Anyone that has used Wordpress for any length of time is surely aware how much of a pain it is to keep your installation up to date. It seems that a new “required update” is released weekly and then comes the painful task of upgrading all your blogs. Heck the latest and greatest version of Wordpress is less than a month old and already a new update is out.

If you want to keep up with the various updates but hate going through the hassles of manually updating your blogs, the Wordpress Automatic upgrade is just what the doctor ordered. Here’s what you get:

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.

Wordpress automatic upgrade upgrades your wordpress installation by doing the following steps.

1. Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.
2. Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.
3. Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it.
4. Puts the site in maintenance mode.
5. De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.
6. Upgrades wordpress files.
7. Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.
8. Re-activates the plugins.

I installed this plugin on 2 of my blogs both of which had already been upgraded to 2.5 and went through the procedure to upgrade then to the latest version (2.5.1) and within about 3 minutes, each blog had been updated and was running smoothly with the latest version. No more downloading the .zip file, unpacking it, and uploading the required files to the server. A few clicks and all was done.

Now I will admit, it wasn’t perfect. The documentation states that when finished it re-activates your plugins, but on both my blogs, all plugins had to be manually re-activated as they weren’t turned back on during the update process. With that minor problem aside, the addition of plugin updates right from the admin panel in version 2.5 and the ability to update Wordpress from there as well with this plugin, running a Wordpress site is getting a whole lot easier.

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You’ve got your brand spankin’ new blog, a great template, and you’ve added loads of great posts. So why isn’t anyone commenting? While not necessarily a gauge of how you are doing, in fact some turn comments off completely, getting people to comment on your posts is a goal of many bloggers.

So now that we’ve determined that many bloggers want people to comment, how is that goal reached? Besides the obvious of writing helpful thought provoking or controversial posts, giving potential commenter’s an incentive is the next best option. With that in mind, I found a plugin for Wordpress does just that.

NoFollow Free allows you to remove the “nofollow” tag that normally accompanies links in user comments which in turn gives those who want to leave comments an incentive to do so, a search engine friendly link or links back to their own site. While this type of plugin is not new, NoFollow Free is a good choice because of the various options it gives you when setting it up with various user selectable situations including but not limited to:

- replacing nofollow on author/text link
- replacing nofollow on registered author/text link
- replacing nofollow only if the visitor or the registered users had X previous comments
- putting back the nofollow if user defined blacklist words are matched

It also comes with an image band that you can place in your header to proclaim to your visitors that your comments are now “NoFollow Free” because what good is this plugin if nobody knows you use it right? Give it a try, I am.

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While not necessary in order to use the service, StatCounter has announced a new Wordpress plugin that makes adding the required code for their web counter even easier. Before the plugin, adding the needed code required at least some knowledge of web programming and access to some kind of HTML editor. Now all you need is a free StatCounter account and a way to upload the plugin to your Wordpress installation.

Complete details on how to get the plugin and even a procedure to add StatCounter for those using Wordpress.com’s hosting service can be found on the StatCounter blog.

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If you have run a blog for more than 5 minutes you have been made aware of just how bad the comment spammers can be. My one main blog averages 50-75 a day. Fortunately, Wordpress comes with a pretty good spam tool pre-installed called Akismet. While it is an excellent tool that I have found catches 99% of the spam on my site, you still need to weed through the spam wasteland the Akismet leaves behind to make sure that nothing got caught that shouldn’t have or at a minimum to delete the various Viagra and porn comments from your queue. Enter a fairly new tool that takes care of the aforementioned problem.

WP-SpamFree aims to prevent the major source of comment spam from even getting to your site, the automated spambots. The author of WP-SpamFree knew from experience that the majority of these spambots couldn’t handle cookies or javascript so he came up with a seamless way to take advantage of that weakness by making the comment procedure include these 2 features that most human web browsers have activated by default.

WP-SpamFree isn’t designed to take the place of Akismet as even the plugin author admits that while less than 1% of spambots can handle javascript, some indeed do and either way trackback spam is a completely different animal which bypasses the comment form altogether. Because of that he recommends you use it along with Akismet to catch virtually all Spam from the spambots and so far from my unscientific testing, it works like a champ.

As I said earlier, my primary blog averages 50-75 spam comments a day, well over 15,000 to date. So far in the 3 days I have had the plugin installed, Akismet has had to catch nothing, 3 days without a single spam comment. Of course spammers are a crafty lot and I am sure they will find a way to circumvent this plugin, especially if it becomes popular. Until then though, adding this to Akismet on your Wordpress blog is a 1-2 spam prevention punch that is hard to beat.

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I have just come across a new plug-in that might be of interest to bloggers using Wordpress as their platform of choice. MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad from MaxBlogPress is a very useful text link rotator that has several functions.

The most obvious use would be to offer text link advertising on your blog and for that function this plug in shines. It allows you to setup an unlimited number of different text link ads that will rotate each page view based on a weighted scale that you designate when setting up the ad, the higher the weight the more a particular link will appear.

Of course every blog is different and MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad takes that into account. The plug in allows you to choose the colors as well as the fonts of your ad bar so that it will blend nicely into just about any template. You can also choose font styles, weights, and alignment allowing you to have full control over how links are displayed.

Finally, like I mentioned earlier, it has other useful functions as well. It is also an excellent plug in to use to announce contests or other site news to your visitors. Just set it up to list your announcement and it will show to everyone at the top of the page. You can even set it up to only show at certain times so that visitors aren’t constantly bombarded with your ads or announcements.

Best of all this useful plug in is available at no cost (registration is required). To find out more and to download the plug in head over to the authors web site.

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