Considering that you’re reading my post i’m pretty sure you are either looking for a better webhost, or just curious about what Bluehost can offer.

Click here to register at Bluehost for only $5.95/mo

Before i get started listing the reasons why your webhost sucks and you should move to bluehost, i have to mention that i’ve been  with bluehost for over 5 years now, and this review represents my personal opinion about this webhost.

1. Bluehost has a monthly fee as low as 5.95$ and offers a wide range of features

6 bucks every month is nothing considering what you get in return: a free domain name, excellent reliability, loads of one click install scripts(powered by the amazing simplescripts, not the crappy fantastico almost every webhost offers)

Click to see the full feature list

2. Amazing support

Yeah, it happened to me too: the server went down and my sites were unavailable, so i promptly contacted the tech support. This happened a couple of times over the past 5 years and every time i’ve encountered an issue the staff clearly stated the issue(faulty ram, faulty hdd, etc) and ensured me my website will be up shortly and no data was lost what so ever.

3. Simplescripts script installer

As i’ve mentioned before, bluehost provides a service called SimpleScripts to all of its customers. Simplescripts is an advanced software installation service that can install automatically a huge variety of scripts: from blogging scripts to forum scripts, polls chat scripts etc. Trust me the fantastico software installer you’re using now is crap compared to simplescripts.

4. Extremely simple Google Apps integration

Lots of webhosts charge you a fee in order to be able to create  email addresses linked to your own domain (e.g tom@thaslayer.com ).  Other webhosts have the crappy web based email services. Why not have the ability to create your own email accounts which use Gmail(yes you’ve read it well). Google offers the app system free of charge and using the bluehost panel its easy to setup your domain to point its email servers to google’s gmail servers.

5. 30 day 100% money back guarantee

If  within 30 days you are unsatisfied with Bluehost you can cancel anytime and get your payment 100% refunded.

Click here to register at Bluehost for only $5.95/mo

As i’ve mentioned the review above is based on my experience with bluehost, and if you are currently stuck at a crappy webhost i’m encouraging you to sign up with webhost and get relieved of all your hosting worries! Remember that bluehost offers a full 30days money back guarantee!

You can see the twitter bird icon on millions of websites, and what you can notice is that many websites use the same icons(maybe you too!) and this is the time when you can start wondering “why shouldn’t i be different?”. This is where the talented artists come in, who release amazing icons and icon packs(mostly on deviant art).

I’ve done some research and collected 17 icons & sets which will get your blog, website or forum readers look out to the tweet icon.

Amazing Twitter bird icon sets

Remember to read the licensing of every icon/icon set on the download pages!

1. Twitter Icons .PSD

2. Free twitter bird icons

3. Twitter Bird

4. Adiumy Twitter

5. Blue Bird Twitter Icon Pack

6. Twitter Icons Pack

7. Twitter Icon BIRRRDFON

8. Twitter Replacement

9. Twitter dock icons

10. Twitter Icon Pack 1

11. Twitter Icon Pack 2

12. Twitter Icon Pack 3

13. TwitterJoy icons

14. The GodTwitter Follow Button

15. Twitter Icon

16. Twitter Space Icons

17. IconTexto Twitter Buttons

Say what?

A lucky reader(maybe you?) will win a custom made wordpress theme based on their requirements, which will be ready to upload & use on your blog.

You will be treated just like other customers: you will describe your blog, the niche of your blog, and you will tell me your vision of the desired wordpress theme(color combinations, number of columns, structuring, and anything else you find important for me to know).

After getting all the details i will open up Photoshop and i will make a detailed draft and this will represent the starting point.

We will talk things over again after which i will modify the placeholders to fit your requirements. From this point everything goes straight forward: i work my ass off and finish your design as soon as possible. Also i will offer support via instant messenger (MSN LIVE or Yahoo! messenger).

After the design is complete you will make the final revisions and once you are satsified with the outcome i will forward the design to my colleague mbogdan who will code it(XHTML/CSS valid, tableless coding, widgetized sidebars).

Contest Duration

The contest will run from March 5th(tomorrow) till May 5th(in 2months), and the draw will be made using random.org .

This means that the more entry credits you have the bigger your chances will be of winning your very own custom made wordpress theme!

How to enter?

There are 5 ways you can earn entry points, it’s really simple earning them in fact:

1) Get 3 Entry points by posting a comment to this post with a link to your blog and why you want a custom theme (REQUIRED)

Your name:
Your blog’s tite:
Your blog’s url:
Why do you want a custom theme?

