Each time you edit your blog post Wordpress sends a ping to the blog pinging services automatically. So if you edit the post several times after it has been published, Wordpress will send pings same number of times unnecessarily. Blog directories and blog ping services like Ping-o-Matic track those pings & based upon the frequency of those pings they may consider your blog as a potential spam & ban it from their services.
So if you update your blog posts a lot, you better have some extra protection from being marked as a spammer. There are some plugins that can prevent Wordpress autoping. One popular Wordpress plugin is MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer. You just have to install it. Then you will get the options to enable and disable pinging. Even you can set the maximum number of pings at a certain time interval like one ping in 15 minutes. And from the log below the page you can find the pings that the plugin has prevented and the pings that went through. A cool plugin altogether. But for activation of this plugin you have to submit your email address and click on the confirmation link in the email. From then on, you will receive newsletters and offers from MaxBlogPress. You can unsubscribe from the mailing list any time.
But what if you get the exact same plugin without having to disclose your email address? CBNet Ping Optimizer is just a perfect alternative to MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer. Everything is same. You will get the exact same functionalities and same user interface and you don’t have to register your email address.
So what will you choose 
I have seen many Wordpress blogs taking this approach. They use to close comments after 30 days or 2 months of writing the blog post. So if you have some current affairs blog or a blog that updates your on offers & price of products, you can think of trying it. But I am not a big supporter of this method. Even with those blogs you may want to comment something so that later users get the correct info for that time. Only solid reason that I find is for dofollow blogs. If you have a dofollow blog, other webmasters might try to take advantage & there is every possibility that they would make a meaningless comment on an old blog post that has nothing to do in current context.
So now I will just tell you how to do it because the choice is up to you
So to close comments on Wordpress blogs after some specific days just go to Settings> Discussion from your Wordpress dashboard. Search for the line “Automatically close comments on articles older than” & then you can find the option to specify the number of days after publishing the blog post. Don’t forget to check the checkbox & save it. You are done. Comment option for all of your Wordpress blog posts will now get closed after that specified days.
Just few days have passed & Wordpress developers have been forced to release a maintenance version for Wordpress 2.9. The main issue is that current Wordpress 2.9 is triggering a bug in certain versions of PHP’s curl extension & for that pingback & scheduled posts are not working properly in different hosting environment. Besides, they have fixed 14 tickets in this maintenance upgrade.
So, if you are having any problem after you have installed Wordpress 2.9, you can give it a try.
By the way, this blog is working perfectly after I upgraded to Wordpress 2.9 & I am quite happy with it
At first I thought I won’t mention it as existing Wordpress users can see the upgrade notification from their dashboard. But still there are so many bloggers who are interested about Wordpress & still don’t use it. So just to let you know Wordpress 2.9 is out & I have upgraded to it without any difficulty.
Then I tried to upgrade all my plugins simultaneously with only one click to the latest versions as I have six old ones. It took me some time to find it, as the batch upgrade option is not present in Plugins, but rather in Tools> Upgrade option. I had a very good video preview in a post made in Wordpress.org about all the new important features of Wordpress 2.9. If you want to explore a bit, go there & you will learn where to find them & how to use them.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post comparing Blogger.com & Wordpress.com free hosting. And one of the demerits of Wordpress.com is that it doesn’t allow the use of free custom domain. So now I thought of letting you know about a free Wordpress blog hosting where you can use your own domain for free. Moreover, there is a revenue shaing program where you can earn 75% of revenue from your blog through Google Adsense.
The free custom domain feature of Blogetery is like Blogger.com. You just need to purchase a domain & then you can update DNS to point it to their server. They support both full-domain mapping (e.g. example.com) and sub-domain mapping (e.g. blog.example.com). So whether you want to host a standalone blog in this free blog hosting or just want to create an add-on blog for your pet project that you don’t want to host on your server, you can use it in both ways. It has some cool features with lots of themes & plug-ins to choose from.
It has been online for more than a year. So if you are looking for a free Wordpress.com alternative, feel free to try it.
Security is always a concern. You love your blog & want to protect it regardless whether someone finds it worth enough to hack or not 
What about a hacker getting into your Wordpress file system somehow? He can easily manipulate your theme files to add malicious codes. Think, he can easily add his own ad code like changing Adsense id or stuff a file with lots of spam links. That’s why your Wordpress blog files need to be continuously monitored. With the help of Wordpress File Monitor plugin you can just do that automatically & almost in real time.
