Are you a Twitter user and WordPress fanatic?   Theme Playground recently published a great list of 50 WordPress peronsalities to follow on Twitter.   Their list includes developers, WordPress bloggers, etc.

I was excited to see our friend Jean-Baptiste Jung make the list, showing he is finally getting the recognition his hard work deserves.   There are also a number of other people included in the list that are worth following, so Twitter users will want to make sure to check Theme Playground’s post.

Some of you may have noticed a lower than normal number of posts over the past two weeks.  This is primarily because of some major server issues we’ve been having, which resulted in all of my sites experiencing quite a bit of downtime.   Fortunately, I think yesterday afternoon we got it figured out and things have been good for the last 24 hours.

While working on our server issues, I had a little spare time that normally would have gone towards blogging.   Here is what I did with my time:

1. Taxes - Having a business requires some changes to how you do your taxes, whether you are an LLC or a sole proprietorship.   As a result, I’ve had to spend some additional time working on the taxes for Apricot Media.  After going through this, I’ve found quite a few ways to improve my processes.  If anyone is interested in learning more about this, I’m planning to write a post about this over the coming weeks on my affiliate marketing blog, Slick Affiliate.
2. Spring Cleaning - Once a year (at least), I’ve always felt it is good to go through your computer and clean up.   This can involve reformatting your computer(s), optimizing databases, backing up files, and cleaning out email and pictures.  We currently have over 120 websites, so this took quite a bit longer this year than in the past.   I also will typically use this time to go through my pictures and music files and make sure everything is backed up on an external drive.

What do you guys do for your computer’s yearly spring cleaning?  Share your tips in the comments!

I’ve never been a major Twitter user, but I have long been fascinated with microblogging as a whole and think it is amazing just how popular and useful Twitter has become over the past year.   TV stations are starting to use it to gather feedback, our local sports radio station is sending out live score updates as tweets, etc.  It is truly amazing!

Back when Twitter was originally launched, I setup an account just like many of you, but I can’t say I use the service as often as a lot of people do.  Maybe it is because I don’t find my own musings as interesting as I find others, or maybe it is the timesink that Twitter can be (just like Facebook), but I just don’t use it as much as I should.

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded my phone to the new Blackberry Storm (which I could write a four page review of how incredible this phone is) and grabbed the TwitterBerry application.   I’ve found that this application has really helped motivate me to use the service a lot more often now that I can easily keep up with things while I’m away from my computer.  

Because I don’t believe I’ve ever mentioned my profile here on WordPress Hacks, I figured now was as good of time as any.  If anyone is interested in following me on Twitter, you can follow me here.

I’m also sure many of you have Twitter accounts and I’d love to keep up with what our readers are doing.   If you’d like me to follow you, leave your profile link in the comments.

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?

Despite the fact that I’ve been blogging for over three years now, the past two days have been a unique experience for me.   For the first time in my blogging career, one of my posts made the front page of Digg.    Truthfully, this isn’t the big accomplishment that it used to be as many bloggers make it there in their first few months of blogging, but this post isn’t about that.  Instead I wanted to post about my experience being on the front page of Digg.

Funny thing is, the post that was Dugg was our best 3-Column WordPress Themes gallery, which was actually published on October 2, 2007.   In that post, we featured our favorite 3-column WordPress themes in a gallery format for people to look through and find a suitable theme for their WordPress blog.   This of course was before any of the premium WordPress themes or content management themes we have today.  After I noticed the post was on Digg’s front page, I decided to revisit this post and noticed how “2007″ it was.   WordPress has grown a lot since then and the quality of themes has really grown with it, making many of these themes really look outdated.

Anyway, I digress.  It was Sunday afternoon before I realized WP Hacks had crashed due to being on the front page of Digg and it took a few hours before I tracked down the reason why and got the site back up and running.   Once that was figured out I decided to dig through the Digg comments (pun intended) and was surprised with what I found:

1) Surely not the “best” themes out there.
Even though some look good, the others are really… well, insignificant.

2) Is it just me or are all of these comments ridiculous? This has become very common on posts like this where they are a ‘best of’ list. My guess is someone is paying people to digg their article and make it FP.

3) Wow, someone just randomly grabs a heap of themes with no discernible consistency of quality at all, jams a bunch of screen shots together into a blog post, then by virtue of having dug every submission of of anyone in his list of ‘friends’ in the last six months, gets this propelled to front page. Then he logs in his army of fake accounts and makes a bunch of comments about his own post.

4) These aren’t that great, and all of these comments look like spam . . .

Seriously?!?   I wasn’t even aware this post had been Dugg for almost 24 hours and suddenly I have an army of accounts and I have friends digging for me?   Is it not possible for people to legitimately make the front page of Digg these days?   I guess I don’t use Digg enough these days to know the “rules for getting to the front page.” With that said, probably the funniest part is this post being close to a year and a half old, yet people act like it was a fresh post showing current themes.

Anyway, for years now I’ve never really focused on Digg traffic and I think the comments above show why.  It is simply a rush of traffic which is usually not targeted to your niche topic, so there is little chance of converting them into readers.   Why exactly would someone want their post on the front page of Digg?  The only potential benefits I can think of are incoming links I suppose.   Otherwise it is more of a hassle than anything.

So, what are your thoughts on Digg?  Do you still use it?

Oh, and to our new readers, if you’re looking for a new WordPress theme, here are a few updated theme galleries we’ve made:

• 140+ Free and Premium WordPress Themes Gallery
• Premium WordPress Themes Gallery