Whitehouse2008.info is a really cool new political site, consider it the alltops or popurls of politics. Basically it is an aggregator of all the best from election 2008. It’s very well designed, using a modified form of wordpress, and some plugins. (I know this because I built it..shhhh)…

On the left are the democrats and the right the republicans. It’s not partisan so people from all walks should be able to get value from it. It also features a cool tabbed ebay store module that I created, using yahoo’s tab creator. I can give more details on that if you’re interested.

Right now, I’d be really interested in everyone’s thoughts on the project  - likes, dislikes and suggestions are very welcome.

Thanks in advance!

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Ping.fm is my new best friend, and it should be yours too!
What is ping.fm?

“Ping.fm” is a service that allows you to post to all your microblogs and social networks at once. “Ping.fm” is a much more efficient way to post.

We all have many friends and contacts across the many multiple social networks. Some friends are only on one or two of the different networks, and being able to post to all at once just makes sense. “Ping.fm” makes it so everyone is in the know about your lifestreams.

“Ping.fm” currently supports many networks including the following:Bebo, brightkite, facebook, twitter, wordpress.com, blogger, friendfeed, identi.ca, jaiku, hi5, kwippy, linkedin, livejournal, mashable, myspace, plaxo pulse, plurk, pownce, tumblr, xanga, and I’m sure “Ping.fm”" will add many more before it’s all said and over.

“Ping.fm” has many options for posting, you can apply a filter for each network, or choose to post as a blog post, microblog, or status update. You can use triggers to send “ping.fm” updates to only certain networks that you choose. You can also choose to only send “ping.fm” updates to the networks setup as microblogs as well.

You can also post to “ping.fm” by many third party services including: Aol Instant Messenger, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, IGoogle Gadget, Facebook App, Iphone app, mobile app, or email, or just via their site.

Along with that there’s also a new wordpress plugin for “ping.fm” that I found yesterday called “pingpress.fm”. It replaces such services like wordplurk, or twitter tools by sending an update to all your networks each time you post a new blog post, it’s pretty genius. Definitely a great tool to have around for your lifestreaming needs.

The Pingpress.fm plugin can be downloaded here.

“Pingpress.fm” is a great way to increase the traffic to your blog. Since using “pingpress.fm” I’ve gotten about 15 new subscribers in one day, and noticed a huge increase in my traffic.I highly recommend using “ping.fm” and “pingpress.fm” if you want to take your traffic to higher levels.

Be sure to try out “ping.fm” and “pingpress.fm” and let me know what you think.

