WordPress 2.2.1 and other Useful Plugins

A bug fix release of the WordPress 2.2 series has been published yesterday. There are several security issues (remote shell and SQL injections) as well so this new version is a must for blog upgrades. You can download the latest version here.

Likewise, I found some newer WordPress plugins you might be interested in:

• All in One SEO Pack – remember my previous entry about Google supplemental index and duplicate content? Well, this plugin will essential help you solve that by allowing you to customize some parts of your blog settings that you can’t normally do without hacking into the themes. I will have to wait and see if implementing this will help fix or reduce pages in the supplemental results.
• Better Comments Manager – this is for very active blogs with dozens of comments everyday. This is basically a simple tweak of the existing comments manager inside your WP admin panel. It added a reply link directly form the list of recent comments and also a filter to view all comments based on posts. Very useful when managing new comments particularly on archived posts.
• Permalink Validator – as the name suggests, this plugin validates your entry URL with the permalink and either does a 301 redirect or a 404. This usually happens when you sometimes change your permalink structure or edit your post slug.
• Target Blank In Posts And Comments – automatically adds the code target= “_blank” in all the links in the post and comments. You get to keep your visitors longer. Be careful though as it might annoy some of the regulars.

The WordPress Guestbook Generator now has paged entries too.

Andrew rants about the Alexa train and the Technorati train. Yes, they do work, Drew (if the objective was just to get the link and the rank at any cost). Some people call it gaming the system. While Alexa can’t do anything about it, Technorati does a hand job on their Popular 100 list.