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?

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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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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Here is a list of great plugins that you may find useful incorporating into your Word Press website.

Shopp

The Shopp plugin has been around for a little while and continues to be our plugin of choice when integrating an e-commerce solution for Word Press. They offer extra modules for common gateways and shipping providers, and with the ability to modify the page templates as child templates, you can style it almost any way you want.

Shopp is an e-commerce plugin that adds a feature-rich online store to your WordPress-powered website or blog. Get your store up and running in minutes. Then, take it to the next level with the flexibility of Shopp’s customization tools that allow production studios and power users to tailor every aspect of the shopping experience.

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When adding your feed URL to FeedBurner, you may want to exclude some categories from your feed. A simple problem demands a simple solution.. but figuring out how to do it may not be obvious.

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

The solution is easier than you might think…

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