It seems that my blog has been quite hungry lately so I decided to do a bit of spring cleaning to help it speed up a tad and be less server-side hungry.

So I have deactivated a few wordpress plugins these were the Cute Profiles, Wibiya Toolbar, Wordpress.com Stats and the WP Greet Box, also I removed several “buttons” from the columns on the blog which were not really needed.

And as another work around for speeding up the blog I have installed WP Super Cache, since removing the plugins etc and adding Super Cache I have noticed a real speed difference, so hopefully this will help others viewing the site and speed up the process.

So lets see how it goes and maybe I will remove some other plugins in the next few weeks, depending on how everything is running, I may also consider changing the design of the blog to something a little quicker

The other day Karen from Blazing Minds did a post on her Blogging Wire called Why I Enjoy Guest Posting on Blogs. It prompted me to write this long overdue guest post and I’m quite pleased that she offered a guest spot.

If you’re a new blogger just getting started you might not know what plugins are or how where to get started. For starters, read my post called So You Want To Be a Blogger before you dive in. Basically, using a plugin is a way to include additional functionality to your blog. Plugins help you customize your blog and give it some personality. Read the rest of this entry »

Continuing in my series of weekly updates from the Blazing Minds blog where I list blog posts I’ve enjoyed reading as well as some of the stats for the week, such as the top 5 referring websites that have graciously sent me some traffic over the week.

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It only seems like the other week when Wordpress upgraded to 2.8.5, now another release is available, Wordpress 2.8.6 fixes two security problems that can be exploited by registered, logged in users who have posting privileges.

I’ve just backed up the database of my blog and used the auto update option in the Wordpress dashboard and it’s updated to the latest version, so far everything seems to be running ok, and all my plugins seem to be behaving themselves.

I’ve visited a few blogs over the last months and lately this blog has grown in popularity with it’s comments, but the question is, is there a right or wrong way to display comments?

For those who are not sure what I mean by displaying your comments on your blog I shall try to explain…

On a Wordpress set up you have several options for your comments, one is that you can display your comments as the most recent comment at the top of the comments list or most recent at the bottom,  another option which is useful for Website SEO is the option to split comments over pages, for example image you’ve got 40 comments on one post, imaging how big that page would look! So you can spread the comments over so many pages.

So now it’s over to my readers ….

• Do you prefer to have the comments with the latest at the top or the bottom of the comment list?
• How many comments per page do you think is just enough?

It will be interesting to see everyone’s responses about this

So, there I was about to check out the SPAM on my blog when lo and behold the wonderful yellow banner is on the dashboard, telling me that a new release of WordPress is now available, so without further ado I automatically upgraded, why? Well here’s the quote from the Wordpress blog about the release of WordPress 2.8.3.

Those of you who are avid readers of Blazing Minds may have noticed that there has been some subtle changes, some cosmetic and some the addition of some WordPress plugins!

So why the change?

After reading the blog post “Wordpress Plugin Changes and Requests” over at ExtremeJohn’s Blog I decided to make a few changes, first of all I decided to add SexyBookmarks, which I think looks nicer than the earlier social bookmark system I used to have, also started using Analytics 360 which now hooks up my Google Analytics to my WordPress dashboard so I can check out my stats from my blog.

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