The thing that I like about this Wordpress plugin is its simple interface with all the necessary features. You can schedule automatic scans staring from only 1 minute interval gap. Enter your email address & you will get notification email when any change is detected in your Wordpress files. Or if you want to keep it as a manual service, you can do that just by putting 0 in the “Scan Interval” box. And a quite useful feature is the option to exclude file paths. Suppose, you want your wp-content/uploads directory not to be monitored as it gets updated frequently. Moreover, if you use folder to store cache files, this feature can become quite handy & will save you from lots of unnecessary emails.
I have seen many bloggers writing about how to increase your FeedBurner subscribers overnight. I don’t want to get into that. Using a few ways, you may get decent hyke in subscribers number. And others may be plain old craps or same known things over & over again. But I am today telling you about a Wordpress plugin that can help you to reach to your potential subscribers automatically.
If you have decent traffic, you may have noticed that many readers subscribe through FeedBurner email subscription option, but they never confirm it. Either they forget it or delete the mail by mistake & never care. Or they may even not notice that they have to confirm subscription. Now with the help of Notify Unconfirmed Subscribers plugin, you can easily ping them to subscribe. This plugin can fetch the list of unconfirmed email subscribers from your FeedBurner account & send them notification mail that they haven’t subscribed to the blog yet. As a blogger, it’s your duty to reach out for as many readers as you can. This plugin can make this process a bit easy.
I have found many bloggers asking how to show only the excerpts instead of full posts in Wordpress. So I thought why don’t I write a post on it. You can find some plugin to do that. But I personally believe in using as less Wordpress plugins as possible, especially for simple tasks. And for this case, you just have to change a line of code in theme file.
Go to Theme Editor (Appearance> Editor) from your Wordpress admin dashboard. Now think you want to show only the post excerpts in search results page. So you will go to the respective file (in this case search.php) & search for the phrase
the_content()
When you find it, just replace “content” with “excerpt“. That’s all. The code phrase should look like
the_excerpt()
Save the changes. Check your blog’s search results page. It should only show excerpts instead of full blog posts. Likewise you can change it in main page or archives pages too.
As a blogger, you surely want to notify as many services as possible when you update or write a post. That’s why most of us just add one after another ping service url in the Update Services list in Wordpress. The list gets huge & we sometimes even forget to care if a ping service is mentioned twice. Then the problem comes. Some servers keep track of the pings & if they find duplicate pings immediately without any time interval, they may take it as a attack of spammer. As a result they might ban your blog for future pings.
That’s where this new Wordpress plugin Ping List Checker can come handy. You can check for duplicate urls in the ping list. It will display the number of duplicates for a particular url & you can then find & remove them from the list. After you install & activate the plugin you can go to Dashboard> Settings> Ping List Checker to check the list.
By the way, some ping services like Ping-o-Matic (http://rpc.pingomatic.com/) ping multiple web services at the same time. So if you add one of those already pinged services like BlogRolling (http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/) in case of Ping-o-Matic, this Wordpress plugin won’t find it. But it will eventually be a duplicate ping. So be a little careful
As a blogger, I am sure that you are concerned about potential hackers & spammers. Today I am going to tell you about a Wordpress security threat that you may not have thought about. Most of us like to try different templates especially on the new blogs. There are tons of free Wordpress themes gallery sites around. And you will fall for them surely to try & find out a suitable one for your blog. But are these sites reliable? You can’t say yes for all of them. Now here comes the trick. When these theme galleries collect Wordpress themes from the respective authors, they can easily put malicious codes on the theme files before showing them in their sites. These codes can be spam related promoting third party sites or even can be used to hack your blog. You would keep blogging & never notice that someone is taking unwanted advantage of you.
As a precautionary measure, I would recommend to download themes from the respective authors’ home pages or from Wordpress.org themes directory . And here is this plugin called Theme Authenticity Checker or TAC, that can help you immensely. You can check all your installed themes for suspicious codes just from your Wordpress dashboard. You don’t have to know any coding. Just install this Wordpress plugin & activate it. In the Appearance menu you will see the option TAC. Click it & the automatic checking will be done. In case of malicious code, it will show the code & give you a direct link to modify the respective theme file from the Wordpress dashboard. By the way, this plugin also shows the static links present in your themes like footer credit links. You don’t have to worry about it
