Alex Dumitru / Sandossu

WordPress has released their latest version that i was waiting for, but currently i’m afraid of the bugs and security issues that it may have, so i will wait until a new release or for some feedback until upgrading.

This version has brought us some new things, as you may read from the WordPress official website:

1. Native tagging support allows you to use tags in addition to categories on your posts, if you so choose. We’ve included importers for the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins so if you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind.
2. Our new update notification lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available. It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new api.wordpress.org service which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you whats the latest and greatest you can use.
3. We’ve cleaned up URLs a bunch in a feature we call canonical URLs which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more. This helps your users, and it also helps your search engine optimization, as search engines like for each page to be available in one canonical location. More info here.
4. Our new pending review feature will be great for multi-author blogs. It allows authors to submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before they would just have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.
5. There is new advanced WYSIWYG functionality (we call it the kitchen sink button) that allows you to access some features of TinyMCE that were previously hidden.

Also, they’ve released new stuff for developers too:

1. Full and complete Atom 1.0 support, including the publishing protocol.
2. We’re using the new jQuery which is “800% faster.”
3. Behind the user-facing tags system is a really kickass taxonomy system, which adds a ton of flexibility. It’s probably the biggest schema upgrade since version 1.5.
4. The importers have been revamped to be more memory efficient, and you can now add an importer through a plugin.
5. Through hooks and filters you can now override the update system, the dashboard RSS feeds, the feed parser, and tons more than you could in 2.2.
6. The new $wpdb->prepare() way of doing SQL queries.
7. Finally there were over 351 tickets in Trac closed for this release, with over a hundred people contributing. This is the polish, the hundreds of tiny bug fixes and features that make WordPress what it is.

 Download WordPress 2.3.

After i’ve posted tips on how to improve your website, now it’s the time to find out what should you be careful at. There definitely are some things that can ruin your work and make your readers leave.

Look and design

Take care what design or theme do you use, because it may scare the readers or it may be a hard job for them to find out what are they interested in. Don’t place too many animated gifs, weird images and unpleasant font.

Also, don’t fulfill your website with ads, but try to blend them and place fewer, not to disturb the visitors.

Content

I will not talk about the quality of the content, because that definitely has to be high, but the formatting.

Don’t post blocks of text, 3 pages long, because the readers will get bored. Don’t post when you remember, meaning you post 3 posts today and 2 after three weeks, but try to post them regularly. Also, don’t post too many posts, because the readers will get bored. You should find out how many is too many in your niche.

Put yourself in your readers shoes

This is the most useful tip, because there may be other issues that can scare the visitor i might have missed and you have to check your website to find them. In essence, try not to use malicious scripts, pop-ups, expandable flash ads, floaters or anything that might disturb your visitor from it’s try to read the content.

Blogrush has made a lot of buzz in the industry lately and a lot of A bloggers have posted about it. By curiosity i have been trying it for a few days and raised about 44,000 credits from which i got 15,000 impressions, but just 8 clicks. That’s not useful at all and until now it seems to be using the space from my sidebar without me earning anything from it.

Today, on the Blogrush website appear an announcement that states the CTR is that low because of the users that cheat the system and will fix the issue shortly.

IMPORTANT MESSAGE: Click- through rates are very low right now due to problems with some users cheating the system. We are a few days away from removing all abuse from the system and you will see your click-rates increase. We are also moving to a Manual Review Process for all member blogs which will also increase the traffic you receive. Thank you for your patience — we’re working hard to improve this beta version of our service.

If you want to try it, feel free to sign up and please tell me your results in a comment. I’m curious if it’s just me or simply the system isn’t working. From as i’ve read, i’m not an isolated case and many bloggers have very low conversions.

I am waiting to see what are they going to do with the cheaters and if they will really improve the CTR. It would be great if they will make it to at least 1%.

You can see my stats, i have 17 referrals that brought me the most of my credits and with a decent CTR, that would be a nice amount of possibly targeted traffic.

There were rumors that Netscape will shut down their social news website and redirect the Netscape.com domain to the netscape.aol.com news portal. Now it’s official that the social news website will move from Netscape.com to Propeller.com and rebrand. Currently we don’t know how long it will take until the website will move, but Netscape officials stated that they are working hard on a smooth transition. In it’s first months, the website won’t be as good as the Netscape.com was for the websites that post news on it, because of it’s low PR and maybe even low traffic.

