Automattic and Windows Live are partnering to make WordPress the default blogging platform for Windows Live users after an announcement by Windows Live’s Dharmesh Mehta at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, CA, today.
The old Windows Live’s native blogging platform, Windows Live Spaces, will be deprecated. Current blogs hosted on Windows Live will be migrated to the WordPress platform. However, users will have about six months to migrate their blog over to the WordPress platform, before they close the system definitely. All old Windows Spaces URLs will be moved to the new blogs.
Automattic CEO Toni Schneider said: “Windows Spaces users can pack up all their stuff and migrate their blogs over to WordPress, and keep blogging on WordPress.com.”
Schneider also added: “8.5 percent of all sites on the Web are already powered by WordPress, adding up to about 26 million currently active blogs and 250 million visitors each month.” (Windows Live Spaces, by comparison, has about 30 million customers)
“As we looked at customers blogging needs and what different companies were providing, we were particularly interested in what WordPress.com is doing,” said Dharmesh Mehta. “They have a host of impressive capabilities, from a scalable platform and leading spam protection, to great personalisation and customisation. WordPress powers over 8.5 per cent of the Web, is used on over 26 million sites and is seen by over 250 million people every month.”
As you may know, Twitter has a new authentication method that lets you use third party Twitter applications and WordPress plugins without them storing your password. The move to OAuth will mean increased security and a better user experience overall. Applications won’t store your Twitter username and password, and if you change your password, the plugins will continue to work.
If you are using any WordPress plugin that connects with Twitter, you should update to the latest version that supports OAuth. Otherwise the plugins are not going to work. I personally use “Twitter Tools” plugin on my client’s Blogs and in some of my sites and I updated to version 2.4 for full compatibility with OAuth. You need to register each of your sites using this plugin in Twitter. (see picture above). The great news is that you can use your site’s name where it says: “about 10 minutes ago via WpThemesPlanet in reply to WordPress”. Instead of “BlackBerry” or “TweetDeck” You can see your own site’s name.
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I would like to add something to my earlier article How to enable WordPress Multisite 3.0. If you are upgrading from WordPress MU (WPMU) to WordPress 3.0.x Multisite make sure to check your HTACCESS file. There have been many reports of broken images on Multisite installations after upgrading from WordPress MU. If you notice any broken images on your Multisite subdomains after upgrading, make sure to check your HTACCESS.
I tried the following HTACCESS and it fixed all these problems with broken or missing images:
#Wordpress Multi site
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
# uploaded files
RewriteRule ^files/(.+) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$1 [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]
#END WordPress Multi Site Read more »
Former WordPress MU (WPMU) is now known as WordPress Multisite in version 3.0. This feature is not activated by default, you must enable it manually. The Multiuser function, lets you create a network of sites. You can run and host many different blogs with the same installation of WordPress. You must have web server file access to activate it. The instructions to activate Multisite are easy to follow and you should be able to get your installation activated with just 10 minutes work.
Start activating the multi-site features of WordPress 3.0 by adding this line of code to your wp-config.php file:
/** Enable or disable Worpress Multi-site features **/
define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);Refresh your Dashboard and got to ”Tools -> Network”. You will see a screen that looks similar to the one in the picture below:
If you want to install your additional blogs on virtual sub-domains instead of sub-directories you will need to create a wildcard DNS record on your server to enable the sub-domain (blog1.yourdomain.com, blog2.yourdomain.com, blog3.yourdomain.com) functionality of WordPress 3.0.
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WordPress 3.0 has been released with the name “Thelonious”. This is the thirteenth major release of WordPress and the culmination of half a year of work by 218 contributors, is now available for download (or upgrade within your dashboard).
New features in this WordPress release include a new default theme called “Twenty Ten”. Let me add that it really looks like “Patagonia” Theme, so I guess less people are going to use my theme, time to “adapt and change” I guess. But in the other hand I can feel proud to work as inspiration to whoever designed Twenty Ten.
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Are you looking for some high quality search engine traffic? Then take a look at the links below and submit your Blog to those sites. Five high quality sites is all you will need to start. Try to stay away from automatic submission software (so 90′s) that claim to auto submit your site to 1000′s of sites. That’s not true. By the way, Google, Bing and Yahoo manage 95% of Internet search engine traffic, so these links will have you pretty covered.
Google Search submission URL. Submit here if your site is new and/or still not listed in google. How to know if your site is listed in Google?
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WordPress 3.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is available for download. A “Release Candidate” comes after the beta release and before the final launch. Also, a “Release Candidate” has all features finished and all potential issues fixed. However, there are millions using WordPress with a wide variety of configurations and hosting setups, so it’s possible that they have missed something.
You can download the RC and test it out if you want, directly from wordpress.org
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