Wordpress 2.7 has finally been released and this version is bearing the the name of legendary Jazz musician, John Coltrane. I am excited about this release and very eager to try it out, but not too eager as I will explain below.

Reason 1 - Plugins

Wordpress is a great core blog manager and makes blogging as easy as pie. Plugins are what takes Wordpress to that new level though, the CMS level that is. Without plugins Wordpress would be kind of bland and most sites would have identical features. Thankfully Wordpress has been designed to make plugin integration quite a breeze …

I have recently been putting together some free Wordpress themes that are available to download at Mtsidesign.com and decided it was time to do a redesign for The State of Affairs.

The new design is not too dramatic over all, but the new homepage for TSOF has major changes I felt were worth noting. Here is a brief list of the major changes.

New animated Featured Articles section.

Added a Featured Video section to showcase new videos and tutorials that we have put together.

New bottom content section that features the about …

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Rachel and I recently launched a new site called MtSiDesign.com. It is a new site to showcase and promote our web design skills. We are just starting out so our prices will be scaled accordingly. Here is a short list of some of the services we offer:

Services

• Website Design
• Website Maintenance
• Graphic Design
• Blog Design
• Blog Maintenance

If your interested in finding out …

1. Traffic, traffic and more traffic
Right now I have two articles with 5 star ratings on Stumbleupon. Both of which bring in consistent traffic. Over the weekend I had just under 4000 unique visitors from people stumbling just those two articles. I’ll admit those 3 days were spikes in my traffic but my site is only 3 months old so it goes to show Stumbleupon can bring in traffic for new or veteran sites.

2. Networking
I have met some really interesting people through Stumbleupon. It helps by connecting you with sites …

I know there are lots of articles already out on the web in relation to this exact topic. The problem I found is not that these other articles didn’t do a good job of describing some great Wordpress plug-ins, it’s the fact that none of the them had half of the plug-ins I use.

These plug-ins are what I use on my site and are what I find useful for my blog, this does not mean that they are what everybody needs, but for a beginner I think they will help out a lot in customizing a blog. Feel free to …