It seems just a few weeks since I upgraded to version 2.1.3 but now Version 2.2 is available. Yeah! Naturally, I will wait until 2.2.1 is out to fix the inevitable bugs… But version 2.2 sounds great! Just in case, you didn’t know already here’s the announcement.

On behalf of the entire WordPress team, I’m proud and excited to announce the immediate availability of version 2.2 “Getz” for download. This version includes a number of new features, most notably Widgets integration, and over two hundred bug fixes. It’s named in honor of tenor saxophonist Stan Getz.

Goodies:

• WordPress Widgets allow you to easily rearrange and customize areas of your weblog (usually sidebars) with drag-and-drop simplicity. This functionality was originally available as a plugin Widgets are now included by default in the core code, significantly cleaned up, and enabled for the default themes.
• Full Atom support, including updating our Atom feeds to use the 1.0 standard spec and including an implementation of the Atom Publishing API to complement our XML-RPC interface.
• A new Blogger importer that is able to handle the latest version of Google’s Blogger product and seamlessly import posts and comments without any user interaction beyond entering your login.
• Infinite comment stream, meaning that on your Edit Comments page when you delete or spam a comment using the AJAX links under each comment it will bring in another comment in the background so you always have 20 items on the page. (I know it sounds geeky, but try it!)
• We now protect you from activating a plugin or editing a file that will break your blog.
• Core plugin and filter speed optimizations should make everything feel a bit more snappy and lighter on your server.
• We’ve added a hook for WYSIWYG support in a future version of Safari.

In addition there were also dozens of UI and accessibility improvements, ranging from more concise wording around options and links to things like a view and preview link above the content box when you’re editing a post or page.

I’m excited by the plugins for widgets b ecoming part of the core. No more need to install the separate plugin!

In the last 12 months, paid blogging has really taken off in a number of ways, with bloggers getting positions in companies or freelancing. But there have also been a number of companies set up for bloggers to ‘sell’ their services to. This post includes the most recent reviews of the Paid Blogging Companies. It’ s not all of them, but the ones I have had most experience with.

• Payperpost Review *
  
• ReviewME *
• SponsoredReviews *
• Blogitive *

(updated: May 25th to add this review)

Worth Watching, but there are ‘issues’.

• BloggerWave (never did any posts for them – payment issues reported)

Plus a more general article here on sponsored blogging. * Payment-wise: I’ve had no problems with payments from any of them so far. All have paid promptly and in full. I have done other posts with Blogsvertise, too. But I haven’t reviewed them yet. I’m also a member of BloggerWave, Loudlaunch, and Smorty, but I can’t comment on the latter two yet at all. What companies have you had experience of as a blogger or an advertiser? Which were good or bad?

Earlier I wrote a review about SmartPageRank. I like their simple website, and functional results pulled from Google, Alexa and so on. Recently, though, I visited their website, and found a link on their front page to their *new* Backlink PageRank Check.

For those of you who recently were downgraded like me to a lower PR ranking, this page provides a list of your backlinks with their relative PR ranking. I’m including a graphic here, and it’s quite useful as it shows all your links. The only problem is that the list is unsortable, but this is a Beta. Perhaps that will change.

The graphic is checking back links for my domain minus ‘www’ to see what residual effect the confusion had. It’s negligible, less than 1% of my results! Did you check?

Do check out this and you can compare your results to see what posts are rewarded or penalized. Do come back and let me know if you have any other good tools for backlink analyzing or unusual results!

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