WordPress has released version 2.2.3, that doesn’t bring any new features, but fixes bugs and security issues. It is recommended to upgrade immediately, as there are two important issues fixed in this release. You can download wordpress 2.2.3 here.

I got tagged by Bobby Voicu and i have to post where you can find me online, on social networks.

Here you are:

Stumbleupon

Digg

Sk-rt

Netscape

Reddit

Newsvine

Hi5

Shoutwire

Thanks for the tag, Bobby. Now i have to tag others: Alex Ion, Mihnea

When you are young, everyone asks you what job you want when the time will come for one. And the most kids answer this, because they have goals and dream to have a great job. And some of them really work for it and try to get that job.

That’s great because if you don’t have such a goal you will probably have a job that requests much work and low wage and won’t probably bring you any satisfaction.

Set your goal

So, when you work on something ( e.g have a website or job ), set a goal, like being promoted after 6 months or earn $xxxx / month after 9 months. If you set this goal and you are serious on it you should see how far you are from reaching your goal, what you have to do for it and the satisfaction of reaching it.

Don’t give up

Let’s say your goal was to earn $15,000 monthly with your website and you are only earning $950. You will probably give up saying it’s impossible and live with it. That’s definitely not good, because maybe you have chosen a wrong niche, haven’t worked enough or your goal was too high in a very short time. Think of all possibilities and extend your time, but work more this time. you should never give up, but only think what stopped you from reaching your goal.

After you reached your goal

Well, if you managed to reach your goal, you should stop working or thinking that’s enough. You always have to dream higher and set another goals and follow what i wrote upper in this post. Think about the billionaires, they don’t need money and can’t spend the money they have, because they have too much, but are still working and starting businesses.

One of the advices I give to people that ask me is to write much quality content for their blogs and they ask me why should they spend time writing instead of promoting. Well, the most say that content is good for search engines, but they still prefer to spend their time on promotion.

Among that, if you write a few posts a day, not much ( and i will say later why ), you will get your subscribers to read your blog, which means you get visitors. I don’t say promotion is not good, but it is better to update your blog with good content than doing link exchange and submit to directories. You have to spend your time both to write content and promote, because even if you get visitors, if they find old, uninteresting content, they leave. So, keep in mind, writing content with a blog with subscriber and not necessarily means getting visitors.

I am using feedburner on 5 websites and all of them had subscribers, but now it seems i have no subscribers. Maybe feedburner is having problems, but i hope everything will be ok and they won’t lose our subscribers mailing lists.

Google Adsense takes desperate measures to promote the CPA Referrals, because probably it’s not so used, as it has a low-to-none EPC.

Some publishers received an email that announced them their contextual ads will be sometimes replaced with CPA Referrals ads, without having the possibility to opt. That’s another wrong move for Adsense and they are surely losing significant users, especially the CPC is continuously going down.

Here’s the email users are receiving:

Dear Publisher,

Your account has been selected to participate in a limited test of an exciting new targeting feature for AdSense. In the next few days we will enable cost-per-action (CPA) ads to compete in your AdSense for content ad units on a limited portion of your traffic, 5% or less of all ad impressions. These ads will look identical to your current AdSense ads, so there will be no visible changes to you or your users.

Your account has been selected because we believe that you’ll earn more by having these additional targeted, high-quality ads competing in your ad units .

Rather than generating earnings for a click or impression, you’ll be paid a larger amount for each conversion with these new ads. A user who clicks on your ad must complete an advertiser-specified action, such as a purchase or a lead, in order for you to be paid. Remember that these ads do compete with cost-per-click and cost-per-thousand impression ads, so a CPA ad will only win in an auction when we expect it to perform better than a CPC or CPM ad.

You won’t notice any change to the way that your earnings are reported. Revenue from CPA ads will appear just as any other contextually targeted ad revenue is reported.

As a reminder, all information about this test is Google Confidential Information under the applicable Google AdSense terms and conditions.

If you have any questions about this test or would like to opt out of this experiment, please email us at adsense-support@google.com.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

via Jensense