Upgrading to WordPress 3.1 brings a new feature set to your WordPress blog. Now self-hosted WordPress users will have “the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com.”

In English, Jetpack is a plugin that bundles a number of great features that WordPress.com sites already have. These are particularly good for those just starting out in blogging and those who haven’t already tweaked their blogs extensively. The features include:

• WordPress.com Stats – simple site stats with no additional server load
• Twitter Widget – display the latest twitter updates from a selected user into your theme
• WP.me Shortlinks – if you don’t use Pretty Link Pro (my recommendation), you can still get a bit of its functionality with post/page shortlinks to make sharing easier
• Gravatar Hovercards – shows a pop-up business card or your users’ gravatar profiles in comments
• Sharedaddy – this allows readers to easily share you content on FaceBook, Twitter, and more social sites
• After the Deadline – adds spell, style, and grammar checking to your blog (this might particularly come in handy for my many non-native-English blogger friends!)
• Shortcode Embeds – allows easier (was this hard?) embedding of YouTube, Vimeo, SlideShare, etc., videos
• LaTeX – mark up your posts with the LaTex markup language, which will mean something to you if, like me, you have über-geeks in your family who need complex equations and such (LaTex has been around forever, but I’ve never seen it referenced in the general blog population before.)

If you want to employ Jetpack on your site, it’s simple.

1. On top of virtually every page in your admin area, there is a long blue banner giving a shout out to Jetpack. Click on the “Learn More” button.
2. Click on the Connect to WordPress.com button.
3. From that point, follow the onscreen directions. Either you’ll be sent directly to the “Authorize Jetpack” button page, or you’ll be given the option to either login to your WordPress.com account or set up a new one.
4. When the installation is complete, you’ll be sent back tot the Jetpack configuration page where you can configure some of the features.

More features for the WordPress Jetpack are in the works.

What do you like about the new WordPress Jetpack? How have you used it?

The much-anticipated version of the Thesis theme for WordPress is now ready for download. It’s got a great new features set.

• Control robots meta tags on every post/page of your site
• Control robots meta tags on category/tag archives
• Save and restore Thesis options
• Five options pages: Site Options; Design Options; Page Options; Custom File Editor; Options Manager
• Faster loading with cleaner PHP
• JavaScript libraries
• New home page controls with better SEO options
• Flexible comment system for better customization
• Easy 301 redirects
• New hooks for more precise positioning
• New headline filter
• Beefed up internationalization

If you are a Win with 1 client (or have purchased your own version of Thesis) and would like help updating to Thesis 1.7, we can do it for only $12.50 for the month of April.

I love this plugin. It is one of the most useful plugins I have used in all my WordPress years. Months ago I got the free version and soon upgraded to the pro version. And, honey, I almost never pay for plugins. This one, however, has such great functionality that it has been worth every penny.

With Pretty Link Pro you can shrink big, long, messy URLs down to clean, simple URLs that are redirected to any other URL you choose. This works a bit like other services such as tinyurl or bit.ly, with one huge advantage: the shortlinks come from your URL and you decide what they look like and what keywords are included!

Pretty Link Pro tracks the number of total hits and unique hits for each link. It creates a configurable chart of these clicks so you can see what your readers are doing.

You can post your Pretty Links to Twitter directly from your WordPress admin panel. Instead of the annoying, nonsensical shorteners you usually see, your tweets will have your own URL. Can you say “branding”?

Want to clean up affiliate or merchant shopping cart links? Pretty Link Pro does this easily to your specifications.

How do you track how many times a promotional email is opened? Create a tracking pixel and embed it in the email.

If you want to set up a private offer for your readers, use a randomized Pretty Link Pro slug to direct your selected readers to the right page.

Some months ago I merged two blogs into one. That’s a link nightmare! But Pretty Link Pro brought the two together seamlessly, converting all the old links correctly to the new URL. That saved me hours and hours of tedious labor.

Like I said, I love Pretty Link Pro. If you’re a serious WordPress blogger, this will be worth it’s weight in gold.

One of the unseemly side affects of having a spidered blog, is that you will, without question, get comment spam. That means that your lovely blog will get all sorts of comments — added by robots and human idiots — that have nothing to do with your posts, but are only left so that you can pass your ranking to their (generally questionable) sites.

To combat this, Google implemented a “nofollow” tag, which WordPress added as the default. That means that your linked comments on other blogs (both spammy and legitimate) don’t give your site any Google juice.

Unfortunately, this implementation hasn’t seemed to deter spammers at all (robots and idiots probably haven’t figured out what nofollow means), but it has discouraged real bloggers from commenting as often as they might.

There is a movement underway to remove the nofollow tag. You can make your blog a “dofollow” blog easily with a simple, free plugin. There are numerous plugins you can choose from, but my favorite is NoFollow Case by Case. Step by step directions to install it in just a few minutes are below.

Login to your Dashboard.

Click on Plugins>Add New in the left navbar.

Type NoFollow Case by Case in the search box. Click Search Plugins.

Locate NoFollow Case by Case in the results list. (It’s probably the first.)

Click on Install on the right side of that plugin row.

Click Install Now on the popup dialogue box.

After the plugin is successfully uploaded, click on Activate Plugin.

That’s all there is to it. The plugin now strips the nofollow tag from all your comments by default. If a particular link shows up that you really don’t want to give link love to, simply add /dontfollow to the end of the URL. For example, change:

http://www.sellviagranow.com

to

http://www.sellviagranow.com/dontfollow

The plugin will leave the link intact, but will add nofollow to it.

Now you can join the growing number of blogs that are happy to give link juice to those who comment. Our own blogs are all dofollow blogs. We encourage you to follow the trend! If you do, you can submit your blog information to the DoFollow Blog Directory & Resources and get a link back.

From the beta last week to the official launch, we already added some new benefits to the Win with 1 Blogger Package. I got so excited thinking of all the great things you’d all be doing with your blogs, I couldn’t help myself.

We now add a couple of basic pages: an About page and a Contact page.

In addition, we added the Post-Plugin Library with the entire suite of utilities that display a linked list of recent posts, recent comments, similar posts, popular posts, and random posts. We included the Similar Posts plugin at the end of each post to keep your readers on your site longer.

We also added the venerable FormBuilder plugin. This amazing little piece of code allows you to easily configure forms to include on your site. (If you’ve ever tried to build a form, you’ll really appreciate this!) To top it off, we also create a contact form for you and add it to the Contact page. It’s linked to your new domain email so readers can contact you without your email being exposed.

Last of all, we added a $100 pixel advertising spot on the Pix2Brix web site! That’s ten long years of linking to your site from a ranked blog.

We aim to offer a great blogger system packed with value. Here’s to your blogging success!