You are receiving this update because your blog has passed our strict Quality Guidelines and criteria -- we believe you have a high-quality blog and we are happy you're a member of our network!

Why am I so glad that I passed? My gut feeling tells me that BlogRush is going to play a big role in promoting member blogs in the years to come and it's a good feeling to know that I'm in the loop.

I cannot verify that 10,000 blogs were removed from the network after the review process, but I do know that John Reese isn't someone with a reputation for fibbing. It's tough enough trying to get your blog noticed without having to clamour for traffic with thousands of spam, scraper and black-hat blogs. It's good to know that I'm part of a quality network of blogs.

The first thing I'm gonna do is to give the thin widget a swing. I hope they allow us to control the look and feel of the widget even more. The 3D border doesn't sit well with my creatively fussy genes.

Congrats to all fellow BlogRushers... or is it BlogRush-ites?

Tags: BlogRush, BlogRush review, BlogRush review results, BlogRush Phase 2

John Reese, the founder of BlogRush is no stranger to the online community. He is a brilliant Internet Marketer who knows exactly what products to produce and how to produce them.

The procedure to sign up and get the widget up and running seems simple enough. You only need to enter a couple of important details and a snippet of code will be generated. You then have to paste this code into your blog where you want the widget to appear. I like the clean interface and the easy navigation. Lots of features are still under development but worry not. John Reese is not someone who builds half baked products.

If you're a newbie, I think the only trouble you might have is where to paste the code in your blog. However, John is working on a help area for users and video guides to show us step-by-step procedures.

Those who are using blog themes with a sidebar width of 200 pixels or less might find that the widget sends your blog out of alignment. Since my blog theme is a one of a kind hack that I put together myself (based on the Almost Spring theme), it took me about an hour to get the width adjustments just right.

The Widget will appear on your blog displaying 5 different posts from other blogs and are related to your blog content. For every time the BlogRush Widget its displayed on your blog, your blog posts will be displayed in the widget of other blogs. That means that if you have 50 visits to your blog, you will get 50 exposures on other people blogs.

The thing that I'm excited about most is the potential Viral Growth of Traffic that BlogRush can give you. The widget has a link to Blog Rush at the bottom and if your visitors join and use the BlogRush widget on their blog, you will get credits.

The more people that join BlogRush under you (and use the widget on their blog) the more exposure of your blog you will have. And it doesn't stop there, if the people that joined under you get new members to join you will get credit for their widget exposures too.

Simply put, the more people you refer the more viral exposure of your blog you will have. This is explained in the introductory video on the BlogRush site.

BlogRush is still in Beta but if John Reese is as good as everybody knows he is, then this widget is going to revolutionize the way bloggers get traffic to their site. The ones to benefit the most are the early birds.

I'd like to see users given the ability to change the color scheme of the widget to match their site, but this is a small issue compared to the potential benefits BlogRush presents.

Sign Up with Blog Rush here and get FREE traffic to your site or blog

Tags: John Reese, BlogRush, Blog Traffic, Wordpress Widget

While their FAQ indicates that the default number of links per page is 5, you will often see more than that. So here's four methods you can use to control the number and location of Kontera links on your pages.

You can specify which part of your page Kontera can place links by using the following :

To restrict the parts of your page that you DON'T want Kontera to appear, you can use the reverse of the first method :

If you're using these methods on a regular web page, you can code the tags into the sections where you want them, but for blogs, there are a couple of ways to do it :

• You can hard code them into your posts. I don't recommend this as it can be a bit messy especially after you have hundreds or thousands or posts.
• A better alternative would be to code these tags into your index.php, single.php and category.php files. You will need to find the section where "the_content()" appears and place your Kontera tags above and below it. This means that the Kontera links will only appear within your post's text.

  *Disclaimer: I have not tested this blogging platforms other than Wordpress 2.1.

  <div class=KonaBody> < ?php the_content("&nbsp;&nbsp;continue reading ".chr(34).get_the_title('', '', false).chr(34)." &raquo;"); ?> </div>

Another (outdated) way of limiting the number of links that appear would be to specify it in the "var" line of you Kontera script :

While the method above still works, Kontera encourages publishers to email them at support@kontera.com and inform them to limit the number of links you wish to have per page. This is then set at their end, which frees you from having to mess with any code. I personally think it's archaic to do it this way, but that's Kontera for you. Let's hope they improve their user admin panel to allow publishers more control.

So there you have it. To get the most out of your Kontera ContentLinks ads, vary the use of the methods above. Happy Kontera-ing.

Tags: Kontera, Kontera ContentLinks

"Hmmm..." I thought to myself, "but I just upgraded to 2.1"

I know, I know... Wordpress is now in version 2.2.x. I'm always a couple of steps behind in these sort of things. My motto is "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"

So I took a peek at my RSS feed and wouldn't you know it, the feed WAS truncated. Googling for the answer, it seems that there IS a bug in Wordpress 2.1 that cuts your RSS feed. Cavemoney50.com states it like this :

And so I'm using Cavemonkey's plugin right now for full RSS feeds, but there is another popular plugin called Complete RSS 1.0 from NeoSmart

Busy people (fellow webmasters especially) find RSS feed invaluable as they keep up with what's happening on their favorite blogs and sites using feed readers. One simple reason to offer a full RSS feed is that your reader may not have the time to visit your site. Unless you can adequately bait the reader with your first couple of lines, a summary may not be sufficient to interest the reader to visit your site. So it's always good to consider offering a full RSS feed in your blog, and in case you've recently upgraded your Wordpress version, make sure you always check your RSS feed to see if any bugs have truncated them.

Tags: wordpress, wordpress RSS feed, RSS feed, truncated RSS feed

Some bugs reported to be fixed:

• ATOM feed validation fixes
• XML-RPC fixes
• Widget backward compatibility fixes
• Widget layout fixes for Internet Explorer 7
• Page and Text Widget improvements

Numerous security vulnerabilities are also addressed:

• Remote shell injection in PHPMailer
• Remote SQL injection in XML-RPC
• Unescaped attribute in default theme

The detailed instructions for upgrading your Wordpress can be found here.

You might also be interested in reading my experience upgrading from WordPress 1.5 to 2.1

Tags: WordPress 2.2.1, Wordpress Upgrade