Word of a new social media site has been slowly spreading through the blogosphere. WP Vote, based off the Pligg CMS, is a topical Digg-type site focusing on WordPress-related posts.

I assume the site is fairly new, since I’m just now hearing about it, and I’m surprised that it took this long for someone to create a WordPress-oriented social news site. It’s a great concept, and I hope it takes off. (Hey Automattic, you could buy them out and make the site part of WordPress.org )

WP Vote is off to a good start, with a bunch of submissions, a decent design, and good comment counts.

Have you ever wished you could have your oldest posts continually pushed back to the top of the stack, in order to highlight old articles from your archives? It’s not something I would do myself, but apparently there are some who would.

HackWordPress.com has a post on how to do just that, and an example scenario of why you would want to.

Personally, I don’t like the idea of mucking around with the time stamps like that, it’s…odd. What I would do instead, is have a section in my template that would pull older posts and display them. Maybe five random linked headlines that are older than 6 months? With the $wpdb class, you can work some WordPress magic and do whatever you want.

Though, as I said earlier, there are probably some people who would want to do what the plugin makes possible.

Collis Ta’eed’s company, Envato, is in the process of launching another FlashDen-style site. Known as Theme Forest, it will be a marketplace for web templates. Straight XHTML/CSS, or built for specific CMSes, the themes will sell from $5 to $75 (the staff set the price).

From what I’ve heard about Theme Forest, and sister sites FlashDen and Audio Jungle, you could probably make a fair bit of money off a decent theme.

The site is currently in private beta (and I’m not in the program ), so details are fairly sparse, though I’ve dug-up some details, and you could get an overall idea of how the site works by visiting FlashDen.net.

• Theme Forest - Thoughts And Opinions
• ThemeForest is Coming - Get Your Beta Invite (Collis’s announcement)

When you deactivate and delete a plugin in WordPress, something generally stays behind. All the tables the plugin added to the database, and their respective rows, remain behind, unless the plugin developer thoughtfully included a function to wipe them before deactivating. This means, if you have the expertise, it’s a good idea to go through the database once in awhile and delete tables created by plugins that you no longer use. (Warning: Unless you’re sure you know what you’re doing, don’t mess around with the WordPress database. You could easily break something.)

The next version of WordPress, version 2.7, will take care of this though. It will include facilities that will enable a plugin’s tables to be deleted if the plugin files are deleted (not deactivated, deleted).

The apparent best method for plugin developers to make use of the feature is to create an uninstall.php script in the plugin’s directory, and add some MySQL queries to remove their tables from the database. The script will run when their plugin is deleted.

Jacob Santos has a post up about the upcoming plugin uninstaller in WP 2.7.

Min-width is a useful CSS property that, as it’s name suggests, sets the minimum width of an element to a specific pixel width (or em or whatever). It’s very useful.

The problem? Microsoft. Internet Exploder doesn’t support the property. Instead of ranting about Microsoft’s pathetic browser, I’ll skip to the solution…

First, make sure you have an IE-specific stylesheet to put all you IE hacks in. It makes it easier to manage things, and it makes sure hacks like this don’t stop your CSS from validating. (Believe me, this one will.) Include it in your page head like so:

<!--[if IE]><link rel=”stylesheet” href=”ieislame.css” type=”text/css” media=”all” /><![endif]–>

Next, add something along the lines of this to the file:

#mydiv { width:expression(document.body.clientWidth < 850? "850px": "auto" ); }

Just replace both instances of “850″ with the minimum width you prefer.

Not too hard, but it shouldn’t be necessary.

Michael Martin has just redesigned his blog Pro Blog Design. Along with the new design comes a few new opportunities for you. Opportunities to promote your site, and make some money.

First off, Michael has 125×125 ad space now. They’re available for $45/month, and the first four buyers get them for $30 instead. (Two out of four have already sold, so the offer won’t last long, sadly.)

Now is Michael selling out all of a sudden and filling PBD with ads? No. Before you start complaining, listen to what Michael has to say for himself: “The money from the adverts is not for me. It will be used to help pay for other writers to write articles for Pro Blog Design.” What was that? Paying other writers?

The second opportunity is guest posting. Michael will be paying guest writers $50 per post. He’s looking for posts on WordPress, design advice, usability, and resources. Authors get s short bio and a link to their site at the bottom of the post. Not bad, eh?

And if you haven’t subscribed to Pro Blog Design yet, I highly recommend that you do.

• 101 Awesome Portfolio Sites
• WordPress 2.7 heavily based on existing plugins - I’m okay with that so long as they don’t introduce 125×125 ad management or URL shortening features.
• 20 Creative Business Cards You Probably Didn’t See Before - Yes, another business card roundup. Don’t worry, this one’s mainly ones you probably haven’t seen before.
• 10 Excellent CSS Tips and Tutorials
• Daniel Scocco interviewed me the other day about my experiences with the 9rules network. Worth a look if you’re considering applying in the next window (November 2008).
• Your blog readers may not realise they are reading a blog - Do you know you’re reading a blog? Good, I guess that doesn’t apply to Webmaster-Source. This is a real problem though, and one that irritates the heck out of me sometimes. Blog = “a sort of content management system” not “an online journal.”
• Making Money Online is About Getting Big (and Not About Jamming Ads on Your Website)
• Eden changes its name to Envato

I think it’s safe to say you’ve heard of Akismet. Good old Akismet, by the makers of WordPress, is the de facto standard for blocking comment spam. It normally does an excellent job, though it misses a few spam comments here and there.

I think it’s safe to say that 98% of WordPress users (I made that number up, just so you know) use Akismet.

But what about the web newbies, just installing WordPress for the first time? You know, the people who don’t have a whole lot of experience with the web, but heard about blogging and WordPress, and decided to set it up with Fantastico on a cheap shared webhost. Those people are in for an unpleasant surprise…

Akismet, by default is deactivated, therefore unprotected. The equivalent of running a Windows-based PC on the internet without a firewall and antivirus, the blog will be slammed with spam pretty quick. It may not be a lot at first, but it will happen.

And not only is Akismet not activated by default, it’s buried on the Plugins page, where non-techies aren’t necesarily going to look. Then you need an API key to use the plugin, which requires registering for a blog at WordPress.com (a most confusingly named site) and then hunting down the page with the API key and pasting it into the plugin settings on your blog.

Here’s how it should work: When you first install WordPress, it should gently nudge you to activate Akismet, and like to the Plugins tab. When you activate the plugin, it should request that you enter your API key, and instead of telling you to get one from WordPress.com, link to Akismet.com, and let them applu for one there.

This month’s featured, and free, WordPress theme is Night Transition by Web Kreation.

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Around mid-July, I asked you what you used for your browser’s homepage. Unlike most of my polls, I this time allowed the selection of multiple options, seeing as most modern browsers allow you to have multiple tabs open on startup.

We ended up with some interesting results, and, predictably, Google is the #1 choice.

An interesting strategy, though quite different from mine, which is to have a custom page with links to my Google Apps email page, and the like.

The numbers are as follows: 40% of the 50 votes have Google.com, 20% use Netvibes, iGoogle, or similar; 20% use “other,” 16% about:blank, 6% a custom HTML file, 2% use Yahoo or AOL, and another 2% have their blog set as their homepage.

Google is leading by a large margin, which I kind of expected. Really, it makes a good homepage. It’s quick to load and fairly empty, sort of like about:blank, but it provides some useful function as well.

Michael Martin of Pro Blog Design uses this strategy:

My blog, Todoist, Google Reader and Digg.I read Digg first, then Google Reader. Once I close each of those tabs, I try not to open them again until the next day. It usually works.