WordPress has recently released a new plugin that bundles many of the great add-ons available to wordpress.com users, into a simple and easy way to get the same features on your self-hosted Word Press website.

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 does the right thing

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.

WordPress 3.1 has been released and brings quite a few new features for users and developers alike.

Highlighted features:

• Internal Linking
• Admin Bar
• Streamlined Writing Interface
• Post Formats
• Network Admin
• List-type Admin Screens
• Exporter/Importer Overhaul
• Custom Content Type Improvements
• Advanced Queries
• Refreshed Blue Admin Color Scheme

New features like the admin bar and internal linking tool will be useful for clients that want to update their own website. WordPress developers and theme creators will find the new Post Formats to be a very welcome addition.

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What is a web browser dinosaur?

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?

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If you are getting a ton of useless traffic from a domain (or domains) and you want to block them.. what would you do? If you are using a Linux based server, you can accomplish this using .htaccess.

“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:

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