2) Get 10 Entry points by Subscribing to my RSS feed using the form below(use the name you used in the comment form)

3)  Get 20 Entry points by blogging about this contest( link to this post so i can track it)

4) Get 50 Entry points by signing up at Bluehost hosting , or referring someone to sign up under my referral id.Before you sign-up read my review of Bluehost.

5) Get 100 Entry points by referring a customer to order a custom wordpress theme(the entry points will be given only after the customer has made the payment)

What’s next?

Go ahead, post your comment and start earning entry points. You can earn 8 entry points in just 2 minutes of work!

Good Luck!

This is both awsome and secure(remember the old wordpresz.org exploit, which infected lots of bloggers), with this process you surely know that the package is the real deal. If you’re running WordPress 2.7 and haven’t upgraded yet to 2.71 click the yellow bar in your admin panel and check out the upograde process!

Before i uploaded my plugin to wordpress.org i wrote a propper readme.txt file which is compatible with wordpress.org’s standards and included it in the package. I also updated the zip file located on my download server, so regardless of where you download it from you will get the same package.

Currently i do not have any plans for a next release of custom widgets, but most probably i will have to once wp 2.7 is released(to make it fully comptible).

If your using custom widgets please Rate my plugin Thanks!

WordPress 2.7 is almost ’round the corner and what i find a bit weird is that the WordPress developers didn’t consider changing the good o’l default theme. WordPress 2.7 will be a huge hit, but released with the well known default theme.

I’m tired of it. In my opinion it depreciates the current WordPress’s value, and a new, more appealing theme with the new features embedded in it would be more suitable for a WordPress release in the future.

MANY bloggers stick to the default theme, considering this conclusion why shouldn’t they get a better default theme?

Ryan announced today the release of WordPress 2.6.3 . The new wordpress version contains the patch which fixes the vulnerability in the Snoopy Library which is used by your wordpress to fetch the feeds which are shown on your admin dashboard.

Although secunia rated the vulnerability Highly critical, it seems that for wordpress users it doesn’t represent such a high-risk Ryan rating it Low-Vulnerability:

” Although this seems to be a low risk vulnerability for WordPress users, we wanted to get an update out immediately.“

Better safe than sorry! The only 2 modified files in the wordpress core are wp-includes/class-snoopy.php and wp-includes/version.php.

If you’re a newbie wordpress user download the whole wordpress package and upload the contents to your current wordpress installation overwriting the older files.

If your a more advanced user download only the 2 modified files from the WordPress 2.6.3 Release post and upload them to the wp-includes folder.

If you are running Custom Widgets v1.0 it is highly recommended you upgrade it to v1.2

This plugin will make your widgetized sidebars so flexible that you will almost think that your running a more advanced CMS system and not WordPress.

With WordPress if you add a widget to the sidebar it is visible on every page. NOT ANYMORE!

This plugin enables the usage of different widgets in different sections, categories, posts,pages, and so on. For example you will be able to have ads related to gaming in the Gaming category and in the same place in the Kids category you will be able to have ads related to Toys for example.

Mark of WeblogToolsCollection suggested that i make a more expanded introduction, for you to get a better idea of what the plugin actually does.

Basically you can add a selected widget ONLY to the page you want to. Below you will find a few live examples, sit tight we’ll get to that. Because in writing it’s a bit hard to explain i’ve made a video for you guys:

Here are some practical examples:

Look at the sidebar widgets on Page #1

Now take a look at Page #2

1. Requirements

The same old requirements:

1.1 WordPress 2.2 and above
1.2 Administrator account
1.3 Ftp acces to “wp-content/plugins” directory for upload

2. Options Panel

Just as any usual plugin Custom Widgets also has an options panel and once you’ve activated the plugin you will be able to see it even if you’re half blind.

Great, now you activated the plugin, went to Slayer’s Custom Widgets section but see no widgets. By this time you probably feel confused. Don’t be. In order to use custom widgets you need to add some widgets to your sidebar from the good old Widgets Page (Design -> Widgets).

Simply Add the widgets to the sidebar and save the changes.

Now that you got some widgets added to your sidebar head over to Slayer’s Custom Widgets section where you will notice that the widgets you added to the sidebar are now visible.

Those which have the blue color weren’t added to any pages/posts/tags/categories. Those which are red were already added to a section(this was implemented in order to make a difference between widgets in use and  widgets not modded by my plugin.

Now, if you click one of the widgets you will be taken to a management page where you can select where you want your widget to appear: on a selected Post, Page, Category, or Tag.

If you made it this far there isn’t much to do, except to define where you want your widget to appear by using the Edit links.

