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Exhibition is a perfect theme for any artist to showcase their portfolio and blog about their work.

Journal is a simple, attractive, one column theme that would suit a diary or journal site.

Terminal features multiple layouts, a custom Twitter widget, and theme options.

Darnell Clayton of BloggingPro has published his list of questions you should have answered before you spend your hard earned cash on a plugin. While most of his questions are good ones, I’d say one of the most important is the aspect of support after you pay. Some commercial plugin providers have switched from unlimited support for the lifetime of the product to yearly subscriptions. For example, a plugin may cost $50.00 for the initial purchase which includes a year of support and upgrades but after the first year, you can opt to pay $25.00 for support or only the upgrades. So far, I’ve had great success with the money I’ve spent on commercial plugins but thoroughly do your research before you spend anything.

WordPress is continuing its climb to CMS fame, according to some impressive stats by Water & Stone.

Of note in the report, “The Big Three — WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal — remain ?rmly in command of the market,” and “WordPress has taken the lead in brand strength after a strong growth year.”

The report itself is quite detailed, and well worth an evening or weekend read.

How many times has the auto save feature in WordPress saved your butt? By default, WordPress auto saves posts every 60 seconds. Paul Maloney of WPZine.com has a snippet of code that you can add to your WPConfig file to decrease that time to increase peace of mind. If you don’t want to use the auto save feature, think about increasing the time to a week instead of disabling it completely.

While reading about this tip by Paul, I started to wonder if Post Revisions were tied to auto saves because if they were, decreasing the auto save time would substantially increase the number of post revisions which in turn, would substantially increase the size of the database over time. After performing some simple tests, I discovered that auto saves are NOT tied to Post Revisions. Unlike Post Revisions, there is only one auto save that is continuously over written. Also, Post Revisions are only created after the user saves the post either as a draft or an edit to an existing post. Just some food for thought.

Miriam Schwab of WPGarage.com has a neat little tip that explains how to install WordPress without using a domain name. The trick involves editing the Hosts file on a Windows machine to specify a domain name for the server address the site is hosted on. Mike Little who published a comment on the article made note that it’s not a Windows only trick but can also be performed on Linux/Unix and Mac OSX. This trick enables the previous site to stay online until the last minute where a simple DNS change will switch to the new site.

In a typical WordPress installation http://yoursite.com/wp-login.php is used to log in to the back-end of the site with the addition of a sub-domain if it’s in use. Personally, I have this link bookmarked so I don’t have to type it in all the time but Chris Coyier of Digging Into WordPress.com has shared a tip to make the log-in URL a bit more pretty. It’s a simple rule added to your .htaccess file. With Chris’s tip applied, the log-in URL will look like http://yoursite.com/login which is much easier to remember than wp-login.php.

Have you ever wondered how WordPress handles the automated core, plugin, and theme upgrades? Well, it’s time for some quick weekend education!

Long-time support forum volunteer, Ipstenu, has done all the thinking for you and has clearly laid out the inner-workings of the automated upgrade process.

It’s a quick read, and you might leave with a new respect for the automated upgrade system, and a new understand for why you should create a child theme if you want to modify your own theme.

Do you have a WordPress blog? Do you want to add voice search to your blog? Well, thanks to Otto the Tech Ninja, you can with just a slight modification to your theme!

Yes, this will only work in Google Chrome if you have the Voice Search extension or if you’re using the latest development version, but with most computers shipping with built-in microphones these days, Voice Search certainly makes searching easy, and it’s a great way to impress your friends.

WPBeginners has published their list of the best tutorials they have written in 2010. Over the course of the year, WPBeginner has covered everything from how to install a plugin to useful configuration tricks you may not have noticed. They end the list by linking to some other cool tutorials they have discovered on other sites. Looks like WPBeginner had a great year.

Stay tuned to WeblogToolsCollection.com as I publish a two part series of our own showcasing WordPress news in review, WLTC style.

Pingdom, a popular website monitoring service, performed a two month experiment to find the most reliable blogging services.

From October 15th to December 15th, Pingdom ran a variety of checks every minute from multiple locations around the world on the homepage and four individual blogs from each blogging service.

In the end, WordPress.com came out as #2, just behind Blogger, which should be the expected winner since it’s backed by the entire Google network.