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If one of your new year resolutions for 2010 is to improve your blogging and take your blog to the next level then I have a great news for you. ProBlogger Darren is offering a sweet deal on his very popular 31 Days to Build a Better Blog workbook. For a limited time you will receive following three items for free when you buy the workbook. More

Earlier this week WordPress 2.9.1 was released to fix some minor bugs found in release 2.9. It also fixes the annoying issue some bloggers faced with posts scheduling and pingbacks. It is always a good idea to keep your WordPress installation (and all plugins) uptodate, so I would strongly encourage you to upgrade to 2.9.1 as soon as possible.

You can upgrade directly from you Admin console or if you prefer you can download the latest version here.

Good luck.

While you are celebrating the arrival of the new year, don’t forget to update the year on the copyright notice on your blog. The simplest way is to edit the file and replace 2009 with 2010, but a better solution would be to replace the year in your copyright declaration with following line of PHP code.

<?php echo date("Y"); ?>

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One of earliest third party tools that I started using for Twitter is TwitterFeed. This service automatically tweets your new blog posts for you. I have been using TwitterFeed for almost two years and I wrote about this service when I started using this. I am quite satisfied with this service but I am switching now to recently announced service by Google.
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Amazon.com being the largest online retailer offers a variety of merchandise. Because of their huge selection of products it is no surprise that Amazon affiliate program is so popular among bloggers.

With an astonishing number of products available through Amazon.com it is quite likely that every blogger will find a related product to link in every blog post. On the other hand, this vast jungle of products can also be overwhelming for bloggers who naturally want to spend their time on writing post not searching for related products.

Unfortunately, Amazon did not offer any help to bloggers to easily create affiliate-links for its products. Every affiliate has to find related products using their keywords and then manually create the link into the articles. This is laborious and cumbersome exercise.

But now there is a better alternative. More

Image credit:Mooganic

Nothing is more embarrassing than a misspelled word or incorrect grammar in an article on your blog. OK, may be there are other more embarrassing things out there but this still is not a nice scenario for a professional blogger. As a blogger you should try to catch all your mistakes before your readers catch them and point fingers at them (or worst publish your mistakes on flickr for all to see:) ). Almost all commercial word processing programs offer built-in spell and grammar checkers. These tools allow the users to write without worrying too much about the spelling and to some extent the structure of their sentences. This peace of mind naturally increases their productivity. Now you can get that same functionality for your WordPress blog by installing a smart plugin. Aptly named ‘After The Deadline’, this plugin frees you from worrying about spelling and grammatical structure and let you focus on your main goal – to write.

“After the Deadline is a plugin for WordPress and TinyMCE with contextual spell checking, advanced style checking and intelligent grammar checking.”

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Smart phones are a great tool for bloggers to blog even when they are away from their computers. Ever since iPhone was introduced mobile-blogging hit its stride. With a plethora of apps available for iPhone you can now easily post to your blog wherever you are. Although most iPhone apps have a modest price but if you search hard you can find some gems of applications even for free. Following are five free but excellent iPhone apps that are immensely valuable for the bloggers on the move.
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Recently Darren Rowes of problogger.net launched a premium forum for bloggers ( problogger.com). I was surprised that he offered the membership of only $1.95 a month.
I singed up as soon as I heard the news and I believe it’s worth much more than that. The community is getting close to 2000 member strong. The first advantage of a fee-based forum is that usually do not get spammers flooding the message boards. More