On the tags section if you have many tags the load time may be a bit large, but it’s worth to wait. By tags i mean tags pages( example:http://www.thaslayer.com/tag/design/ ).

Donate to Development

If you find this plugin useful and understand that a lot of time was spent in its development and lots of nerves were killed feel free to donate a few bucks which will fund further releases.

3. Download Slayer’s Custom Widgets v 1.0

Slayer’s Custom Widgets v1.2 (Primary Download link)

Slayer’s Custom Widgets v 1.0 (Primary Download link)

4. Installation Instructions

4.1 upload the slayer_Custom_Widgets directory to wp-content/plugins
4.2 activate the plugin (dashboard -> plugins -> find “Slayer’s Custom Widgets” -> click the activate button
4.3 head over to the usual Widgets section (wp-admin/widgets.php) and add some items to your sidebar
4.4 Now go to Slayer’s Custom Widgets section and select the widget you want to customize.
4.5 Add the desired widgets to the desired pages.
4.6 You’re all done!

If you want to show some love feel free to comment or to blog about the plugin

This seems to be a very common issue among bloggers who use feedburner. To be honest i also had the same problem, and did post up on feedburner groups asking for help, but heck no one answered.

So i did some searches on G and saw that quite many bloggers don’t know how to handle this issue, some of them even edit the wp core code messing stuff up thinking that it’s wordpress’s fault that in the feed pops appear as short snippets.

Solution

Go to your WordPress Admin panel -> Settings -> Reading, there use these settings:

Now head over to Your Feedburner feed management section, click on your feed and select Edit feed details where at the Original Feed URL put http://www.yourblog.com/feed

After this at your Feedburner dashboard go to Optimize -> Summary burner and make sure that Summary burner isn’t active.

Now that everything is done head over to Google Reader, or any Feed reader and check out your feeed. It should display the full feed along with images. Don’t be alarmed if in firefox’s feed reader you see only a snippet, test it in a real feed reader!

Credits go to Dever for helping me figure this out.

Akismet

To be honest i have no idea what would i do without the latest version of Akismet. Here’s an example to make my point:

Akismet has protected your site from 200,930 spam comments already, and there are 129 comments in your spam queue right now.

In my opinion Akismet is the best spam filter for wordpress, as i tested it it works better than Dave’s spam karma.

All in One SEO Pack

This is yet an other plugin that i would never deactivate. It increased significantly my SERP rankings. It is like hiring a SEO master to work on your blog.

Don’t believe me? Download and install it and see the difference.

Sexy Comments

Initially i wanted to use Brian’s threaded comments, but eventually went with Sexy Comments which has some great features like digg alike system (if Comment Karma is integrated) , mybloglog/gravatar integration, post preview and post quote.

Feedburner Feedsmith

The feedburner integration plugin which redirects your feeds to the your feedburner feeds page. Feedburner offers advanced feed usage statistics(hits/subscribers/etc).

Google XML Sitemaps

This cool plugin generates a sitemap and updates it every time i make content changes to my blog(for example when i write a new post or a a page).

You can view my sitemap at http://www.thaslayer.com/sitemap.xml

My Video

My Video wordpress plugin allows me to embed youtube/google video/metacafe videos on the fly, just by using a simple tagging system which looks just like bbcode @ forums.

No Ping wait & No self pings plugins

These are 2 great plugins. No Ping wait speeds up posting by moving generic pings to execute-pings.php, while No self Pings keeps WordPress from sending pings to your own site.

Wp Lightbox JS

Even though this is a really lightweight plugin Wp Lightbox JS really helps me give a better aspect to the previews of the themes in my portfolio, and the images that are posted on my blog.

WordPress Download Monitor

For a while now i link all downloads to this download manager which counts the number of downloads, using this plugin i can stop some users from leeching.

Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form

Me being a web designer and a blog owner i need to have a contact form which can allow my customers/readers to contact me. This handy plugin offers an advanced configurable contact form.

You can check out my customized contact form at http://www.thaslayer.com/contact-me/

ShareThis

At first i used sociable plugin, but when i switched to the new theme i decided that there’s no need for so many icons that link to social bookmarking websites, so i implemented Sharethis which can allow the user to submit to social bookmarking websites or to mail the page.

OIOpublisher Direct Pro

Last,but not least the most recent plugin that i installed is the OIO Publisher Direct PRO plugin for which i paid 37$ i think, and to be honest it’s worth the price and hopefully i will get back my investment soon .

That’s it, 13 plugins aligned which work side-by side and add a few extra queries to the database, but what the heck, as long as the load time of my blog is okay there’s nothing to worry about