IdeaFry is a new platform that built on multi-user WordPress blogging engine, i.e. WordPress MU. With just three steps listed in the following: Create a blog, name your blog, and then choose your theme, you’re jumpstart your own blog in less than one (1) minute.

WordPress is widely used in the blogosphere, where it proved effective in customize your own blog, and you also can find lot of third-party plugins that are available in the Wordpress community. However, there is also a fact that you need to continuously watch out for update if your WordPress blogging engine is self-host, i.e. WordPress.org, unless you’re using the WordPress.com platform.

Users will find this IdeaFry similar to WordPress.com, however, they can make money instantly from Google AdSense once they’ve successfully sign-up to IdeaFry. You’ll find three (3) columns of advertisement sponsored by Google, i.e. in the right-hand side and footer of your default theme, whether you like it or not. Also, the maximum storage space for your blog is 10MB and there are twenty-one (21) themes available for you to choose if you don’t like the default WordPress theme.

A great news today for the users of WordPress.com, a blogging platform as the company behind it, Automattic is granting more online storage. 3G instead of 50MB will likely make their users happy about it and no doubt, for anyone who embark on blogging initiative, the revised offer of online storage size will make WordPress.com as the number one choice among other blogging platforms such as Blogger and TypePad. As mentioned on the WordPress.com’s news, you only get 1G on Blogger free account while if you want to get 3G of online storage on TypePad, you need to pay $300 in TypePad’s Premium package. Nevertheless, if an user feel that 3G is still not enough, she can upgrade to 5G for 20 credits (Credits cost $1 each), 15G for 50 credits and 25G for 90 credits. If you want to learn more about the upgrade plan, there is a help page on this issue.

I always believed the more space offered in any consumer-oriented blogging platforms is good for both the users and the company that developed it. First, there are countless blogging platforms, such as Google’s Blogger, Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces, TypePad, Yahoo 360, LiveJournal, Xanga, and social networking platforms like Friendster, MySpace or Facebook also allowed users blogging on their accounts. In order to stand out of the competition, more online space seemed to be a simple strategy. Secondly, to encourage the existing bloggers or would-be bloggers to create compelling content without worry of the space requirements, blogging platform providers must thus increase the online space incrementally.

I’ve been a long time never go back and visit the WordPress.com since I host my blog at Media Temple, a web hosting company. Just came across WordPress.com has released a statistics plugin for the bloggers. I trying to understand that very few people nowadays find their web traffic reports accurately. You can read my another post pertaining to this issue. When I came across a new stats (statistics) plugin, and read the “special” features that available on its web page, you’ll sense that there’s something stated really good about that particular stats plugin that tailored enough to one potential user’s interests.

This type of stats plugin is good in such a way when we realize our visitors are getting bigger, and much bigger everyday, our self-confidence grow, or vice versa our egotism also grow, maybe. We all know that the Internet didn’t invent anything, but a huge group of people existed, distributed their ideas, softwares, propaganda, and etc. Just as the various stats plugins that we encountered everyday, regardless the offer of these stats plugins are accurate or not, these tools helped us realize a single thing: Internet is a tremendous thing and it’s free, that’s mean it’s going to be funded by advertisements. We read a lot of blogs or online newspapers and all these providers are free, just because of the advertisements. However, advertisements or the sponsors, need to know the web traffic report of the sites that they sponsor. As many bloggers or the online technology news providers, they do not need the detail web traffic reports, but the sponsors need. Thus, there’s a room for the growth of these stats plugin or the click-stream data provided by some companies, simply because the number of visitors or the browsing behaviors of these visitors are truly very important.

I’ve been tracking a new blogging engine, Lingua Project which powered by PHP, MySQL, and Ajax. If you really would like to know what a Lingua is all about, you can visit their official blog, that run with the Lingua software, i.e. version 0.1 Alpha. Their developers are completing some coding practices with respect to spam protection, such as the integration with Akismet software, default theme redesign, and improving its existing administration control panel. In other word, Lingua software still not completed yet, as you can see the progress on this web page.

