I know most of you must be saying, what the heck is “Yahoo Buzz!” .

Yahoo Buzz has officially opened for all the publishers out there. Yahoo Buzz is nothing but Yahoo’s clone of digg where people vote on articles. And the most voted few articles would be pushed to the Yahoo homepage, the most visited page across the internet. I am happy to bring this information to you, not because I brought it much ahead of any other blog around me – but happy because I could bring you something fruitful.

Every blogger must be glad now, that they have a chance to be on Yahoo’s homepage for some time and get loads and loads of traffic that might melt your web hosting servers.

But how to add those Yahoo Buzz buttons to your blog posts? 

Specially, when you have some 100s of nice articles in your blog that you would like to test with this service. Travis Johnson has brought you Yahoo Buzz wordpress plugin within a day of Yahoo buzz opening for all the publishers. I could not see a blog post on his blog about this wordpress plugin, but you can download the plugin here – don’t ask me how I got it – Travis emailed me

This plugin will help you to bring those Yahoo Buzz buttons at the bottom of your post and your readers can then buzz your articles.

As there is no post on this plugin by Travis, let me explain the steps to install this plugin

1. Download the Yahoo Buzz wordpress plugin.
2. Upload the zip to plugins directory
3. Activate the plugin from your wordpress blog’s admin section
4. Now go to Dashboard -> Options -> Buzz on Yahoo!
5. Select the look and feel of button you would like. Here the button details are given in text without graphics, so this Yahoo buttons page would be of your help
6. That’s it, you would see the Yahoo buzz button appearing at bottom of each of your posts

Enjoy Yahoo Buzzing and buzz this article too with the help of button below !

WordPress has released a very important security update recently [couple of days back]. Anyone running WordPress 2.5 must upgrade to this latest release.

Download WordPress 2.5.1

This latest patch includes

• a number of bug fixes
• performance enhancements
• and one very important security fix.

It’s recommended to update your wordpress immediately if you are using WordPress 2.5. Before anyone come to know about the vulnerability, it would make sense to upgrade it 2.5.1. They have fixed around 70 bugs in WordPress 2.5 and released it quickly.

This morning as usual I opened my mail box and there were few updates from Monika’s easywordpress blog. This is one of the blogs I added to my list of RSS subscriptions recently.

The updates on WordPress 2.5 are good enough to attract me and read the complete article

WordPress 2.5 is ready to be downloaded with some cool features in it that I liked.

The cool part about the new writing screen is that it anticipates the natural flow in which we write and will remember the way we leave it. So next time we come back, the same environment welcomes us.

I am excited to download and try it but don’t want to play with this blog at least. I would use another travel tips website to check out new upgrades and may become a part of wordpress testers.

If you would like to download & install the wordpress 2.5 release candidate 1, go ahead. Thanks Monika, for writing on this.

I have a question for you. Simple, straight and easy to answer – Do you like my WordPress template? Answer can be as simple as Yes / No or as elaborate as positives and negatives about my wordpress theme, the alignment, the colour, navigation of this template and so on. I know it’s easy for you to do so, because you are seeing this wordpress template right in front of you as a live demo. And deciding on whether you would like to select this template for your blog is easier for you now. [I know you would thank me to find out such brilliant red professional template]

Did you know what is the general thinking of a blogger while choosing free wordpress themes? He or she needs the visualization of the wordpress theme or in simple words – picture of the theme or demo; categorization of the theme; quick glance on what theme can give you in few words and last but not least the free download link. This is what exactly I look for when I browse through some of the cool wordpress themes to select one for my next wordpress theme change.

These guys at TopWPThemes.com are doing all the hardwork for us and we need not to worry about all this. They have around 55-60 top wordpress themes that are categorized in categories like 2 columns, 3 columns, Adsense ready, widget ready etc. If you observe they have almost all those basics covered while presenting a new theme what we talked about a while ago. I can see the free demo and download link right there to preview the theme and short notes about the theme. Cool – that saved lot of my efforts!

No doubt, they will go places, and I would like to contribute a little to their success. I have few suggestions for them to incorporate few things to take this theme blog towards completeness. How about adding a simple rating system for the wordpress theme? Would not you like to see 4 or 5 stars around a theme given by visitors and users of the theme! If it’s difficult to incorporate, let it be. And also, I would like to see more categories and more themes, and yes – this is something which can be worked upon over the period of time if the themes are added religiously. If they could post one wordpress theme per day, imagine a huge database of wordpress themes in next few months. I would certainly like to see it, would not you?

This search engine optimization method we are going to discuss shall be the simplest method to optimize for wordpress blogs. Why I am talking here about wordpress blogs only, because blogger already has implemented this tact by default.

We are talking about the difference between URLs like http://www.lifeiscolourful.com/nofollow-or-dofollow-link-train-contests-are-fun/ and http://www.lifeiscolourful.com/?p=6

It’s well proven that if you have keywords in your page URL, the page comes in SERPs sooner than you expect. Google loves to see the keywords in your page URL and bring your page upfront. This blog has been experiencing this for many of the posts that start coming in Google search results within couple of days of posting.

Getting this done is very simple method but many of you might not do it, just because you might not find it out how to do it quickly in wordpress, or you have lack of time due to busy schedule even though you are strongly willing to get it done for your blog or you are just a lazy bum – We don’t mind catering to all type of readers.

First step is to login as administrator to your wordpress blog [Now I know this step could be avoided, don't you think so?]. You can now go to “Options” and then “Permalinks” in the second row of tabs.

If you would like to have only Post name in your URL, add /%postname%/ in “Custom Structure” or if you would like to have post name as well as post id, add /%postname%/%post_id%/

Before you update your new page URLs, it’s important that you install Permanent redirect wordpress plugin that replies a 301 permanent redirect, if requested URL is different from blog post’s permalink. This ensures that there is no duplicate content for your blog post in Google’s eyes and only one URL associated with each blog post.

And now you can update the new search engine optimized page URL structure for your blog.