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Splinder, a popular Italian blogging service, will be closing its doors on January 31st. If you’re Splinder user in need of a new home, fear not! Moving to WordPress is super-easy.

If you want to try a similar hosted blogging service, WordPress.com has you covered with a new importer, a handy guide, and free support if something goes wrong.

If you think it’s time to host your own blog, you might be interested in running a self-hosted WordPress.org blog. There are no Splinder importers for WordPress.org yet, but you can import to a WordPress.com blog, then export the resulting blog to any WordPress.org installation. Before you choose between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, make sure that you review the differences between the two.

Having been through two similar service closures myself, I recommend moving your Splinder blog as soon as possible. When those doors shut, they tend to shut for good, and you don’t want to be one of those who just waited too long. Even if you don’t plan on moving to WordPress, you might want to import into a WordPress.com blog now, just to preserve your content until you know what your plans are.

Splinder, a popular Italian blogging service, will be closing its doors on January 31st. If you’re Splinder user in need of a new home, fear not! Moving to WordPress is super-easy.

If you want to try a similar hosted blogging service, WordPress.com has you covered with a new importer, a handy guide, and free support if something goes wrong.

If you think it’s time to host your own blog, you might be interested in running a self-hosted WordPress.org blog. There are no Splinder importers for WordPress.org yet, but you can import to a WordPress.com blog, then export the resulting blog to any WordPress.org installation. Before you choose between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, make sure that you review the differences between the two.

Having been through two similar service closures myself, I recommend moving your Splinder blog as soon as possible. When those doors shut, they tend to shut for good, and you don’t want to be one of those who just waited too long. Even if you don’t plan on moving to WordPress, you might want to import into a WordPress.com blog now, just to preserve your content until you know what your plans are.

Notice anything different about Weblog Tools Collection? The name of the post probably gave it away. This blog is rocking in speed and deliverability! How you ask? Thanks to the fine work of the people over at Cloudflare.com

CloudFlare is a free(mium) service that was recommended to me by our own James. He had heard about it in conversations with some folks over dinner and wanted us to try it out. While this blog has gotten loaded over the years with JavaScript from various sources and code cruft of years, it has also gotten quite slow as a result. It is not the server (though Spam storms never help) and MySql running on the same server does not help. I had added caching thanks to WP Super Cache and had tweaked most of the settings to be tolerable on the server. I had even tried a CDN at one point but backed out because it turned out to be such a touchy beast.

The free CloudFlare product, which is what we use on here, is substantial enough to depend upon and is easy to set up. I might upgrade to their paid version once I am more comfortable with the results and have let it bake for a month or two. Signup was easy and it really took just under a few minutes to setup this blog. We have been running it for about three days now, with positive results and zero downtime. Let us go over some the details.

It takes just a few minutes to add your site to CloudFlare.com. Add it in, watch a video while it figures out all the details of your DNS, and then turn around and make the name server changes it asks you to make. There are instructions included on the page and it tries to help you make the best choices. It is worth noting that only self hosted WordPress blogs are capable of using CloudFlare. Since the actual change needs to happen at the registrar and name server level, TTL reduction will not help propagate it faster. While Go Daddy seemed to push the changes through quickly for us, it can take up to 48 hours for everything to work properly.

CloudFlare.com

Once the name server changes are made, you just sit back and watch. The free service from CloudFlare performs a bunch of automated magic, including using location aware technology to redirect your visitors to the right cache of your content. I know that the content is still live and interactive, but the seamless nature of the change makes this so easy and attractive. It speeds up your site using a variety of caching technologies and a CDN, including automatically minifying your scripts, reducing extra items in your HTML. It eventually reduces the amount of bandwidth you consume on your server and the number of requests actually hitting your server.

• It works with static and dynamic content. Direct access is no sweat since a subdomain is created that goes directly to your site! For all of you using virtual hosts, let me calm your fears. CloudFlare works fine with virtual hosts.
• It is always online, even buffeting traffic surges and reducing downtimes. (I have a concern about this. I turned off the MySql server by mistake and the blog displayed a DB error. I assume that if my server is down due to spam storm, the same thing will happen. I will have to investigate that.)
• Reduces slowdown effect of third party tools and scripts such as FaceBook, Google AdSense or Analytics and Twitter. We have a lot of those!
• Protects against network threats such as spammers, uses previously reported information for protection. This is fantastic, if it works.
• Provides visitor analytics that are better than those based on JavaScript. I see a huge difference between thee results and those provided by StatCounter.
• Provides a host of other third party plugins that can easily be installed. I use a couple of them.

Some recommendations for WordPress users:

• There is a WordPress Plugin, use it to be safe. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cloudflare/ Once it is installed, there is a setup page (which is not linked from the plugin page, fix?) that asks you to put in an API key and then lets you optimize your database.
• Continue to use Akismet and any other Caching plugin you have. Instructions are everywhere. Be sure to mark spammers etc. All of it helps the ecosystem.
• Be patient. In my case, the changes were up within an hour. It might take longer for you.
• If all else fails, switch your name servers back and ask for help.

After over three years since its acquisition, Google has finally launched a major upgrade to FeedBurner with an emphasis on real-time stats.

The new interface provides real time stats for clicks, views, and podcast downloads, which means you can start seeing what content is drawing traffic from feed readers, Twitter, and other syndicated sources as it happens.