Special note - updating all these services also means replies will only come to those networks, which is why I recommend combining “ping.fm” with friendfeed for the best results.
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Wordpress 2.7 - Here we go again!It’s only been a few weeks since the launch of Wordpress 2.6, and there’s still bugs being worked out such as the podcast issue, but already talk of a Wordpress 2.7 release is around the corner, and this one might actually blow your socks off - at least the new features seem a lot more likely to impress me than the ones from 2.5 to 2.6.Here’s a quick overview of what you can expect with Wordpress 2.7:Comment Moderation Keyboard Shortcuts - being a good blogger is about popping out blogs fast, and doing all our other tasks as fast as we can so we can be on to the next blog post. This feature will help with moderating comments, now you can use a key combination like ctrl+s to spam a comment, or some other similar scenario. I can definitely see myself using this feature and think it’ll be a boon to the new wordpress.API for Comment Management - This is one of the best features, it’ll be a mechanism to allow offline integration of comments management, users will be able to use desktop and 3rd party web clients to moderate, edit, reply, delete, spam, or unspam comments. This would be a good tool for programs like scribefire to implement.Easy One Click Plugin Installer - Installing a plugin will now be a lot easier with the new One Click Plugin installs. This feature is available in two plugins namely the one click plugin installer, and my favorite is the one click plugin updater. This is definitely a feature they should have had a long time ago.API for Theme Updates - Wordpress 2.5+ has made huge strides in plugin management, you automatically receive notices of new updates and can upgrade without having to ftp into your server, now they are looking to do the same with Themes, so that users will be able to easily update their themes.Easy Update to the Wordpress core - Core updates is a feature that will be similar to the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin, or the Instant Upgrade of Wordpress plugin. What it does is updates the core wordpress files easily and fast without having to do it manually via ftp. For the non-techies this will be an easy way to transition from upgrade to upgrade.Comment Replies via Admin Panel - This plugin aids administrators ability to reply to comments from the admin panel, there are a few plugins that do this now, but of course having it built in should make it run more smoothly than using the plugins. Here are some similar plugins if you’d like this feature for 2.6 or below: WP AJax Edit Comments, Better Comments Manager and Absolute Comments.Default Google XML Sitemaps - This is a feature that I’m surprised took so long for wordpress to implement. This will include a default sitemap generator, which will create a Google compliant XML sitemap for your blog. If you don’t have a sitemap for your blog now - I highly recommend downloading the Google XML Sitemaps Generator plugin which is what I use currently, cause who knows how long it will take for Wordpress 2.7 to be released?Threaded Comments - This feature allows user to reply to other comments in a threaded manner, replies to comments will show below the original commen, kind of like a threaded forum. Again this is possible via plugins and Brian’s Threaded Comments is a really good one.Option to Subscribe to Comments - The team at WordPress is planning an option to let commenters subscribe to comments that they’d like to follow up on so they can remain in the conversation. This one is actually not a definite addition, it’s still on the burner so to speak - but I currently use the Subscribe to Comments plugin which does the same thing, I would like to see it built into the wordpress Architecture personally. Movable Widgets in Dashboard / Write Pages - This will use ajax and allow the ability to rearrange the write page to your own liking, this could be a cool plugin if implemented right. Batch Editing of Posts - this feature does what it says and allows batch editing of posts and pages, there’s not much more info on it, but I’m wondering if it’s similar to the Manageable plugin. At any cost these are some great plugins, that will be even better as built in features of wordpress. It will make the plugin section less cluttered as I have almost all of these plugins installed, and more. I’m sure also having them part of the wordpress core will make them work more smoothly with each other, and run a lot faster.I’m excited for the new Wordpress 2.7 and can’t wait to give it a try. You can find out more about the great features by visiting the , and I’d like to thank QuickOnlineTips and WebLog Tools Collection for the heads up on the new features.Blog Poll: What is your favorite new feature coming out in 2.7?

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It seems that wordpress has released their newest update - wordpress 2.6.

So far I’ve upgraded to wordpress 2.6, without any hitches, most of my plugins seem to work.

Here’s a list of new Wordpress 2.6 features from the official wordpress blog:

Version/revision saves a copy of a post every time you edit it, allows you to view (not edit) each of those copies (revisions), Shows forward (in time) diffs between any two revisions.
Display captions of images alongside them in posts and pages.
Add paging of Themes in Design panel
Word Count displayed when writing and editing posts and pages
Press This bookmarklet
Add sorting to gallery
Export/import post excerpts
Theme Previewer
Check (assigned) Categories at top Category box in Write/Manage Post
Show when a term is both a tag and a category
Wider Profile fields
TinyMCE 3.1 [Maybe the horizontal rule issue is fixed]
Two categories can have sub-categories with the same name

Wordpress 2.6 Poll:

Have you upgraded to Wordpress 2.6 yet? If not are you planning to? If so, when?

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Have you tried out the Google Nemesis program?

If you sign up with Google Nemesis, and comment on this blog post, you’ll get FREE web hosting for 1 year, and a free domain name. Not to mention the fact that you’ll be entered into a great contest to win a Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, Iphone, or equivalent prize.

Not to mention the fact that many people are using Chris X’s brilliant tactics and software in Google Nemesis to make thousands daily(yes daily, not monthly).

