This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Nexx Inc. All opinions are 100% mine.

If you’re looking to move your blog from wordpress.com to a self-hosted install, this may be a good deal. Nexx.com has recently been rebranded, and is now offering a new Unlimited Web Hosting. To celebrate their new plan they’re offering it at $10 for the first year, including a free .com domain name. I know plenty of hosts where the domain alone would cost that. And to make things even better, they offer a 1-click WordPress install. You should be able to have your blog up and running in mere minutes.
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The great thing about WordPress is that there’s a huge, active and helpful community of users and developers. There have been WordCamps organized all of the world, as well as many smaller meetups. Last week, Kaj Rietberg and I put together just such a meetup in the Dutch city of Amersfoort.

The event was sponsored by open source development company 4WORX and hosted at the neighboring Dara restaurant (recommended!). Kaj and I were happy to welcome around 25 WordPress enthusiasts, a couple of whom had been tricked beforehand into preparing presentations. Kaj has written a more detailed account over at the WordCampNL website (in Dutch) which includes the slides from two speakers.
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When I first heard about gdgt.com, I thought the startup founded by Peter Rojas and Ryan Block was terribly clever, and right up my alley. The idea of having gadget freaks keep “had”, “have” and “want” lists makes sense both from a user’s perspective and from an advertiser’s. When the website opened to the public I was quick to register and started adding things to my lists. Some stuff that wasn’t in there yet. It was amazing to see how much stuff was entered by users.

But I don’t buy a new gadget every day, so keeping the lists up-to-date doesn’t require me to visit GDGT daily. Considering how Rojas and Block were also involved in Engadget and Gizmodo, I was hoping their new effort would replace both those blogs and become a one-stop shop for technology enthusiasts. So far, at least for me, it hasn’t.
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This blog isn’t about making money. I have no problogger ambitions, and I don’t really like ads on blogs. But what I do find interesting is how ad networks work, what their benefits are, and which work best for a blog like mine. That’s why I’ve added a few AdSense units, and signed up with BuySellAds. Adsense has paid for the hosting of the movie review blog I run with a bunch of other people since day one, but I never really experimented with placement and such because the layout on that site is far from optimized for ads.
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I’d been meaning to do a proper redesign of this blog for some time. The content part was reshuffled a couple of months ago, and I was pretty pleased with how that turned out. But the header was a watered down version of the old Papertrail theme and far too boring. That’s why I asked Blondmonster to help me out.

Suzanne‘s a former colleague, and a fabulous designer. I really like the stuff she does, and ‘boring’ is simply not in her vocabulary. She came up with the underwater theme, did all the drawing and all I had to do was put it all together. Hope you like the result. The theme was tailor-made for this blog, so don’t expect it to become available for download any time soon.

I’ve been working on yet another upgrade to my WP-Cumulus plugin. It looks like it’s become a pretty major update with a couple of exciting new features, but as a result it will probably no longer support versions of WordPress prior to 2.5. One of the things I want to introduce is proper shortcode support, and that API was introduced in 2.5.

Does anyone still use 2.3.x? Or even older versions even? I’ve not been able to find any statistics on this, but I assume most people keep their installs up to date, right?

I guess anyone who runs a WordPress blog will have noticed the recent flood of Russian comment spam. Like a lot of English spam, the comments appear to be hand-written, and can almost pass as regular comments. The problem therefore is how to figure out whether or not a message is spam.

Something similar has happened on Gmail, where my spam box is usually full of Chinese characters. Gmail’s spam filter is incredibly accurate, so I usually simply delete everything in my spam folder. With blog comments however, things are a little more tricky.
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I promised to donate to five of my favorite WordPress plugins a little while ago, and offered to let you help decide how the money should be divided. Unfortunately, that post didn’t yield enough comments to truly determine which of my picks you liked best. That’s why I decided to simply split the money five ways.

I made the payments yesterday, and I must say that felt good. I’ve been using some of these plugins for ages, and it seemed only fair I made a little donation in return. Please see the original post for the nominated plugins. Now if only I’d known Matt was going to introduce a ‘Thank a plugin developer day‘ so I could have timed this to match that. I’m pretty sure Joost, Arne, Krischan, Mitcho and Michael aren’t going to mind though .

I don’t like ‘re-blogging’. I try and write original stuff and not point to other people’s posts. This video however is essential if you’re serious about SEO and WordPress, and you haven’t seen it already you really should. My fellow countryman Joost de Valk talks about SEO and shares some great tips. The video is after the break.
More Joost de Valk on WordPress SEO