Lingua Project is found by Alex Suraci; (his home page is temporarily unavailable at the time of writing). In the recent years, the competition for blogging softwares is also intensified over the past few years. For a new player such as Lingua to stand out of the crowd, what they can do is developing the enhanced features of flexibility. Flexibility is critical for a newly released software. Thus, they planned to develop a WordPress importer, that allowed users of WordPress easily switch their blogs to this software. Also, I believe they need to find at least a few web hosting companies that want to be their partners in offering a one-click install service for the users that want their blogs host under this engine.

I just came across that WordPress.com has adopted openID, an open, decentralized distributed identity platform. This is an attempt to served as a single sign-in standard on the web for their users. WordPress.com is not the only blogging platform that announced to support openID, the other player LiveJournal has previously made announcement. Moreover, some of the big names are backing the support for openID including AOL (read this post), Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Wikipedia.

The main reason for WordPress.com to adopt openID is to ease their users by signing in a number of sites with their existing WordPress.com accounts, according to their official blog post.

I previously posted a post on WordPress 2.0.6 in the beginning of this year, and it’s less than one month, another new stable version of WordPress, i.e. 2.0.7 has been released to the market. This is what they said:

Recently a bug in certain versions of PHP came to our attention that could cause a security vulnerability in your blog. We’re able to work around it fairly easily, so we’ve decided to release 2.0.7 to fix the PHP security problem and the Feedburner issue that was in 2.0.6. It is recommended that everyone running WordPress 2.0.6 or lower upgrade to this new version.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Due to the above problems, WordPress has decided to fix the bugs for the users by released this version. For users that want to upgrade to this version, just follow the instruction as listed in this web page. On the other hand, I’m still using 2.0.4, I will upgrading to this version and let you know by then.

Update: I’ve just upgraded my blog from the default version, i.e. 2.0.4 to 2.0.7. If you experienced difficulty in accessing this blog, please accept my apologies here.

WordPress has announced that it has released its latest stable version, WordPress 2.0.6 two days ago. WodPress revealed that this release included an important security fix. I’ve been intrigued by the fact that this release has also solved the HTML quicktags issue in Safari browsers and the problem of comments that could mess up one’s blog layout. You can download it by clicking here.

As a user, it’s been a great news to know the latest development of the software platform that I used. On the other hand, I would rather my hosting provider, i.e. Media Temple to upgrade my current version 2.0.4 to this version than do it myself.

I just met a friend at a bookstore. I am going there to buy some VB 2005 and Ruby on Rails related books. This friend told me he found the first problem in customizing his blog, i.e. did some CSS edit with Yahoo! web hosting. (He was using Yahoo! web hosting for nearly six months). After he changed his blog’s header weight, the update only take effect after 24 hours. He asked why he needs to wait for so long to view the changes he did on his wordpress blog? His CSS script errors or Yahoo! servers’ problem? I can’t answer it because I’m not with him when he was doing the CSS edit.

However, I experienced something I do not like Yahoo! web hosting package. I once install and customize a WordPress blog in Yahoo!’s server for one of my clients. Though I got the option to make my client’s blog as the home page, Yahoo! by default will force that blog to a subfolder. To be more specific, my client’s blog home page address will become, i.e. www.example.com/blog/. Moreover, all the pages are within the subfolder, put an example, the “About” page, would appear as www.example.com/blog/about.

Assume my client want to host another blog in the same Yahoo! hosting package by using Movable Type, another blogging software available in Yahoo!. After you done the Movable Type installation, it would appear as the following URL, i.e. www.example.com/blog1/. I feel the methodology behind this setting is: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Just take it as granted.

I even read some sources on the web, there are issue pertaining to permalink when you host your blog with Yahoo! For all sort of issues here, I hope Yahoo! aware of this and take action towards in integrating WordPress and Movable Type with its hosting package. Try to improve its blogging package and thus attract more customers.