This site is a great tool to use after you get your site set up and running. It tells you basically how long your site takes to load up for an average user. Since most internet studies have shown that visitors will often leave a site if it doesn’t load in less than 7 seconds (and in some cases as short as 4 seconds) you can get a good idea of how your site performs. Keep in mind that this is also testing your web server, so as you get more popular you can keep an eye on how well your site is performing in case you need to make a move to a better performing server.

Link: http://www.octagate.com/service/SiteTimer/

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Now that Wordpress 2.2 comes standard with the sidebar widgets plugin (which allows you to drag and drop customize the sidebar areas without altering the theme files–look in the Admin Presentation area) as a core system, here are some other widget plugins that you can get that are pretty useful:

Configurable Pages Widget: This widget lets you set up the Pages sidebar tree menu in a better way than the default one does, you can exclude certain pages appearing and set the order http://is-here.com/projects/wordpress/pages

Drop Down Archive and Progress bar widgets: One widget adds a Drop Down archive to your sidebar area (much like my AWSOM Drop Down Archive plugin does on the main) while the other one adds a progress bar to your sidebar area that has color selection and other customizable features. http://tech.windsofstorm.net/

By now there are tons of widgets out there for almost anything. A quick Google search for Wordpress widget will net you tons. So go check out what you can find, you never know what’s available.

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There is a critical security issue with the 2.0 version of the Akismet anti-spam plugin (which is bundled with most versions of Wordpress), all users of this plugin should download the newest version of the plugin (2.02) from the Akismet download page and replace the files on their server. The newest version of Wordpress 2.2 already has this latest version bundled with it, so upgrading to that version of Wordpress will also close this security hole.

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The newest version of Wordpress has been released (2.2) and can be downloaded from the Wordpress.org website (you can use the link off our left bar over there if you’d like).

As with any major number release I suggest NOT running right out and upgrading your site immediately. If possible try to upgrade a local or non-live version of your site first. Major number releases tend to change certain behaviors of Wordpress which can cause older plugins or themes to break. Based on my testing my plugins will work fine, but even so I will be doing the same technique as they suggest:

1) backup your site files and database.
2) de-activate all plugins.
3) replace the regular files with the new files
4) go to www.yoururl/wp-admin/upgrade.php and run the database update function
5) log in and reactivate all of your plugins
6) test EVERYTHING!

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While I host my own image gallery plugin here (AWSOM Pixgallery), I’m not arrogant enough to think that it’s the only way to get images onto your website in a pleasing way. This image gallery plugin called Popup Image Gallery is actually very nice and has some great AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) features (transitions between images, mouse-overs pop up images). It has one drawback though (in my opinion), no direct HTML links can be done to images since there isn’t a real “page” associated with any image (the pages are all built using JavaScript). However, it’s an interesting alternative to try out if you want slide show effects or other cute transition features for your images.

link: http://www.yellowswordfish.com/my-wordpress-plugin-library/popup-image-gallery-plugin/

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