Automattic released this year a new version of their theme Prologue, which used internally in the company to keep each other up to date. Microblogging is getting more and more popular in enterprise environment as communication platform mainly. Since WordPress provides already the necessary tools for blogging, so it's obviously easier to add some restriction to make it suitable for microblogging. It's not only about limiting posts to 140 characters, but also by providing edit-in-place functionality with Ajax quick reply and live notifications on the home page.

That's everything you need to communicate without having to visit the dashboard. P2 provides also threaded comments, live tags suggestions, show/hide feature for comments, and handy keyboard shortcuts for more accessibility from your keyboard. An interesting new experience if you are looking for an easy to use microblogging tool and of course if you are already familiar with wordpress platform. See below a video from wordpress.tv showing different P2 capabilities. Demo is available here.

P2 is available in the themes directory, or directly under Appearance > Themes for wordpress.com users.

Posted by Hatem at 7:33 AM to Microblogging | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the last two years microblogging tools knew a great expansion, mainly Twitter service which turned quickly into a giant communication platform with only 140 characters. If you are interested to run your own Twitter-like platform for your company or your community, Laconica is a great open source communication platform which provides a similar service to Twitter, Jaiku and Plurk.

Laconica is written in PHP and uses a set of PHP packages from PEAR in addition to other open source solutions such XMPPHP, PHP-OpenID, OAuth, Markdown, PECL Mailparse, in addition to the free open-source SQL full-text search engine Sphinx.

Laconica support plugins and API. Their API is compatible with Twitter API which make it possible to use with any of the software already available for Twitter such Gwibber, Twhirl, Witty, … in addition to many online services including ping.fm, twitterfeed. Laconica came also with a built-in Facebook application which will update your Facebook status automatically with your Laconica microblogging platform.

Continue reading "Create Your Own Twitter-like service with PHP and Laconica" »

Posted by Hatem at 7:33 AM to Microblogging | Permalink | Comments (0)

TynT Tracer is an interesting solution which aims to help online content owners get credit for their content and drive extra traffic to their sites. The service is small,simple but very useful ! You to register first in the service then you will get a Javascript code to include in your pages. Once a visitor copy any content from your pages, the scripts will append a "Read more" link and an optional creative commons license if available.

Such tools could be more than useful in blogging/journalism since you can automate adding a link back to your site in addition to the ability to monitor your visitors engagements in the website. For this TynT Tracer offer an interesting stats tool that gives you actionable insight into what content your users find most engaging.

Be aware, Tynt Tracer track more than "copy" events, because even when you select and highlight any text in the page it will be recorded in their servers. This could be great for content owners to get lots of rich information about their readers, but it could be annoying for users especially if you notice that everytime you select a text a request is sent in the background.

If you feel that people are using your content without giving you credit, Tynt Tracer is for you. The service is totally free, and require only registration.

Posted by Hatem at 10:44 AM to Monetize your Blog | Tips | Permalink | Comments (2)

Many bloggers were interested into monetizing their blogs and I was sharing with some friends lots of tips that I'll post here also, but this wasn't really our main focus especially that there are lots of great blogs such as Problogger and Performancing who are more specialized in this topic.

You probably heard about people making more than $10k from paid posts only and you are wondering if you are eligible to make such good money easily. Today I'm coming back with 8 tips to monetize your blog with Paid Posts, hope this will open your mind to new alternative that you don't know or still thrilled to experiment.

Continue reading "8 TipsTo Monetize Your Blog With Paid Posts" »

Posted by Hatem at 7:08 PM to Monetize your Blog | Tips | Permalink | Comments (5)

Wordpress have just released version 2.8.1 with handful of bugs fixed; Notable issues that are fixed in beta 1 include :

• Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
• Dashboard memory usage is reduced. Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
• The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
• A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
• Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.

You can automatically upgrade to 2.8.1 by changing in version.php

$wp_version = '2.8';

To be replaced with

$wp_version = '2.8.1-dev'; 

Wordpress 2.8 come already with lots of improvements in speed, widgets interface, new syntax editor for themes, new themes interface similar to plugins, in addition to the new Screen Options on every page. More information and download http://wordpress.org/.

Posted by Hatem at 12:41 PM to Blogonews | Permalink | Comments (0)

BuddyPress 1.0.1 have just been released, a great solution to transform WordPress MU into a social network platform. A great suite of WordPress plugins and themes, each adding a distinct new feature and allow social interaction between members.

All BuddyPress plugins can be themed to match your own style, in just the same way as a WordPress blog. The BuddyPress plugins are bundled with a default theme to get you going out of the box.

This point release fixes a number of security issues in the 1.0 version so it is a critical upgrade for everyone currently running BuddyPress. There is also a number of other bug fixes so please review the release history for more information.

Advanced BuddyPress features include :

- Extended Profiles
- Private Messaging
- Friends
- Groups
- The Wire
- Activity Streams
- Blog Tracking
- Forums

BuddyPress is already used by many websites such Volkswagen TDI Tank Wars, GigaOm Pro, Wanna Network?, Flokka ... and many others. You might check the online demo at http://buddypress.org/demo/. More information and download available at http://buddypress.org.

Posted by Hatem at 7:12 AM to Blogging Network | Blogonews | Software | Permalink | Comments (0)