The interface can be accessed by clicking the “Try out the NEW (beta) version!” link at the top of your FeedBurner account page.  According to the launch article, “The best way to see these real time features is to publish a new post and then switch to the ‘Last two hours’ view to begin seeing updates.”

At this time, the new interface is primarily for the showcasing the new real-time stats.  All other account actions will still need to be done from the old interface.

What’s your take on the new FeedBurner upgrade? Is this just what FeedBurner needs to bring life back into the service, a step in the wrong direction, or too little too late?

On this year’s Blog Action Day, over 5,700 blogs from 143 countries reached an estimated 41,231,000 readers regarding the world’s various water problems.

Several popular blogs contributed this year, including The White House Blog and The Official Google Blog, and feel free to stop by our post for a great way to share your fundraising goals with your readers.

Despite the broad reach of this year’s Blog Action Day it was a rather steep decline from the over 31,000 blogs that participated last year regarding climate change. We’ll let you know as soon as voting begins for next year’s Blog Action Day topic, and hopefully we’ll wind up with a topic that more bloggers are passionate about.

If you published a post for this year’s Blog Action Day, kudos to you for participating, and please feel free to share it with us.

Today is Blog Action Day 2010, and this year’s topic is water. To many of us, water is a commonplace item. We don’t have to walk for miles for a simple drink of water or risk our lives with every sip, yet over 800 people world-wide have no access to clean water, and over 3 million people succumb to water-related diseases every year.

Organizations like Charity: Water, Children’s Safe Drinking Water, and Water.org are collecting donations to provide wells and water filtration to communities around the world, so wouldn’t it be nice if you could set a fundraising goal on your WordPress blog and share the experience with your readers?

Tracking your fundraising progress on your own blog is incredibly easy thanks to ChipIn. Just register for a free account and create a new event. Once your event has been setup, click the “Create Widgets Now” button. Customize your widget in step 1, select WordPress in step 2, copy the code in step 3, but forget about step 4. Just go to Appearance/Widgets in your WordPress admin panel, drag a text widget to your sidebar, title it or leave the title blank, paste the code into the body of the widget, and click “Save.”

Your visitors will now be able to donate and view your fundraising progress from your sidebar.

We’re curious to read your posts for this year’s Blog Action Day, so please feel free to share them with us.

Voting has concluded for this year’s Blog Action Day topic, and the winner is water!

Register your blog now and join the thousands (if not millions) of bloggers worldwide who will be posting about the world’s water problems on October 15th. If you need some inspiration for your post, the Blog Action Day crew has provided a few suggestions.

Last year, over 31,000 posts were published across the globe on the topic of climate change. Will you be participating in this year’s Blog Action Day?

WordPress.com and Windows Live are partnering together and providing an upgrade for 30 million Windows Live Spaces customers. This partnership was announced at TechCrunch Disrupt. You can read more about the partnership, the Windows Live Spaces importer for WordPress.com, the added ability to Publicize on Messenger on the WordPress.com blog. Via: Windows Team Blog.

Six Apart has been acquired by advertising network VideoEgg and merged into the company’s rebrand as SAY Media.

Six Apart is perhaps best known for their self-hosted blogging platform Movable Type and their hosted blogging service TypePad. Though SAY Media will not discontinue these products, it remains to be seen how the advertising network will influence their future.

A former power-house in the blogging industry, Movable Type’s popularity began to falter when Six Apart released version 3 in 2004 with more restrictive licensing. In fact, the Google Trends graphs for Movable Type and WordPress are almost inverse of each other, showing a steady decrease in Movable Type popularity and a steady increase in WordPress popularity beginning at roughly the same time as Movable Type 3′s release.

If you’re unsure about the future of your Movable Type or TypePad blog, now is as good a time as any to move to WordPress as your new self-hosted blogging platform or WordPress.com as your new hosted blogging service. After either installing WordPress or signing up with WordPress.com, go to Tools/Import in your admin panel and select “Movable Type and TypePad.”

What’s your take on this acquisition? Is Six Apart’s legacy safe in the hands of SAY Media (formerly VideoEgg)?

If you run a social network or any kind of online publishing service, you will be hit by spam, if you haven’t been hit already, and Akismet wants to help.

When most people hear about Akismet, they often think about WordPress, but Akismet is actually available for over twenty additional systems and platforms, including Movable Type, Drupal, phpBB, PunBB, and libraries for PHP, Python, and .NET.

If you’re running, or planning to run, a social network or online publishing service, the Akismet team wants you to know that they can not only protect you from direct spam, but from parasite spam as well, as long as you can give them a way to contact you.

Akismet’s pattern and volume monitoring abilities make direct spam easy to filter, but ever since the dawn of forums, spammers have opened accounts for the sole purpose hosting their spam on your site. Thanks to Akismet’s pattern monitoring, the Akismet team can easily track the source of these parasite spammers and notify the site’s owner, but there’s little they can do if they can’t get in touch with you. Since contact forms can break without warning, the Akismet team recommends that you provide a traditional abuse@yourdomain email address. If you don’t want to make this email address public, at least contact Akismet and have it placed on file.

Are you using Akismet on your social network or online publishing service? With so many options available, why not try it today? Parasite spam can hit almost any site driven by user content, so don’t forget to offer your contact information to the Akismet team.