Business Blogger

Well, if you didn’t have anything better to do today I guess you could hop on over to WordPress for the brand new WordPress 2.3. Taking the words strait out of their mouth, “this release includes native tagging support, plugin update notification, URL handling improvements, and much more.” Sounds good to me.

The best feature I think is the new pending review feature. This feature is great in that it actually lets you submit a post for review by an editor. This means that running a large multi-editor blog using wordpress just got easier. They even added canonical URLs. Wow, they are really reaching out to the SEO audience here, although this will help anyone with their search engine optimization. For those of you that don’t know what this means, just try typing in businessblogger.net without the www and see where you go. It automatically redirects you to www.businessblogger.net so that this blog is seen as being on one domain by the search engines.

Also there is tagging support. This is a great feature as some people really enjoy using tags to navigate a site and we all know that the search engines love them too. They even added complete Atom 1.0 support for those that like to run Atom feeds. I think that this release is by far the best since I’ve been blogging, which is not long, but it speaks volumes of the support you get with WordPress. Congrats to the WordPress team and thanks for the great product. Now all you have to do is come up automatic updates and you will officially rule the blogging world.

I want to give something back to those that take the time to comment by giving you a little reward. I’ve decided to implement a useful little plugin that rewards my top commentators. The plugin is called “Show Top Commentators,” but of course. It’s a nifty little plugin that enables you to show the top commentators on the front page of your blog along with a “dofollow” link to their site. This will enable “Top Contributors” to get their links right on the front page of Business Blogger and it enables me to give a little link love to you.

The plugin has a couple of options that I made use of. The first option was one that lets you limit the number of top commentators to list on your page. I’ve decided to put the limit at five commentators for the time being. For beginners, I had reservations about driving traffic away from the blog but on the other hand I want to help those that help me. I think a top five is fair for now, I may decide to change that at a later date. The second option I chose to use was the one that filters comments from users. This lets you filter comments from yourself or anyone else, so I filtered myself of course.

So here it is, the first set of top commentators:

Billy

Sabo

Steve Howlett

Angie Hartford

Robert - Sorry, I didn’t get your URL.

This plugin has been around for a while and I have run across a few blogs that use it. I think it’s a nice plugin and I hope you like it. I know that I’ve enjoyed your comments, opinions and insight thus far.

WordPress is hot, and I mean really hot. They had just released a new version not that long ago and now WordPress2.2 “Getz” has just been released. This is why I chose WordPress!

This means that I will have to take some time out of my day to perform the upgrade. A few of the new “goodies” that come with Wordpress2.2 are:

WordPress Widgets - These are now included in the new download instead of using the old plugin. Apparently they even cleaned it up a bit.

Plugin Protection - There is a new protection system in place to save you from updating a plugin or editing a file that could break your blog.

Speed Optimizations - Making your blog a bit faster is never a bad thing!

These are just a few of the new features. You can get the WordPress2.2 download here. If you need help with your upgrade be sure to check out tips on upgrading WordPress.

Until next time.