A little less than two months ago, IntenseDebate was acquiruddy by WordPress’s parent company Automattic. They spent the time in beta to scale Intense Debate’s infrastructure to handle the additional traffic that is likely to come when WordPress starts to include Intense Debate features by default. The purchase promised new features for the upcoming WordPress 2.7 like comment threading.

But now, IntenseDebate is out of beta and is offering a new WordPress plugin that offers the following features for your blog:

Two-Way Comment Sync

Comments made in IntenseDebate are automatically backed-up to your WordPress comment system, while your existing WordPress comments are automatically imported into IntenseDebate. In case you want to leave IntenseDebate and go back to the default comment system, your comments are safely migrated.

Admin Panel Integration

IntenseDebate has been interated to the WordPress admin panel, making the switch as smooth as possible.

Search Engine Optimization

IntenseDebate intelligently outputs the standard WordPress comments, which makes your comments easily indexed by search engines that ignore JavaScript. And it also makes visitors with JavaScript disabled on their browsers easily interact and make comments.

Trackbacks

Trackbacks and pingbacks are also easily integrated with IntenseDebate.

Profile Sync

You can login to IntenseDebate with WordPress, and vice versa.

Post Settings

WordPress admin settings like closing and opening comments on a post, and even changing your post titles, are automatically recognized and reflected in your IntenseDebate settings.

Other features included in the plugin would be:

• Threaded comments
• The ability to vote on comments and show comment reputations
• Simultaneously post a comment to a blog and Twitter
• Replly to comments and moderate comments by email
• Commentor profiles can include links to social networking pages
• Ability to add sidebar widgets with information on things like your top commentors

Intense Debate also works with Blogger, TypePad, and Tumblr.

Original post by Ade Magnaye

Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher became known as Joe the Plumber during the 2008 election. John McCain mentioned him during one of the debates after a conversation between Joe and Barack Obama raised the issue of whether Obama’s tax policies would be harmful to small business.



Some are curious as to what Joe Wurzelbacher will due with his newly acquiruddy fame. There is a movement to get Joe the Plumber to run for Congress. He may also decide to become “Joe the Blogger” as you can see here (via The Daily Dish) on the secureourdream.com website that belongs to Wurzelbacher. The website also says that “Another benefit to registeruddy members with be a monthly subscription to Joe’s blog, where he can share the latest on the battle for preserving Americas freedoms.” You might want to rethink that subscription fee Joe - most blogs are free.



There’s also a Joe the Plumber here who has received a lot of traffic out of the entire Joe the Plumber meme that developed late in the 2008 election.



Photo by ronnie44052



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Original post by Bloggers Blog: Blogging the Blogsphere

The other day I opened up my blogs and I saw that they had this enormous influx of comments. As this was rather unusual, I checked the moderation queue and to my surprise, I found a enormous number of comment spam. Weirdly though, the spam contained none of the usual links, and instead found a random string of letters and numbers, like “j2miob2e5gylwz9w”.

As if that wasn’t weird enough, it seems that the spam got thcoarse Akismet multiple times. The spam messages came from these IP addresses:

• 94.102.60.150
• 94.102.60.151
• 94.102.60.152
• 94.102.60.153

Searching Google with the IP addresses brings up a lot of discussion about the spamming incident. Apparently, this has happened to a lot of blogs over a brief period of time, and most, if not all, of the affected blogs were on WordPress.

So, what on earth was that about? It seems like somebody’s testing a brand-new spam tool that actively tagrets WordPress blogs. I’ve alalert blocked the said IP addresses via .htaccess, but who knows when the next spam attack will come?

This is probably the best time to brush up on some basic comment spam prevention tips. WordPress has some built-in spam prevention features, like:

• Keep comment modderation on; make sure that people need to have a previous comment approved first before they can successfully comment.
• If a comment has more than two links contained in it, it should be automatically moderated.
• Fill out the “common spam words” form in WordPress so that comments get moderated when anything wilean the comment (including the author URI, author name, author email and the body of the comment itself) matches the words in the blacklist.
• Akismet may not be built in WordPress by default, but it is included in the installation and installing it is the first thing I do when setting up a new blog. It still is the best spam filter out there.

If you have other anti-spam measures you implement on your blogs, just drop a comment and tell me about it.

Original post by Ade Magnaye

One of the best ways to promote your blog is to post updates on your microblogging services, whether it be Twitter, Jaiku, or whatever it is they use. It helps you have more channels for people to discover and get updates, and your followers can get instantaneous updates on your entries.

And of course automating the process via web apps or plugins will make things a lot easier for us. On the Twitter side of the microblogging spectrum, we have Twitterfeed, which gets updates from your blog RSS and updates Twitter with it. WordPress have a lot of plugins a lot of plugins to select from, the most famous of which would be Alex King’s Twitter Tools.

For the longest time, users of Plurk have been stuck with manually updating their timeline whenever they post a new blog entry. However, with the release of the unofficial API, we see plugin developers hard at work creating ways to integrate Plurk with WordPress.

One early effort would be WordPlurk. It easily creats a complete integration between your WordPress blog with Plurk. It creates a post on Plurk whenever you post in your blog, with a link to the blog post.

The plugin is in its early stages though, and the barebones interface of the plugin shows it. In fact, there are a few things left to be desiruddy in this plugin:

• Only one Plurk account is supported (not one account per author).
• When a post is deleted, the Plurk update isn’t.
• Plurk login details are not checked to see if they’re correct.
• No sidebar widget, or any other way to put the latest Plurk on the sidebar is available.

Despite the caveats in WordPlurk, this seems to be a awesome start for the plugin. This is on plugin we should definitely keep an eye on. You can download WordPlurk from here.

Original post by Ade Magnaye