Introducing WordPress Jetpack.

What features does it have?

Version 1.1 of Jetpack includes:

• Gravatar Hovercards: Find out who’s commenting on your posts with enhanced information for Gravatars (includes full name, bio, other web profiles).
• WordPress.com Stats: Keep on top of your traffic with powerful and simple to understand statistics for your site.
• Twitter Widget: Keep your readers more up to date by syncing your tweets to your site via a simple widget.
• Shortcodes: Quickly add movies, images, and more to your posts and pages with a single line of code.
• Shortlinks: Automatically creates an easy to copy/paste mini-url for any post on your site.
• : Use the famous markup language to quickly create beautiful mathematical expressions and equations.
• Sharedaddy: Your readers can easily share your posts via email or their favorite social networks.
• After the Deadline: Your writing will improve thanks to this artificial intelligence based spell, style, and grammar checker.

Some of these features use the powerful WordPress.com cloud, others are popular features provided for the convenience of not having to install and manage several separate plugin installations.

It’s easy to see that this one plugin, might just replace quite a few plugins that people use everyday.

Which feature interests you the most?

Microsoft has recently launched the ie6countdown.com website to help transition people over to a more modern browser. From a web developer point of view, let us just say: “Three cheers for Microsoft!”.

10 years ago a browser was born.

Its name was Internet Explorer 6. Now that we’re in 2011, in an era of modern web standards, it’s time to say goodbye.

This website is dedicated to watching Internet Explorer 6 usage drop to less than 1% worldwide, so more websites can choose to drop support for Internet Explorer 6, saving hours of work for web developers.

In a recent tweet, they said:

It’s not often that we encourage you to stop using one of our products, but for #IE6, we’ll make an exception

Why is this a good idea?

There are still quite a few people in countries all around the world using IE6, and helping them transition to a newer/better browser not only helps them, but helps advance the web.

To read more about why updating your browser is a good idea, read our recent article Web Browser Dinosaurs Still Among Us. Also, don’t forget to leave a comment below and let us know what you think about the ie6countdown website.

A web browser dinosaur is a web browser that has outlived it’s time. It should be extinct by now, but for some reason it just won’t go away.

We get quite a few visitors here at Power Pix, and we are still surprised by how many people access our website with ancient web browsers. If you really love something, you have to be strong enough to let it go.. now may be the time.

Why do people still use them?

While we have not performed a formal survey on this topic .. (this might be a good idea), there may be a couple of good reasons why people still cling to their ancient web browsers.

• Maybe they have an old operating system that came with an outdated web browser installed by default.
• Maybe they don’t know how to upgrade their web browser.
• Maybe they are not aware that there are other web browser choices.
• Maybe they are just plain “used to it” and don’t want to change.

These could all be legitimate reasons for keeping the dinosaur alive.. but at what cost?

Why should I change or upgrade my web browser?

The internet (web pages/web content) has come a long way since the early days of text based websites with a few blinking marquee banners. (Now we can deliver silky smooth blinking graphics using things like Flash or some other new technology *sarcasm*.) The real point is.. the web is evolving at break-neck speeds and that means the tool that you use to view it, needs to evolve as well.

To make sure that a website renders correctly for everyone, many web developers are forced to use “tricks” and “hacks” to make a website look and work right. This adds extra bloat and slows the website down just to accommodate older browsers.

What choices are there?

When it comes to browsers that are trying to support web based standards, and help advance the web.. here are some good choices:

• Google Chrome: Google Chrome has a lot going for it. It is fast, VERY secure, supports many web standards, and also supports add-ons/extensions.
• Fire Fox: This is also a good choice as it is quite speedy, supports many web standards, and also provides extensibility through add-ons.
• Opera: Fast, supports many web standards, provides extensibility through add-ons.
• Safari: Fast, supports many web standards, provides extensibility through add-ons.
• IE 9 Beta: Should be faster than previous versions, increased web standards support, provides extensibility through add-ons.

Just for fun..

Try out the following tests on your current web browser and see how well it does. If your using a dinosaur, you may be in for a surprise.

• HTML5 Test: HTML5 is currently under development, as the next major release of the HTML standard.
• CSS3 Selectors Test: CSS3 is also under development and contains some very exciting tools for website development.
• Acid3 Test: Tests how well your browser supports the DOM (Document Object Model) and JavaScript.
• Chrome Experiments: See how well your browser deals with the experiments on this website.
• Internet Explorer Test Drive: Even more entertaining tests for your browser to perform.

We hope that you found this information useful and will help us move the Web Browser Dinosaurs into their rightful place .. the museum.

“Wait.. did you say block traffic.. that sounds crazy right?” Not necessarily.

• There is good traffic (potential customers, people who are interested in reading your content..)
• There is bad traffic (comment spammers, image hot linking, spoofed links on other sites linking to yours..)

To block a certain domain or domains from accessing your website, you can edit your .htaccess file with the following:

<Limit GET HEAD POST>
order allow,deny
deny from annoyingdomain1.com
deny from annoyingdomain2.com
allow from all
</LIMIT>

Just change out the domain (or domains) that you want to block, add the code to your .htaccess file and upload to your server. Those domains should now get a 403 (forbidden) error when attempting to access your website

If you use WordPress (you don’t have to be using WordPress for this to work), the WordPress codex contains a very useful article about combating comment spam and blocking access.

They recommend using:

SetEnvIfNoCase Via evil-spam-proxy spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer evil-spam-domain.com spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer evil-spam-keyword spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Via pinappleproxy spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer doobu.com spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer poker spammer=yes

Order allow,deny
allow from all
deny from env=spammer

Hope you found this tip useful!

So how do you exclude categories from your feed when using FeedBurner?

The solution is easier than you might think…

Exclude Word Press Categories

We stumbled onto this little trick from jaypeeonline.net and decided to share it here.

First determine the post category you want to exclude by going to your admin panel and click on Posts > Categories, and then click the “edit” link. In the edit window, look at the URL in your browser URL bar to see the category ID. It should look something like this:

http://[yourdomain.com]/wp-admin/categories.php?action=edit&cat_ID=5
The ending number is the post category ID.

Now that you know the post ID, you can modify your feed URL to exclude it.

Original Feed URL:

http://[yourdomain.com]/feed/

Edit Feed URL to:

http://[yourdomain.com]/feed?cat=-5

Adding another category:

http://[yourdomain.com]/feed?cat=-5&cat=-6
Or try…
http://[yourdomain.com]/feed?cat=-5,-6

Sounds great, but what if we want to include a single category or certain categories in the feed and exclude the rest? Try the solution below.

Include Word Press Categories

Original Feed URL:

http://[yourdomain.com]/feed/

Edit Feed URL to:

http://[yourdomain.com]/feed?cat=5

Adding another category:

http://[yourdomain.com]/feed?cat=5&cat=6
Or try…
http://[yourdomain.com]/feed?cat=5,6

Just remove the “-” and your ready to go!