PhobosLab have just released the first stable 1.0 of Asaph, a new microblogging solution. Asaph focuses on collecting links and images from other pages. It allows you post content directly from any page you are on. Asaph is not a full blown blog and it does not aim to be one - it just does this one task, but it's pretty good at it.

You can watch the screencast (~5Mb) to see what Asaph looks like. The solution come with two predefined themes, require PHP5 and MySQL and is available for download under the terms of GPL v3. For more information check Asaph project's page.

Posted by Hatem at 8:32 AM to Software | Tools | Permalink | Comments (0)

WordPress Released today version 2.3.1 fixing over twenty bugs including some security issues.

• Tagging support for Windows Live Writer
• Fixes for a login bug that affected those with a Blog Address different than their WordPress Address
• Faster taxonomy database queries, especially tag intersection queries
• Link importer fixes

So good luck to upgrade to the new version ! Even with the number of solutions available to help upgrading easily, it still a real mess !! Just wondering why there isn't a version like everybody to upgrade from 2.3 to 2.3.1 including only files that changed ? Is it that difficult to automate ? If you are upgrading from an older version be sure to remove the utf-8 from DB_CHARSET in your config file, this will save you lots of time looking around : "where these special caracters are coming from ? "

Posted by Hatem at 6:30 AM to Blogonews | Tools | Permalink | Comments (0)

BusinessWeek have an interesting article on how top bloggers earn money and there are many known figures on the list from BoingBoing, ShoeMoney, Kottke, TechCrunch, Mashable, Problogger... others that I don't know at all, but probably you'll recognize some of them. But what I find interesting on this article is not the "how" top bloggers earn but the "how much".

Many bloggers I estimated they earn much more than the numbers announced, such Problogger ($100.000 a year) and this is probably due to the nature of topics Darren is used to blog about on problogger beside his photography blogs, which I bet provides the highest revenue for him. I don't think this is the real list of top bloggers on earning, since many don't reveal their real revenue. $5.000 per month is a good revenue, but not that high ! But you will notice how all of them used to vary their revenue sources.

From cat pictures and celebrity gossip to tech news and politics, the stars of the blogosphere earn plenty of dough, regardless of subject. Some bloggers start their sites intending to make big profits. But most of the bloggers we talked to had more modest expectations, and saw their blogs unexpectedly turn into businesses as traffic picked up and ad dollars rolled in.

Posted by Hatem at 7:11 AM to Blogonews | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, here is a first good news after Google have acquired Feedburner : since today PRO features are available to everyone for FREE. This include the stats pro and the MyBrand feature. I think it's a great move today for blogger to adopt Feedburner, if you are not already using it. This will not only reduce server resources consumed by your servers but will provide you a set of functionalities to make maximum profit from your RSS subscriptions.

I was waiting for the PRO brand feature because I have more 20 blogs to syndicate and fees will pay me another more robust server. So now that the feature is free I just sent email as indicated in the website and waiting until someone get in touch to enable it. It will make our RSS served from http://feeds.phpmagazine.net instead of http://feeds.feedburner.com. I'm not sure how the Stats PRO will help me, but I'll give it a try and we'll see what Site Stats can add.

Posted by Hatem at 6:57 PM to Blogonews | Tools | Permalink | Comments (0)

LifeType team just released a new Ads Plugin highly requested by blog communities to create custom blocks for all blogs. Very useful plugin to add for example a top banner to all blogs with ads, subscription link or other. You can make your service similar to Blogger and get some support clicks to your main blogging platform.

To release this new plugin, LifeType team decided to make it a little fun with a "plugin ransom", users interested to the plugin donate money until donation reach 100 Euro. I'm very sorry Oscar to broke the game :-) If you bid higher it might happen ! So now the plugin have just been released under the GPL like all other components of LifeType. Big thanks to Oscar and all LifeType team for making such great work.

Posted by Hatem at 9:05 PM to Advertising | Tools | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are some great wordpress plugins that can definitely boost your blogging and make your blog more fun. Recently I was testing Postalicious, a Wordpress plugin that let you create posts from your delicious bookmarks. You may probably noticed many bloggers posting speedlinks with their latest bookmarks, this not only make your blog more active, but also help you share your favorite bookmarks with your readers.

Usage is pretty simply, all you need is a delicious account. I used to create a new delicious account for a new wordpress blog that I created for testing, but you can use your existent one. Then after installing the plugin you will have to configure it once with your delicious account setting and how you want post to be integrated in your blog. Finally highly recommended Firefox and Delicious plugin, then your bookmarks could be posted everyday automatically in your blog. Then you can enjoy !

Posted by Hatem at 8:10 AM to Tips | Permalink | Comments (0)