Upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1

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WordPress 2.5.1 was released recently. This version includes a number of bug fixes, performance enhancements, and one very important security fix. It is recommend everyone update immediately, particularly if your blog has open registration. The vulnerability is not public but it will be shortly.

You can always use the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin, to make the upgrade process simpler.

You can read more about the 2.5.1 release at the WordPress Blog.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Promo codes for DreamHost

I am using DreamHost for one of my websites. The features and benefits that they provided are excellent. A lot of popular open-source software can be installed using their awesome 1-click installer. If you haven’t used their hosting yet, I would highly recommend that you give it a try.

The website that I currently host at DreamHost is KapNuz, and to ensure that you get the maximum benefit, you can use this promo code that I created especially for you – KAPNUZ01. You can get as much as $50 off from your first year of hosting charges. Not bad at all, if you ask me!

Popularity: 12% [?]

A weekend project called KapNuz

I had bought a domain name some time last month for an experimental project. I’m pleased to announce that I managed to spare a couple of hours over the weekend to get “Alpha 1″ up and running. KapNuz is a news aggregator and provides news under various categories. I have a limited set of categories currently, but this will grow significantly in the coming days.

The project does draw inspiration from popurls but the plan is to give it a host of “cool” features over the next 2-3 weekends.

You can follow the KapNuz Blog for updates.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Alexa changes ranking algorithm

Alexa recently changed its ranking algorithms to improve the quality of website rankings

As per their announcement, Alexa is now looking at more sources of data to rank websites, and they have introduced an improved methodology to do these ranking.

You might notice some changes in your website rankings. I’ve seen some nice jumps for a few of my websites.

For instance, Online Presence jumped almost 50,000 places and at the time of writing this post, was ranked 137,000. I surely need to get a lot more regular in writing posts to improve the ranking.

YPOPs!, another website that I run, jumped 40,000 places and is currently at 111,000. So far, their improved ranking system has benefited me!

Popularity: 12% [?]

ICDSoft increases business hosting plan by 5x

I was quite pleased to receive this particular email from ICDSoft today:

We are writing to inform you that we increased the resources available to our Business hosting plan. All features were multiplied by 5 and a single Business account now features 10GB space and 200GB monthly traffic.

ICDSoft is one of the best web hosting providers currently. They have one of the best customer support services that I have ever seen. Most support tickets are resolved within 2 minutes. Talk about responsiveness!

If you are not happy with your current hosting provider, I would highly recommend ICDSoft.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Get over your writers block with Zemanta

I came across a very interesting Firefox plugin called Zemanta. The plugin comes into action only when you visit one of the supported platforms, e.g., WordPress, as an author. For instance, when I loaded up this blog’s page to write this article, I noticed Zemanta visible on the right sidebar. It not only claims to provide good suggestions on your article, but pulls up some images from Flickr which might be relevant to what you’re writing. It also suggested some external sites to link to and also tags for the article. Nothing like testing it while writing the article itself, wouldn’t you say? The first round of suggestions that I got is shown in the image below.

I’ll be giving this a shot for a few more articles to see if it helps in improving the quality of posts that I write!

Popularity: 13% [?]

Your daily dose of Bollywood News!

If you’re looking at a site to get your daily dose of news and gossip from Indian Movies (Bollywood, and others!), look no further than FilmyFundas.

This is a website I launched a few months back. The entire site was coded over a weekend. The site is updated with new content every hour.

Enjoy the latest gossip and rumours…

Popularity: 17% [?]

SezWho on Online Presence

Online Presence has now integrated the SezWho Comment System. All existing comments on this blog have also been migrated to SezWho.

I hope you like the new features that SezWho brings to a blog.

Keeping commenting! :-)

Popularity: 16% [?]

Entrecard unveils new pricing strategy

Entrecard has finally responded to the criticism of the ad pricing system they had. Earlier on, you could inflate the pricing of ads on your system by dropping more cards on other blogs. This is not going to happen any longer. Dropping cards is no longer linked to the pricing. An excerpt from their announcement:

To calculate your price at any given moment, just start at 2 credits, and double it for everyone waiting for an ad on your site. For example, if you have 5 people approved and stacked in the “On your widget” column of the dashboard, and 5 people waiting for approval, you would calculate 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2, or 2 to the power of 10, which eqauls 1024 credits. And then in 24 hours, when an ad has completed running, their price would go down to 512. If no one bought an ad that day, tomorrow it would go down to 256. And then if someone bought an ad for 256, the price would go back up to 512.

For the next few days, the pricing shown might be quite strange to say the least. Have a look at the following:

The “ECs” required for ProBlogger seem to be extremely high! Does anyone have that many ECs to advertise? The figures for John Chow seem to be more realistic though. I guess it will take a few days for the new system to settle down to produce realistic numbers.

Popularity: 12% [?]

BlogCatalog Premium Membership

I won a 1 year Premium Membership at BlogCatalog from the contest held at Winning The Web.

The upgraded membership provides me the following benefits:

1. The badge shown on the right is displayed on my profile!
2. Beta Access to all new features launched by BlogCatalog
3. Ad Free Browsing at BlogCatalog
4. Featured on the Home Page for additional exposure
5. …and many more

This is worth $72 as per the pricing shown on BlogCatalog.

Thanks Gyutae and BlogCatalog!

Popularity: 17% [?]

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