I started the process of bringing our sites up to date in the last week of December.  For our blogs, we use WordPress which at the time of writing is at version 2.9.

Now, as someone who does not easily trust the auto-update feature to get everything right on our server, I prefer to FTP the update into place.  The only trouble is, that this is easier on some blogs than others, depending on how the theme is setup.

So updating all of the blogs at once is actually quite a mammoth task, and something that I tend to avoid.  I will update the blogs over the course of a few days and prioritise which ones are to be done first.  Obviously a security update is more important than a feature update.

But now the deed has been done – we are running version 2.9 on all of our active blogs, and can move on to the next step.

Yesterday I came across an interesting plug-in for WordPress – something that I had been wanting to write myself for a long time.  It is called the “MaxBlog Press Ninja Affiliate” plug-in.

The first thing you have to know about this plug-in is that it is not free – you have to buy it.  This is new territory for many bloggers, and has caused some discussion on the WordPress forum.  But I went ahead and bought it because, quite frankly, it does something rather special.

If you want to make money with a blog, one of the ways to do advertising – either affiliate advertising, or keyword advertising.

Affiliate advertising uses links in either blog posts, sidebars or banners to link to another company’s website.  You get paid per click or per sale.  But keyword advertising allows you to sell advertising on your website and embed it within the content.

Let’s say, for example, that I wanted to link the first instance of the word pizza to a pizza place in my area.  Theoretically this is possible, but having sold the link I would have do a search on all posts and add the link manually.  After the time is up, I would have to do the same thing again to remove the links.  Plus, I would not know how often the link has been clicked on to argue that the time period should be extended – maybe even for a higher price.

One of the items on my long list of things to do was to try and write a plug-in that had a list of keywords and a list of links, and when a particular post was displayed it would add the link to the keyword in the text.

But the price of the MaxBlog Press Ninja Affiliate made this almost unviable, especially since I don’t know when I would have got round to doing it myself.

So now I have started fitting out my blogs with this system, because the great thing is that it is a one-off payment – not per blog! I obviously don’t want to over-do things and make my blogs look like a lot of advertising links, but maybe it will help generate a little bit more income.

Anyway, I’d like to recommend the MaxBlog Press Ninja Affiliate plug-in to anyone with a self-hosted WordPress blog – it’s a great little tool that really adds power to your posts!

It’s always a shame when a great piece of software is discontinued, and this week whilst installation a new WordPress site I was shocked by a message on the Spam Karma screen – the “major announcement” was that development of the plug-in was being discontinued and the software would pass over to a GPL project.

I first discovered Spam Karma through a post on the Notes from Spain forum around the time I first started using WordPress. It’s a plug-in that really belongs in the software by default, as a popular blog gets spammed on a daily basis. Unfortunately, it’s not.

Spam Karma uses a clever set of rules to decide if a comment or trackback is spam, and I don’t think that any spam has ever got through on the installations that I support. There have have been some false positives – about 1 or 2 per year!

But I can understand the problem – the software is non-profit, so however passionately you develop it the time eventually comes where you decide to call time and move on to other projects.

The author’s blog gives one of the reasons as the current development of WordPress. I think WordPress is a great piece of software as well, but I do agree that the frequency at which the upgrades appear has recently become a little bit overwhelming. There have been times where I seem to be in a cycle of upgrading installations, and before I have finished the next version is released.

Let’s hope that this is not the end of the story for Spam Karma, and that some good programmers take over the project and keep the blogosphere free of spam.