Internet Business Daily

Post Ratings
I just added a new feature to this blog. It is late at night, about 2am and I have nothing better to do than find cool WordPress plugins. Anyways the new addition is called Post Ratings, which can be found here. As you can see it puts a little Ajax-style rating system at the bottom of each post. I think it looks great and adds even more of a community feeling to the site. I’m definitely giving this post a 5 star rating!

Download the WordPress plugin here, and read the install guide here.

Users Online
The second plugin I installed was Users Online. It can be found on the same page as the link above. All it does is add a sidebar widget that displays the number of users currently browsing your site. Both of these plugins are very nice and do not make the site too cluttered.

Today is a very good day for some people, including John Chow. Many people who were previously banned from Digg are now allowed back! Of course everyone took advantage of this right away. The first to do so was JC (because he is EVIL). John had a story on the front page of Digg within 15 minutes of finding out he was unbanned. It is very funny to see how easy it is to play Digg’s system. All you need is a popular person (John Chow) to get many of his followers to digg his story and poof, front page story that easy.

Hopefully one day ill grow a following such as other people have done, and that way I can have my stories hit the front page any time I want as well. Digg still has a lot of work to do in terms of stopping things like this. They are far from a democratic system, it reminds me of high school elections where the most popular kid always wins. Come on Kevin, get with the program.

WordPress 2.1
There are a couple of things that I would like to point out that are new on this site. I finally got around to upgrading to WordPress 2.1. I thought there was going to be many errors and custom coding to get all my plugins to work, but luckily it was pretty painless. The only thing that did not work was Subscribe to Comments, but the creator came up with an upgrade: Subscribe to Comments 2.1 and now everything works great.

WordPress 2.1 includes a whole bunch of upgrades, and some of them have really made my life easier. One of my favorite upgrades is an auto save feature when writing a post. It automatically stores a copy every minute of what you have written so far just in case the page accidentally closes. I remember when I first started writing this blog that a very long post that I had just written got deleted for this very reason, I’m glad they have addressed this issue. There are many other little changes that I have not gotten around to trying.

Site Changes
I have made a few changes to the website itself. The most obvious change is the header image. I decided I was a little tired of the one I had on before and photoshopped a photo I took a few months ago. The picture is of Westcliff, which is in Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz is where I went to college and I absolutely love the town, and for obvious reasons. It is one of the most beautiful places I have been to. I also thought this picture blends better with my site theme colors.

eBay! Button
I have just joined the ebay affiliate program, which is why I have the little eBay button on the right. When people click on that button and buy something from eBay, I get a portion of the commission. I have been told that some of the top bloggers make the most money not from Adsense, but from the eBay affiliate program. So I decided to try my hand at it.

So those are the little changes I have made to the site. I want to make sure I provide a quality experience for my readers so if anyone has any comments or suggestions, please feel free to let me know. Stay tuned for updates on my business ventures!

I would like to take a moment to thank one of the best features of WordPress: Akismet. Without Akismet I would have to go through every single spam comment that comes my way, which is a whole lot. I get hundreds of these comment spams per day and it would take me hours to go through them all. Akismet checks the content of the messages against a database of known spammers and automatically filters them out of your comments inbox in WordPress. To give you an idea of how much spam I actually get, here is a screen shot of an Akismet message from within WordPress.

3,825 spam messages caught without me having to even look at it if I didn’t want to! I do scan them over before deleting just to make sure it did not filter a real comment, which has only actually happened twice. Since the time I first had Akismet, only about 5 or so spam messages have slipped through. I am very impressed with their service and would like to thank them.

UPDATE: download Akismet here.

I have added a little feature to my blog. I recently signed up for MyBlogLog and love it. I get to see and possibly chat with people who come and enjoy my blog. The avatars from MyBlogLog give my site much more of a community feeling. I then saw on John Chow’s blog that he had also signed up for MyBlogLog, but found an awesome little plugin for WordPress to make MyBlogLog even more useful. MyAvatars is a WordPress plugin that puts people’s MyBlogLog avatar in every comment they post to.

The myavatars.zip file is the first thing you need to download. Upload that file into your WordPress plugins folder like usual, and then activate the plugin. You will then need to put this piece of code into your comments.php file:

<?php if(function_exists("MyAvatars")) MyAvatars(); ?>

Similar to John Chow, I put the code directly above <?php comment_text() ?> in my file. Something weird happened though, two different results came about from putting that piece of code there. For John Chow, the avatar appears to the right of the comments, which looks good. For mine however, it appears under the number and date when people comment, which also looks good. You can put that piece of code anywhere to make it look however you want. Here is what it should look like: