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.

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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.

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.

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.

Mark Jaquith has a great suggestion on how to Import a Vox blog into WordPress or almost anything else. In short, he suggests that you import your Vox blog into a vanilla WordPress.com blog and then export it out as a WordPress export file. Then you actually have a bunch of choices of what to do with your blog. PS: Be sure to mark your WordPress.com blog as private before importing if you do not intend to make that your final destination.

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If you know of someone, or are yourself a blogger on Vox, you should know already that Six Apart has announced plans for closing the service. Users have until the 30th of September to get their data our of Vox and into other blogging and/or CMS platforms if they so choose.

New plugins

WP-comment-master enhances your comments with AJAX posting and pagination.

Readable Names forces commenters to write their names in the language that your blog uses.

List Yo’ Files adds the ability to list files by file name for a given folder with hyperlinks to each file making it downloadable.

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Updated plugins

WP-WikiBox allows you to get a Wikipedia article summary for a keyword in any language, inline with your posts and pages, with a simple shortcode.

Vimeo Quicktag enables the user to embed a customized Vimeo video into the blog content.

WP-Stats-Dashboard displays your blog’s stats graph plus your blog traffic, social engagement and social influence directly in your dashboard.

IE6 Upgrade Option displays a warning message, simply and politely informing the IE6 user that their browser is out of date, and provides links to download newer browsers.

Keep in mind that this will be the last major release to support PHP and MySQL 4. If your hosting provider has not yet switched to PHP 5.2 or higher and MySQL 5.0.15 or higher, it’s time to start bugging them.

Besides bug fixes and code cleanup, users can look forward to a new wordpress.com inspired admin bar and theme browser, as well as post templates and styles, and a separate network dashboard.

The team plans to halt new feature submissions on October 15th, followed by a primary code freeze on November 1st, and a string freeze on December 1st. The beta period will begin November 15th until the estimated final release date of December 15th.

Personally, I’m really looking forward to seeing what will come of the development team’s focus on bug fixes and code cleanup with this release. What are you looking forward to in WordPress 3.1?

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The WordPress development team had a very successful meeting last Thursday, where they solidified their plans for WordPress 3.1.

The finalized goals for WordPress 3.1 are “to have a very short dev cycle, a decent amount of testing time, and a release in mid-December. Low on new features, heavy on ui and code cleanup, and avoidance of schema changes. Save the big ideas for 3.2 where we’ll have the liberty to implement those ideas in PHP5. No schema changes and no big new APIs.”

Dark Tuts is a very clean WordPress theme that has been designed with blogs in mind. This theme has an HTML5 doctype, clean and valid code, 3 color schemes (blue, green, red), 3 different ways to add post thumbnails, the ability to change thumbnail sizes via the theme panel, 1 advertisement spot and tons more features.

Semanu is powered by the 960.gs css framework with multiple widgets and a 3 column layout.

BlogTimes is an old school Newspaper style WordPress Theme, based on a three column fluid layout, enabled with cufon fonts with beautiful typography for the headlines, options panel, and a custom front page slider.

Quick-Vid is a simple blogging theme with slick design elements.

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WP Perfect is a two column SEO optimized WordPress 3.0 ready theme. The theme has a jQuery-based options page that lets you change basic settings easily.

Syailendra is an adsense (advertising) ready theme with multiple widget positions, threaded comments, theme options, drop-down menus, and custom menus.

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Her recap not only briefly covers the topics discussed during her session, but she also lists all of the plugins that were featured, and that list is well worth exploring. Even if you think your blog couldn’t possibly use any more plugins, you might find something that you (or rather your blog) just can’t live without.

Lorelle VanFossen has published a recap of her Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins session given on August 29th at OpenCamp in Addison, TX.

To Lorelle, “a mind blowing WordPress Plugin is one that breaks the rules. It is unique and original in its implementation, and pushes WordPress. It might not be a Plugin that everyone must have on their site. It might not be a Plugin that even interests you. What these will do is to get you to look at the incredible diversity of Plugins available.”

New plugins

Pingdom Status lets you display your Pingdom monitoring data on your WordPress site, essentially creating a status page for whatever it is you are monitoring.

LBAK Google Checkout is aimed mainly at small projects that just want to sell a few things on their blog through Google Checkout and don’t want too much else apart from ease of use.

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Facebook Like for Tags converts a standard Facebook Like button from a one-time sharing feature to a one-on-one relationship for ongoing updates and sharing based on tags (keywords) or categories defined by you, the blogger/author.

Updated plugins

WP-Stats-Dashboard displays your blog’s stats graph plus your blog traffic, social engagement and social influence directly in your dashboard.

WP Tweetbox adds a highly customizable Tweetbox at the end of blog posts and pages.

Relevanssi replaces the basic WordPress search with a partial-match search that sorts the results based on relevance.

WP-reCAPTCHA integrates reCAPTCHA anti-spam methods with WordPress including comment, registration, and email spam protection.

WP-SimpleViewer allows you to easily create SimpleViewer galleries with WordPress.

These recent updates would not have been possible without your feedback and beta testing skills, so keep doing whatever you can to make each release better than the last!

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Do you use any of the WordPress mobile apps?  I use the iOS mobile app and can honestly say that it has certainly simplified my life when it comes to moderating comments and making last-minute post corrections. How about you? Have the WordPress mobile apps added to or detracted from your WordPress blogging experience?

The WordPress mobile apps for Android and BlackBerry have both been updated with some shiny new features, like a new comment notification system and improved VideoPress integration.

There’s no word yet on an update to the iOS mobile app, but the team still has its eyes set on making this one a major bug-fixing release.

Lukoo is a simple and stylish theme based around the color green.

Modernist is a beautifully built yet transparent theme. It was designed with a focus on optimal typography in order to better showcase your content.

Twist of Ten is a simple clean CMS style theme.

Bombax is a nicely crafted theme with 5 different color schemes and configurable options such as right or left or holy grail or no sidebar, magazine style or traditional style, custom header, and custom background.

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Us and Them is a modern, clean, blog-style, 960 – 1200 px grid-based, smooth WordPress theme and features some cool jQuery plugins just out of the box as some neat tool-tips and accordions.

3. If you cannot edit or override the system php.ini file, add php_value memory_limit 256M to your .htaccess file.

As always, if you need further assistance, the volunteers in the WordPress Support Forums will be more than happy to help you.

2. If you can edit or override the system php.ini file, increase the memory limit. For example, memory_limit = 256M

You see, your server may be packed with 4 GB of RAM, but that doesn’t mean that all 4 GB have been allocated to PHP on your account. In fact, most decent hosting providers only allocate 32 MB to PHP under each account. Now, most WordPress installations with a good amount of plugins will run fine under 32 MB, but there’s always a chance that one more plugin or one seemingly innocent admin panel task (like exporting or importing posts) may put you over the edge, and you’ll see either a blank screen or the infamous error which starts off something like “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted.”

If you see the infamous fatal memory error, there are three things that you can do before asking your hosting provider for assistance. Which method you use depends entirely on your server configuration. If one method doesn’t work, try the next. Keep in mind that most hosting providers closely monitor memory overrides and don’t take too kindly to frequent use.

1. If you’re using WordPress 2.9.2 or lower, try adding define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M'); to your wp-config.php file. If you’re using WordPress 3.0 or higher, WordPress automatically does this for a variety of tasks, so there’s really no reason to try it in this case.

If neither of these work, it’s time to ask your hosting provider to temporarily increase PHP’s memory allocation on your account. Keep in mind that most decent hosting providers allocate 32 MB to PHP under each account, and most decent hosting providers allow users to temporarily increase the memory allocation. If your hosting provider won’t accommodate you, perhaps it’s time to find a new hosting provider.

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Remember the old days when your computer would crash because you were running too many applications simultaneously? Well, you might be surprised to know that WordPress can fall victim to the very same thing.

If you see a blank screen, refer to WordPress and the White Screen of Death before continuing.