Miscellaneous News & Updates - July 21st 2008

Last night I returned from a much needed holiday. As I mentioned 10 days ago, I decided not to post while on holiday because I couldn’t get wi-fi in my room and the internet cafe was not the ideal environment to write articles. In the weeks I have been away there has been a lot of announcements so I thought I would give you all a biref update on what has been happening since I was away.

Before I do so, I would like to thank the bloggers who have been updating the site in my absence. Firstly, I would like to thank all of the regular BloggingTips authors who post on a weekly basis. They have been writing some great articles recently and have made sure that regular readers of the site have a reason to drop by every day

So a big thanks to :

• John from Leschinski Design
• Ramkarthik from Blogging Tune
• Yuwanda from Inkwell Editorial
• Amanda from Blogger Buster
• Sarah from Stuff by Sarah
• Monika from Monika Mundell
• Syed from Technology Nerd

I would also like to thank our guest posters : Todd Andrews from Elementary Marketing, Jay from DatMoney and Salwa from Blogriffic. Thanks guys

Here’s a quick update from what you have missed in the last few weeks

• ScribeFire have released an innovative new ad service called Quick Ads. The service allows you to add ads to your blog with ease using your browser. They have partnered with over 100 ad networks so that revenue is maximised and with payments on a monthly basis and no minimum payout threshold, I’m sure they will be a good alternative for bloggers, particularly since they have now been acquired by Media Whiz.

  The video below explains how their service works :

  At the moment they are offering 3 ad sizes (728×90, 160×600 and 300×250) and they also allow you to publish ads from your own Google Adsense account. For more details, check out the their official announcement : ScribeFire QuickAds is born!

• A new service has launched called Widgenie. Widgenie lets you upload your spreadsheets and documents and then lets you create visually impressive charts and documents at a touch of a button. These graphs and charts can then be embedded onto your blog posts. Check out their Multimedia page to get an idea of how useful this could be.
• WordPress 2.6 was released last week. One of the best new features if the ability to see what revisions you have done to a post. WordPress will now show you the numerous revisions to a post and you can also restore a previous verion of a post at the touch of a button.

  Here’s a video which explains some of the new features :

  As always, you can download this new version from the WordPress Download Page.

• Staying on the subject of WordPress, WP have announced an overhaul of their themes directory. It’s now much easier to search for templates so if you’re looking for a new WordPress template it’s worth checking out.

If you know of any other major blogging news from the last few weeks, please leave a comment with a link to the story