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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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!

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…