The full product, which allowed several types of popups to be added easily to your WordPress blog or regular web pages, is now replaced by a Lite version, available on ActiveBlogging.com

The Lite version, available to ActiveBlogging Platinum Level members, is a WordPress-only plugin, and provides popups only to WordPress webpages.

For more information on the Lite version, check out our PopupPicker product information page.

Now, the fifth edition has made the change offline, and it’s a ‘real world’ edition – on Amazon.com!

About four times the size of the last edition, I’ve gone into detail on using WordPress, as well a many, many beginner topics: getting a domain name, choosing good hosting for your site, and more. Plus, I’ve updated it throughout for WordPress 3.

There’s much more inside the book – but enough talk – so head over to Amazon to check out “Top 10 Tricks to Conquer Your Niche With WordPress”.

Aside from updating the code, and making sure it works on WordPress 2.8.4 (yes, it WAS tested on the latest!), most of the changes involve small upgrades to the features – the ability to add nofollow tags to the Javascript code (just in case Google indexes them, a seeming possibility now), easy CSS coding (so you can position the ad precisely, or put a border around it) displaying ads whether Javascript is on or not, and a new ‘switch’ mode so ads can switch from time to time on the user’s browser while he/she reads – handy for getting more ‘impressions’ out to those eyeballs reading your blog.

For those wondering, the AdBlock is a way to display a group of ad images randomly, and includes links to click on. Do the traditional 125×125 ads in a column (similar to ActiveBlogging’s ads on the right side here), or go for a single rotating 468×60 banner (or anything else for that matter), and have it display randomly with each page visit. Coded in PHP, the ads are actually embedded in the page’s HTML, and includes search engine friendly links.

Or, go the Javascript route – the ads are sent to the viewer’s browser and shown randomly from there – ideal if your site is caching pages. Otherwise, without Javascript, the ads displayed with the cached page would be shown to everyone exactly the same.

Plus, it’s widgetized; use it for up to ten spots on your blog. You can use code to place ads anywhere on your theme, or use the widget to drag and drop onto your sidebar.

A perfect way to easily place advertising on your blog with no fuss or muss, feel free to check out Dave’s Easy AdBlock Widget.

It’s called “Dave’s Social 2.0 Rating Plugin” (or “Dave’s Social Ratings 2.0 Plugin”, depending on my mood), and it allows people to rate posts easily – one click with their comment.

For example, comments here can include rating – and the total is shown below.

The big advantages – VERY flexible, and theme-friendly (NO editing required).

You can read more here about it, and buy a copy.

Of course, ActiveBlogging Members (Platinum Level) get a copy as part of membership – along with the many other plugins included with membership, it pays to join if only for the plugins!

You should be.

With the recent release of WordPress 2.6.5, and the imminent release of 2.7, there’s a lot of attention on security, and people hacking WordPress sites to gain control of them. So more than ever, it pays to be watching out for any information you give out that could give hackers a leg up.

One such is the version number – every WordPress theme displays it, thanks to the function call wp_head(), which needs to be included in every theme (like wp_footer()).

Although it does a number of other useful things, the one it does in this case is to add a generator description announcing your blog version:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.6.5" />

This can be an issue in two ways:

• For those forgetting to upgrade quickly, it’s a calling card for hackers looking for exploitable older blogs.
• For those who upgrade immediately, it can be a notification for others should there be any zero day exploits (hacks on newly-released versions).

Either way, you should consider removing it from your theme – fortunately, it’s very easy to do:

• Edit your WordPress theme, looking for the index.php file.
• At the VERY top, add this line:

  <?php remove_action('wp_head','wp_generator'); ?>

• Save and use.
• Reload your blog, and check for the generator tag (use the ‘view source’ command of your browser). It should now be gone.

Although this kind of tag is informative (I myself like to know at a glance what I’m working on) with today’s problems online, it’s not worth it to give hackers any more details – so leave it off, and make sure hackers DON’T get those extra details from your site!

What it does is very simple – it moves the nag message away a bit, so it doesn’t take up as much space on your page. Still nagging, but a little more discreet and out of the way (a chiding message, perhaps?).

In any case, I got tired of losing a 1/2 inch of screen space at the top of the web page every time a new version of WordPress came out – so this keeps it out of the way.

Just unzip, upload and activate – the message is now tucked in the top left, thanks to a little CSS coding.

It’s called “Fix Upgrade Message (utopia45)” (catchy, eh?) and you can get it in the plugins section.

Enjoy!