Read my complete review on Google Nemesis.

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I love twittertools by Alexking. It’s a great plugin for sending your blog posts to Twitter.

Twittertools uses the standard tinyurl.com to send links to twitter, which works, and is nice.

Yesterday, I learned of a service called TweetBurner.com. Tweetburner, not only makes urls that are smaller than the ones created by Tinyurl, but Tweetburner also keeps stats of which links get the most hits.

If you’re link is popular it’ll even show up on the front page of Tweetburner.com

(Note on Size: Tinyurl.com vs Twurl.nl = 11 chars vs 8 chars.)

The only problem with Tweetburner, was the twittertools plugin didn’t have support for TweetBurner.com, and I couldn’t find the spot in the code where tinyurl was mentioned.

So, I sent out a message to everyone in my network asking if they knew of a plugin like twittertools, that uses tweetburner instead of twurl.

What I got was a beta version of Twittertools, rewrittern to post tweetburner links to twitter.

The blog was in Dutch, I believe, but the direct link for the plugin is here: Download plugin v0.3 (beta)

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Who Sees Ads, is the ultimate ad management system.

You can literally pick and choose where, when, and how your ads are shown.

You can choose to show certain ads to people based on all kinds of display conditions such as: Search Engines, home page only, Regular Readers, American Readers, etc….

The interface is very visual and intriguing. You can easily create and edit ad rules.

The wizard will create example ads.

The plugin also ensures you’re in compliance with YPN and Adsense guidelines. Also that you don’t accidently click on ads, it has an admin protection built in.

You can also choose the perfect time of day to display the ads, morning, noon, night, at tea time, etc….

I don’t write about plugins’ very often, and I must say this one was definitely one worth writing about!

Go check it out: Who Sees Ads.

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So,

I’ve been incognito, most of the day, working on my new theme for my blog.

I like it a lot - after-all Green is my favorite color.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on my new theme.

Likes / Dislikes?

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Word out on the street is that there’s a new Wordpress ready to launch.

This is all grand and wonderful, but there are some setbacks.

Don’t get me wrong the new design is somewhat sleek - however, I had grown accustomed to the advanced admin menu plugin which essentially turns the menu into dropdown menu’s. Sometimes wordpress is really slow and this makes pretty much all navigation one-click.

I think, with all the new javascript based technologies out there today, such as ajax, jquery, etc - it wouldn’t be too much of an issue for them to include a drop down-like menu standard in Wordpress.

Another plugin that lacks functionality in Wordpress 2.5 is the Gregarious plugin, which I was using for social bookmarking / diggs etc.

I’m also not sure I like the way they redid the side-bar in the new post area.

But it does look a lot better in other ways, and I can see it being a lot easier to navigate for newbies. My beef is probably just the fact that I’m so used to the older styles look, that the new change will take some time to get used to.

Have you tried the new Wordpress? Let me know your thoughts.

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Alright. Via my google feed-reader I discovered this new service called Zemanta. I must say, it is kick-ass! It’s actually an odd plugin.

When you install it into firefox(only available platform currently), and log into your blog(in my case a wordpress blog). It shows you a sidebar in your blog, right where you categories generally are.

It tells you that after you write 300 characters it will give you content that is relative to your blogs. The more you right the more pictures, articles, and even tags it gives you.

Zemanta is a very nifty program, I highly recommend you try it. Probably the best thing about zemanta is the fact that it can take your writing to the next level, by providing easily inserted pictures and content. The semantic layer that it provides is awesome.

Another nifty feature of Zemanta is that it actually scans the web for Creative Commons Licensed content. So blogs will be able to post related images without the fear of being sued by angry artists and photographers.

Of course almost everything, these days has the chance of being abused, and it’s a pretty safe bet that Zemanta may see the birth of many splogs, of course only time will tell.

If you couldn’t tell - this post was actually written with the aid of Zemanta.

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