Okay, so the title is a little misleading, but I wasn’t really sure how to title this post.    What I wanted to do was write a quick post to congratulate the WordPress team on the great success that has been WordPress 2.7 launch!

In case you haven’t noticed, we are coming up on 2 full months now since the release of WordPress 2.7  and there hasn’t been a WordPress 2.7.1 release yet, which shows that everything was well tested prior to the official launch.  

For those of you that have been with WordPress for a few years or so, I imagine you’ll appreciate this accomplishment the most.   I remember getting to the 2.x.7 or higher releases with most WordPress branches and I think at least once we got to double digits before the next major release?  

Out of curiosity, for those of you that traditionally like to wait until the first security patch is released to upgrade to the next major branch, have you already upgraded or are you still waiting to experience WordPress 2.7?

A few months ago I switched my Feedburner account over to Google in order to try out their AdSense for feeds program (not on the WP Hacks feed, but only on a few sites I run that convert well with AdSense).  At the time, doing so was strictly voluntary.  According to a few reports I’ve been reading around the blogosphere the past couple days, it looks like everyone who hasn’t already moved their feeds to Google will be prompted to do so in the very near future.

Is this a good thing?  I suppose there are some advantages to having your feeds on your Google account.   So far the only problem I’ve run into since making the switch to Google’s Feedburner is the Feedcount WordPress plugin I was using, which no longer works with the new setup.  I went in and hacked the plugin code a bit to try to get it work, but it still wasn’t working with the new setup.

Anyone else having any problems since switching your Feedburner account to Google?

Akismet has long been accepted as the most popular spam fighting WordPress plugin, closely followed by both Bad Behavior (which can be used along with Akismet) and of course Spam Karma 2.   However, one interesting WordPress plugin I recently came across is the AntiSpam Bee plugin, which was designed by the author specifically to be a competitor with Akismet.

The interesting thing is that this WordPress plugin actually replaces the comments field completely, making it so spammers can’t find it.   Some other listed features:

• Quick & Dirty: activate, done!
• Spam may be marked or deleted immediately
• Saves no data in the database, accordingly no connection
• WordPress 2.7 ready: Design and as well as technical
• Very, very fast execution
• No need to adjust any templates
• Clean up after uninstall the plugin
• Anonymous and independent

Has anyone tried this WordPress plugin yet?   I’d love to some first-hand experiences from people using it.

I think for quite awhile now the self-hosted version of WordPress has been considered by most to be the dominant blogging platform, but up until recently it was purely speculation.

Last Friday, Royal Pingdom did some research and published the top blogging platforms based upon the Technorati Top 100 list.  As you’d expect, WordPress took first place with 27 of the Top 100 blogs (5 more were hosted on WordPress.com).   Of the self-hosted blogs, Movable Type is in second place with 12 blogs.

For your reference, here are the 27 WordPress blogs (links are included on the original post):

• Perez Hilton
• Problogger
• Chris Brogan
• Zen Habits
• Copyblogger
• Think Progress
• VentureBeat
• SlashFilm
• Global Voices Online
• The Caucus Blog - NYTimes
• Bits Blog - NYTimes
• Freakonomics - NYTimes
• Pajamas Media
• Just Jared
• Smitten Kitchen
• Hot Air
• Neatorama
• TechCrunch
• Smashing Magazine
• Washington Wire - WSJ
• Michelle Malkin
• Daily Blog Tips
• Yanko Design
• Mashable
• Roy Tanck’s weblog
• CrunchGear
• Delicious:days

It is nice to see the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and New York Times (NY Times) both listed here.  It would be interesting if this study is done every year to see trends.   I would imagine WordPress will be over 50% of the Technorati Top 100 list within a few years as some of those blogs switch away from Typepad, move their WordPress.com blog to self-hosted, etc.

Over the weekend I noticed that WordPress has launched a sweet new visual resource for their blogging software, which can be found at WordPress.tv.   As you would probably guess by the domain extension, WordPress.tv will provide video tutorials for both WordPress.org and WordPress.com installations.

If you look at it now, you’ll find a lot of extremely basic tutorials for people new to WordPress, but one cool thing is you can submit requests to see future WordPress video tutorials.  I would imagine over time you’ll start to find a lot more advanced WordPress tutorials.

Some other cool things about WordPress.tv:

WordPress.tv is also now the place to find all that awesome WordCamp footage that was floating around the web without a home. See the presentations you missed and get a peek at behind-the-scenes action. We call it WordCampTV.

You’ll also find slideshows of presentations made by Automattic employees and other WordPress gurus, plus interviews I’ve done with the media and fellow bloggers.

I hope you’ll consider WordPress.tv not just a support resource, but also a place to hang out and keep up with all the geeky goodness going on in the WordPress community. Tune in regularly for fresh content and updates to the WordPress.tv blog. Lots more is on the way.