I wanted to let everyone know that the newest point release for AWSOM Pixgallery should be available this week. I’m doing some testing and hoping to squeeze in one or 2 more things before I release it. Right now it has a “fix” for the thumbnail pagination system to allow admins to limit the number of pages that are displayed (for those of you with huge multi-page galleries), support for 3rd party image plugins (like Lightbox, etc) that disables the built in system and easily adopts the new one (also good for those times that other plugins conflict with Pixgallery’s javascript), plus a new Image view tracking system that can display the number of times each image has been viewed (or not, but the admin can still see this info), and some more fixes and add ons.

So look for the release soon.

Lorelle always offers a ton of good blogging advice over at her blog at lorelle.wordpress.com, but she’s particularly spot on with her advice on Post Titles. One of the best ways to really get people interested in your posts is if they have a really good reason to read the post in the first place, and a good title is that first selling point. In addition, search engines also tend to use the title a bit more in determining what content to deliver in a search, so a really great article with a terrible title will probably be lower in a Google search than a crappier but better titled article. Go check out her full article to get more advice on this.

A new Video Tutorial for AWSOM Pixgallery has been posted in the AWSOM.org Tutorial section. This new video tutorial covers the FastFlow method of quickly adding Image and Gallery Captions to your Pixgallery galleries.

While I’m obviously a big booster of the WordPress system as a means of setting up a blog, art, or comic website, I am not blind to the fact that there are other options out there, and in many cases these other options may be better for some people. The website BloggingPro.com has an excellent write up of the present good options available for people that want to self host a new website using a CMS type system. Their article (available here) details the current pros and cons for WordPress, MovableType, Chyrp, Habari, and ExpressionEngine. So if you want to get an idea of the current state of things in the blogging software world ( to help make and finalize your decision that WordPress is the best :) ) go check them out.