list presented nominations for the top active support forum volunteers. These volunteers were nominated for being active on the support forums within the last month and for helping multiple users almost every day on their own free time. The nominees were then organized by the number of topics they have been involved in since joining the forums to find this year’s top fifteen.

If you stopped by the WordPress Support Forums this year, you were probably helped by one of these fifteen volunteers, or you at least got the chance to see them in action.

Without further delay, here are the top fifteen active WordPress Support Forum volunteers:

Mel “esmi” Pedley: Professional web developer since 2001 with a special interest in CSS, web accessibility and, more recently, all things WordPress. Spent a number of years in a previous life running IT support in the public sector. Old habits die hard. [forum profile]

Samuel “samboll” Bollinger: I am a landscape architect by trade and am an avid golfer and camper. I originally started using WordPress back in the 1.5.x series for a business site. I became active in the forums when version 2.0 came out. Can’t remember exactly when I became a mod, but just came to forums one day and saw I was…thought that was a weird way to do it at the time, but years later and I’m still here. I use and support WordPress because of the community and transparency of all levels of the WordPress hierarchy. [forum profile]

Chris “Chris_K” Kasten (fka HandySolo): I’m Director of Technical Operations by day, an independent consultant by night and experienced in a wide range of technologies. I got involved with WordPress support back in 2005 when I had some questions, found the forum and realized I could answer others’ questions while waiting on my own answers. Volunteered to help clean up mangled forum posts shortly afterward and have been a mod ever since. [forum profile]

James “MacManX” Huff: When I started using WordPress six years ago, I had no clue what a “server” was, I though PHP was pronounced ffp, and I think I killed my blog eight times during the first hour. I would never have made it as far as I did without the WordPress Support Forums. Now, I’m happy to donate my time to help others, just like the forum volunteers from years ago helped me. [forum profile]

Otto: I live in Memphis, TN, and make beer in my spare time. I’ve been doing this sort of thing for about 5 years, and recently got hired by Matt as his “Tech Ninja”. So I’m actually paid to help people out now. [forum profile]

Michael “alchymyth” Stolze: I am a senior scientist, with interests in logic and computing since the early days of “fortran” and “assembler”. I began using WordPress and visiting the support forum while I was remodeling a website for a friend; and now I am part-time building web sites and WordPress themes. My life’s motto: “I am here to help.” [forum profile]

James “Rev. Voodoo” Yeo: I’ve tried to make my own website since 1993 when I got my first email account in university. I’ve hand coded, and I’ve tried just about every package out there. WordPress finally made it fun! [forum profile]

mercime: My first WP site was a WPMU 1.2.1 install in 2007 to consolidate all blogs I set up with Greymatter (CGI) in 2002 and self-hosted Blogger sites set up in 2003 under one admin for a church. I believe in the power of giving and giving back. Even though I am neither a coder or programmer, I go to the WP/BP forums and try to help others out where I can. For it is in giving that we receive … more than we even hope for. [forum profile]

Clayton “ClaytonJames” James: My involvement with WordPress started after a year-long trial of installing, evaluating and then discarding more than a dozen other blogging and content management systems that just didn’t live up to my expectations. After only a month with WordPress I knew I had found the right solution. Being involved with support in the forums has taught me almost as much about myself as it has about WordPress. It’s a pleasure belonging to a support community that’s always so willing to share its collective patience and knowledge with others. [forum profile]

Mark “t31os” Duncan: In my spare time I write hacks, plugins or provide support in the forums for WordPress (it’s great fun – generally) and it’s also nice sharing back what I know about code with the community, there’s also the satisfying feeling you get when you’ve helped someone troubleshoot a problem, create a custom hack or add some special functionality to their site (I think we all know that feeling). [forum profile]

Roy: I used to have an html website, but in April/May 2007 I switched to WordPress. Being unfamiliar with CSS, PHP, XHTML, etc. (and still!) I frequently used the forums to clear things up. After a while I could answer other user’s more basic questions myself and this is still the case. I just check every once in a while if there are questions that I can answer, because I think it would be a shame if a new user with a simple question would get stuck early in his/her WordPress experience on something (relatively) simple. Also I check the forums frequently because it is usually the first place to learn about large or small hacks, hiccups in the software, etc. [forum profile]

