You may discover, that as your blog gets more visitors and pageviews, your are getting more spam in comments to your posts. They originate as actually comments, pings, and trackbacks.
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I decided to streamline my project management procedures with some kind of software, as the number of concurrent projects is increasing, and more and more time is lost both for switching tasks and trying to grasp a-new the global view of the project each time I turn to it.
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More and more often I came across “snap previews” appearing on the links in other blogs. So I decided to try it on my blog as well…

The Snap Preview Anywhere is a WordPress Plugin to display those previews. The actual service, providing the previews, is snap.com. They also offer the FireFox Snap search engine (top-right in FF), though I don’t quite get it’s intended purpose…

The plugin page has all the necessary instructions (and even more), so won’t copy-paste here.

The only unanswered question is “Does my blog really needs this?”.
I’ll let it be for the time being… if it gets too annoying, will remove. Please comment if you think that snap previews do help somehow, and if you think that “useless” is not about snap previews.

Update: snap preview anywhere is annoying, if used on all the links. So I decided to leave SPA on for external links only, and (thanks to the new version 1.2) now the preview appears only when hovering the tiny image to the right from the link itself. This is now much less annoying, but still allows to see the preview of the linked page, if you desire to do so.

I decided to try the ClustrMaps service – they offer a mini-map of geographical locations of your site visitors (you can see a sample at the bottom of the right sidebar and of this post… currently no ‘dots’ there, as it is freshly installed). Registration is simple. If you have Sidebar Widgets plugin, you will only need to add ‘Text’ block somewhere, and paste in the code provided at ClustrMaps admin page.

Somewhat useless, especially when you already have Google Analytics running for your site (it has a very similar to ClustrMaps’ geo display… as if it might be different ). The good thing is that this geo-statistic is public.

Note, that free ClustrMaps is limited to 2500 visitors a day, and you are obliged to make the thumbnail map visible (no hidden counters). Of course, there are also paid versions – ClustrMaps+ and ClustrMaps Pro. Find more details yourself at ClustrMaps.

As described in my previous post, there are some rather simple mechanisms to enable visitor’s browser to cache content, and avoid unnecessary load on your servers. In this post I’ll take a look at some parts of the practical implementation of the caching mechanism on the server, using PHP.
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Well, not a news, actually, but this one seems important.

Following the discussions, installation and administrative interface became much simpler, and thus easier for newbies. Other first-impression change is said to be the new default theme, which looks good as well.

I will surely check this new release out very soon, but for now you can try one yourself.

Update: beta-2 is available since November, 28, with over 160 bugs fixed.

Information taken from: freedom.org.ru

1. www.zoneedit.com; 5 names; A, MX, NS; mail forwarding, web forwarding
2. www.everydns.net; 20 names; A, MX, NS; web forwarding, dynamic domains
3. www.dnspark.com; 3 names; A, MX, NS; web forwarding, mail forwarding, backup MX
4. www.domain-dns.com; unlimited names; A, MX; web forwarding, paid mail forwarding
5. www.xname.org; no limit; A, MX, NS (I keep several domains there; quite good as for a free service)
6. primaryns.kiev.ua (UA-IX only); unlimited names; A, MX, NS; primary only
7. secondary.net.ua; unlimited names; secondary only
8. ns2.trifle.net; unlimited names; secondary only
9. FreeDNS.ws (suggested in comments; looks promising – I now have one domain there)