Observed this just a little while ago.
Not sure if I am the first one to spot this, but this is sure an interesting development for Bloggers and WordPress users.

We already know that Google shows the Video Thumbnails beside the search results from top video sites like YouTube and Metacafe. We also know that Google shows the Picture of a news article from news sites if there is a picture in the news post. But this is new: (The search result which has the image is a WordPress.com Blog)

The search on google.
The blog with an in image in the post.

Have you spotted this before or is this a new feature that Google is testing? Does this also work on Self hosted WordPress blogs and other Blogging Platforms othet than WordPress? I didn’t spot any other occurance yet.

Ping-O-Matic, the most popular and preffered rss-to-searchengines pinging service, also the default wordpress ping service is now down and is having an upgrade according the official blog.

Lets hope it will be back soon. Meanwhile, add the technorati ping code in the blog options so that search engine and users will find your posts.

Find the technorati ping configuration information here.

Happy Blogging!

Its happy news for wordpress fans and the community as more and more portals and large websites use wordpress to update their users via these blogs. NewYork Times is also in the game now and here is their new blog: The Carpetbagger. Matt writes about it in his blog yesterday. Very recently we also heard yahoo and about.com using wordpress for blogging. But for teh community the dissappointing things is that none of these gaints care to give a link back to wordpress.org from their blogs.

About.com blogs which pull millions of users across the internet in various topics was using Movable Type untill now and is moving all its blogs to wordpress platform. This clearly shows how well wordpress is growing and as Big guns like Yahoo & About use wordpress they build trust for people looking for a blogging platform.
Matt mentions it in his blog. Everyone is happy about it. Only google is left back among the big guns to try wordpress officially. Google already having their own platform for blogging(blogger), will be hard to convince for trying wordpress for their official blogs. Anyway, i’ll bring google and wordpress together with my google logos blog which I am working on.

Its a clean blue and a very light theme.
To me it looks pretty customizable.
I am sure, I will be using it on one of my future blogs.

The Theme’s Features:
* Top bar showing random post and RSS feed details
* Page Navigation bar
* A different, appealing design
* Included blog icons
and a few other nice features…

Link to Contempt Wordpress Theme

You can see the demo on this site: http://www.technodaddy.com/wp/

Blogs are a new way to publish content and advertising to readers, instead of using email to inform their members of news or information. They are also used as diaries for personal thoughts, advertising, fan info, discussion, general news, etc. In the past year as people become familiar with the word “Blog”, what they are used for, and several websites popped up offering to host a free blog for anyone who wants one. This caused an explosion of blogs.

Blogs have RSS feeds, or news feeds inserted into their webpages. Those RSS feeds have constantly changing news being shown in which this make the search engines visit those pages – frequently. Unlike free FFA pages, search engines do not discount or ignore links on blogs. It has real, constantly changing content, information, photo’s, links and news. If you have a link along with a short ad on those pages, the search engine will pick up your site and also count your links as valid, and they are valid!

People do visit blogs to get the information they offer and can not ignore any advertising on it. Advertising is being offered right now by the companys who are the hosts of the free or paid blogs but this runs into thousands and thousands of dollars. You can hand post to every blog, but this would literally take forever as thousands of blogs exist now and more are created every second of the day. Tools are available to create one free (suppress popup killer) and there are all kinds and types of blogs. My all time favorite and the one I always recommend is wordpress. Probably thats the best one around.

EFL.org has a good guide to new bloggers about what you should think before posting something on your blog.

I am not sure if there are such laws in India.
But if you are a US citizen, you got to read this.
The site says ….Whether you’re a newly minted blogger or a relative old-timer, you’ve been seeing more and more stories pop up every day about bloggers getting in trouble for what they post……………..EFF created this guide, compiling a number of FAQs designed to help you understand your rights and, if necessary, defend your freedom.

Here is the link: Legal Guide for Bloggers

In one line, its one of the cool firefox extentions for webmasters.

Created by Allen Holman, its one of the most popular and useful plugins among the blogging plugins for Firefox.

If you are using Firefox browser and have adsense ads running on your websites, whitout this plugin, I say you are missing a lot.

Look at these screenshots:
1. Firefox status bar earnings display:

2. Firefox adsense extension settings window:

I’m going to watch the numbers changing now

You can check out Allen Holman’s website for the extension here:
Google Adsense Earnings Notifier

Authored by Arne Brachhold in the early days of the Google SiteMaps release by Google. This plugin is so famous that almost everyone who is aware of the importance of the Search Engine Registration, listings and rankings uses it these days.

I feel this is one of those plugins which makes wordpress the best among the blogging tools.
I have just started using it. But I was using Google SiteMaps since its lauch in the first week of june 2005 for many of the sites that I work on

You can download the latest version of this plugin here: download 2.7
You can view the complete log of the development here: final release
Take a look at the Screenshot.

Being a wordpress plugin and giving 100% support to the wordpress blog, the coolest thing about this plugin is that we can also add pages that are not generated by wordpress. That means if you have a page like http://www.mydomain.com/flash/index.html which is not generated by wordpress(http://www.mydomain.com/blog/), you can add this page too in the plugin’s admin panel and the plugin pings google via google-pings telling the changes in the site.

Cool isnt’it?

Wondering where your .htaccess is gone in the wordpress root directory you recently installed ? Well, I was wondering too when I installed wordpress. I did’nt know about remote masks. Its very simple actually.You just need to set a remote mask value. If you are using WS_FTP software as your FTP tool, then this can be done by going to the Startup tab in the Connect dialog box. In the create site or Edit site box, you will find a menu item called ’startup’, in startup, find Remote Mask and fill its field with -la and save the settings and you are done. Re-connect to the ftp and you will find your .htaccess file.

Some useful links:
http://www.efficienthosting.co.uk/support/wsftp.html
http://www.nexusportal.net/support/general-hosting/ftp/win/wsftple.html
http://www.nexusportal.net/support/general-hosting/ftp/win/wsftppro.html