Mika A. Epstein: I work for “the man” at a large, multi-national bank, but I help with WordPress because the Communist/Socialist in me thinks that if we make the code better, we help make the world better. WordPress has caused me to master all sorts of bizarre talents I never would have thought possible. It’s even helped me to be better at my “real job” because of the coding ideas I’ve come across in the WP community. No one thinks better sideways than the WordPress Devs! [forum profile]

Mark “songdogtech” Ratledge: I got involved helping out in the WordPress.org forums after I found lots of help there myself. I’ve been developing WordPress sites for individuals and non-profits for a few years now. As well as working in IT and being a technology journalist, I’ve been a carpenter, mechanic and have taught university-level English and literature. [forum profile]

mrmist: I got into WordPress a few years ago after switching when MoveableType were having something of an identity crisis. Since then I have been getting more involved with the community, picking up bits of knowledge here and there. These days I am mostly active around the forums and Codex, and I try my best to submit simple patches to the code base. [forum profile]

Andrea “andrea_r” Rennick: I became a user of WordPress MU a good three years ago – when it was in pre-beta stage. I was just your typical mom at home, teaching my kids, and I wanted to create a community for other homeschoolers to have blogs all in one location, so we could find & support each other. It took me a month just to get everything running. I was spending so much time in the MU support forum finding answers, eventually I was helping others. [forum profile] (Note: Andrea was highly active in the WordPress MU Support Forums before they were closed a month ago.)

No support forum would be complete without moderators. The following moderators are currently active in the forums and deserve an extra round of applause. Not only are they tasked with keeping the forums organized and free of spam, but most of them are volunteers as well.

Michael “mdawaffe” Adams, Les “LesBessant” Bessant, Sheri “designsimply” Bigelow, Michael “miklb” Bishop, Samuel “samboll” Bollinger, Brian “briancolinger” Colinger, Mark “t31os” Duncan, James “MacManX” Huff, Chris “Chris_K” Kasten, mrmist, Andrew “nacin” Nacin, Otto, Mel “esmi” Pedley, Andrea “andrea_r” Rennick, and Peter “westi” Westwood.

Obviously, this is just a small sampling of the volunteers providing help on the support forums. If you ever helped someone on the WordPress Support Forums, give yourself a pat on the back, and keep up the amazing work. You’re a part of something that makes WordPress one of the greatest open source blogging platforms.

If you have ever been helped by one of the volunteers on the WordPress Support Forums, let them know how much you appreciated their help.

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Collis Ta’eed is a veteran blogger and co-founded the Envato network of educational sites and marketplaces covering niches like freelancing and web app’s and much much more. Collis’ network of sites reaches hundreds of thousands of readers monthly, his marketplaces are responsible for enormous amounts of income for developers the world over and his tutorial sites are the hallmark how-to repository for much of the web community.

Collis joined us today to share with us the mechanics of growing initial traffic to your blog, differentiating yourself in the market and monetizing your blog. Listen in to learn more about how to go from freelancer to business owner.

In the news:

• PHP 4 & MySQL 4 reach end of life
• Keep up with upcoming WordCamps in your area
• Matt Mullenweg has released many of his previous themes (with great photo gallery implementations)

Plugin picks of the week:

• Posts 2 Posts – Create relationships between posts of different types.
• Events Calendar Pro – Rapidly create and manage events
• WhyDoWork – Insert AdSense into your blog without modifying templates
• yphplista – An AJAX WordPress plugin for PHPlist integration

The 300,000 Biggest Websites, Visualized With Their Icons: Gizmodo had an interesting post today about a chart/image that contains the favicons of the 300,000 most trafficked websites on the Interwebs. I thought the interactive version was interesting and found Weblog Tools Collection completely hidden right under the lower left corner of the Blogger icon. The traffic data came from Alexa and it was put together by Nmap.

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via Mike Connor » Sync in Firefox 4 Beta.