In general, comment spammers write messages to escape your attention. Although they use smart spam bots and BlackHat software like XRumer or ScrapeBox, they want you to believe they are real bloggers, real people, writing real comments. They want you yo approve the comment and publish it on your site. They simply lie in order to convince you to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Web spammers are selling links from your blog to their clients. They do this to game the search engines and trick your readers into visiting dubious web sites. Their clients are sometimes seemingly harmless, but are often peddling fake pills, adult, scams and malware.

Identify False Positive Spam Comments you can first check for links to spammy URLs in the comment url box. Sometimes I’ll see a thoughtful comment clearly written in direct response to the post it’s commenting on, under a real person’s name, and still mark it as spam because they link to a site whose legitimacy is questionable. Another great method I use and that never ever fails is lookup the exact comment or one of it’s sentences in google. Let’s take this sample spam comment:

and paste it exactly in google. Make sure you write it between Quotes (“sample comment”) which tells Google to look for the query in that exact order. If you get any results on the exact comment, it’s most likely comment spam. Now check this:

We received more than 330,000 results. We are talking about 330,000 clones of the same spam comment posted in blogs.

Another consideration is that old posts tend to attract a lot of spam. Real people generally recognize that if a post is a year or so old, the conversation there is pretty much over. Spambots do not realize that. It still sometimes happens that someone comments on an ancient post, but the age of the post is a big red flag.

If you can Identify False Positive Spam Comments, then you can mark them as spam and they will not comment again.

The focus for this release was making WordPress faster and lighter. The first thing you’ll notice when you log in to 3.2 is a refreshed dashboard design that tightens the typography, design, and code behind the admin. If you’re starting a new blog, you’ll also appreciate the fully HTML5 new Twenty Eleven theme, fulfilling our plan to replace the default theme every year. Start writing your first post in our redesigned post editor and venture to the full-screen button in the editing toolbar to enter the new distraction-free writing or zen mode, my personal favorite feature of the release. All of the widgets, menus, buttons, and interface elements fade away to allow you to compose and edit your thoughts in a completely clean environment conducive to writing, but when your mouse strays to the top of the screen your most-used shortcuts are right there where you need them.

Under the hood there have been a number of improvements, not the least of which is the streamlining enabled by our previously announced plan of retiring support for PHP4, older versions of MySQL, and legacy browsers like IE6, which allows us to take advantage of more features enabled by new technologies. The admin bar has a few more shortcuts to your most commonly-used actions. On the comment moderation screen, the new approve & reply feature speeds up your conversation management. You’ll notice in your first update after 3.2 that we’ll only be updating the files that have changed with each new release instead of every file in your WordPress installation, which makes updates significantly faster on all hosting platforms. There are also some fun new theme features shown off by Twenty Eleven, like the ability to have multiple rotating header images to highlight all of your favorite photos.

This new version looks amazing so far. The only problem I found was a message after I updated saying that I was running an old version of explorer (Image above). Quite strange, since I’m using the last version of Internet Explorer.

1) Blog-O-Folio

Blog-O-Folio is a free 2 column WordPress Theme suitable for any and all of your corporate, portfolio or personal blog needs. With a wide variety of tunable theme options and functionality to merge your portfolio with the blog, it is now ultra easy to maintain your blog and portfolio at the same time.

Download Here

2) Liquorice

A simple and clean vintage looking theme for you to build on using Google’s font API Lobster font. Custom background feature enabled.

Download Here

3) Agency

It is a magazine style theme that puts your content in a beautiful wrapper, complete with subtle page elements that is sure to add elegance to your pages.

Download Here

4) Adventure Journal

Adventure Journal is a powerful theme that lets you customize a wide variety of features from the comfort of your Dashboard – no coding required.

Download Here

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…

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.

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.

With this new feature, you still individually approve each application before using it, and you can revoke access at any time. To see which applications you have authorized or to revoke access, just go to the Connections section under Settings.

In order for Twitter applications to access your account, developers have been able to choose one of two authentication methods: Basic Authentication or OAuth. Both require your permission, but there is an important difference. With Basic Auth, you provide your username and password for the app to access Twitter, and the application has to store and send this information over the Internet each time you use the app. With OAuth, this isn’t the case. Instead, you approve an application to access Twitter, and the application doesn’t store your password.

Besides Twitter WordPress plugins, many other apps, including Echofon, TweetDeck, Twitterrific, Seesmic, and Twitter for Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry, are already using OAuth. The same feature explained above, applies for all these other applications.

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

If you are using The Donncha Domain mapping plugin to allow users to use domain names, make sure to update to the latest version that is compatible with WordPress 3.0.x. Otherwise you could see this message when a blog user tries to login:

“You don’t have permission to view this site. Please contact the system administrator.”

To update to the latest version of Donncha’s domain mapping plugin:

WordPress 3.0 Domain Mapping 0.5.2

If you notice any other issues after updating to WordPress Multisite, let me know and I will see if there is any fix.