Wp Themes Planet

Interesting post about free WordPress themes

A must read from weblogtools Collection titled: “Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else”. They explain and warn users to get free WordPress themes from trusted sources like WordPress.org. You can also get themes from the designer’s personal sites like WpThemesPlanet.com All the designers from WordPress.org are trusted. The most dangerous themes are known Premium themes that are listed for free download at bogus blogs. For example there are WooThemes Premium themes in many different sites listed for free download. Themes that you are supposed to pay for. They usually embed some malicious code into the themes and many times they encode this bad code using base64 decode.

Siobhan on WPMU.org has a nicely illustrated, researched and explained article on why users should never search for “Free WordPress Themes” in Google or any other search engine. Not enough can be said to avoid the malicious theme hawkers on the Internet and I appreciate the work and the explanation.

The problem is that most users, who are new to the ways of WordPress, will still use Google to search for themes and will download the first link that provides them with a free theme that catches their fancy. I would go so far as to say that somewhat knowledgeable users might still be tempted to ignore any possible bad effects from these themes; e.g. users continue to flock to sites that provide collections of serial numbers online in spite of being riddled with porn and adware. My opinion is that there are two ways to solve the problem or at least throttle down the preponderance of malicious themes installed on hapless WordPress blogs. Both options come with their pros and cons but one is a resolution closer to home.

Read More Here…

Adsense Account taken down by the Google Empire

Nice surprise today. My Adsense account was taken down and I received this message:

After reviewing our records, we’ve determined that your AdSense account
poses a risk of generating invalid activity. Because we have a
responsibility to protect our AdWords advertisers from inflated costs due
to invalid activity, we’ve found it necessary to disable your AdSense
account. Your outstanding balance and Google’s share of the revenue will
both be fully refunded back to the affected advertisers.

After browsing the web, I found this to be pretty common for a lot of honest hard-working people.

It looks like they ban the account after someone or some click-bots click a lot through your ads. Very strange! I can’t believe one multi-millionaire monopoly like Google, and they are not informed of this problem. So, it’s very easy to disable Adsense accounts all over the web.

The dominant market position of Google’s services has led to criticism of the company over issues including privacy, copyright, and censorship all over the world.

Luckily my income is not coming from Adsense, I never received a single check from them and I honestly think that Adsense is not a good system for people who want to do a serious long-term income, because your business will depend on the arbitrary discretional decision of someone with a mouse on Montain View offices and a Coca-Cola next to his Monitor, and your business can just finish with one click-mouse that will ruin your life if you really built let’s say 400 sites after 5 years of hard work and your daily foods depends on that.

NEVER EVER put all your eggs on the same Basket.

I can see their ads all over web on illegal sites and not on honest sites. Of course, someone will disagree with me and say that he does a “killing with adsense” and that “adsense rocks”.

Anyway, I can live without it. But of course I will appeal, since this is completely unfair. I just had a few clicks each month from visitors and they ban the account like it was heavily clicked by someone. My account had no chance to be clicked that way by anyone.

Yes, I know, I used to talk wonders about Google Algo in other posts, but Adsense make them really look really bad.

Oh, one more thing, I added the Category ADSENSE SCAM. I have nothing to lose.

“Indignation” is the definition of this post.

Happy Holidays from Wp Themes Planet!

Happy holidays everyone. I hope you enjoy the end of this great year 2010 and the begining of next year 2011. Remember that WordPress 3.0.4 Critical Update has been just released. This is a very important update to apply to your sites as soon as possible because it fixes a core security bug in our HTML sanitation library, called KSES.

You can update in your dashboard, on the “updates” tab, or download the latest WordPress site.

Expect new updates of Patagonia, Tandil and Director in 2011!

Enjoy 2011!

WordPress 3.0.3 Upgrade

Version 3.0.3 of WordPress is now available. This is a security update for all previous WordPress versions. The release comes just 1 week after the version 3.0.2 was available for download.

WordPress 3.0.3 fixes issues in the remote publishing interface, which under certain circumstances allowed Author- and Contributor-level users to improperly edit, publish, or delete posts. According to Peter Westwood from WordPress team, these issues only affect sites that have remote publishing enabled.

The feature called “Remote Publishing” is disabled by default. Some users have it enabled to use a remote publishing client such as one of the WordPress mobile apps. You can check these settings on the “Settings → Writing” screen.

Download 3.0.3 or update automatically from your WP “Dashboard → Updates” screen in your site’s admin area.

Google Instant Preview Tool

A few days ago, Google added a new feature to the Search Engine, designed to give users an instant preview screenshot of their search result without having to leave the page. This great tool allows users to view a thumbnail of websites without clicking on the link. Google wants to reduce more time to the search process, either by improving the engine to be faster or minimizing errors from the user.

According to Google, they found that people who use Instant Previews are about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click. The previews provide new ways to evaluate search results, making you more likely to find what you’re looking for on the pages you visit.

Read more »

WordPress.com Food Blog Aggregator

WordPress.com announced the launch of FoodPress, the first project for aggregating content written by its users. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and WordPress.org among other projects, has partnered with Federated Media to handle the publishing and advertising opportunities for FoodPress.

To get featured on the site, they recommend that bloggers use food-related tags like food, recipes, baking or drinks, so that their posts are easier to find for the site’s editor. So if you’re a food blogger and writer, be sure to use related tags on your posts. The bloggers currently post “thousands of mouth-watering recipes and food stories every day.”

Chances are that this won’t remain WordPress.com’s only attempt at establishing destination sites for different verticals. It’s easy to imagine similar sites that aggregate the best travel blogs on WordPress.com, for example. Assuming FoodPress is a success and an overall traffic driver, they expect that other niche content aggregators or “presses” will be launched later.

If FoodPress becomes popular, it could not only bring more traffic to WordPress.com blogs, but also provide some SEO advantage to the sites that are listed there. It will also incentivate their bloggers to keep updating their blogs with fresh content.

Promo codes for Godaddy October 2010

Hello people! I don’t usually make these posts, but I just renewed 5 domains with Godaddy and received a $10 discount with a promo code, which is really cool. In case it helps anyone, here are some interesting promo codes valid for the month of October, 2010. Either for new domains, renewals or hosting. Pay attention when you go throughout the checkout cart. Just one step before you place your order, on the right you can see someting like this. Enter your code, update the cart.

I used “cjcfat50″ for a $10 discount on an order above $50. Here are the codes:

cjcfat10 – 10% off (exp 10/31/10)
cjcfat20h – 20% off shared hosting (exp 10/31/10)
cjcfat30 – $5 off $30 (exp 10/31/10)
cjcfat50 – $10 off $50 (exp 10/31/10)
cjcfat75 – 15% off $75 (exp 10/31/10)
cjc749fat – $7.49 .com (exp 10/31/10)
cjcfat199 – $1.99 /mo hosting -3 mo (exp 10/31/10)

Enjoy!