Today I am going to tell you about another free WordPress hosting where you can use your custom domain for free and run your own ads. If you are stuck with WordPress.com as you have to pay for custom domain mapping and you can’t add your own ads at all, here is a good alternative from reliable DreamHost.
It is called DreamHost Apps. If you don’t want a paid hosting from DreamHost, here you can find free application web hosting that includes several popular open-source web applications like WordPress, phpBB or Drupal. Obviously you won’t have FTP access or can’t install new themes or plugins. You have to be happy with the pre-installed ones. But that is the case with any other free WordPress blog hosting. And like WordPress.com you have no restriction on space or bandwidth. But unlike WordPress.com, you can map your custom domain free of charge. And though you can’t modify your themes code at will, at least you can add Adsense or any other ads code through widget in sidebar. I just checked with their support. And there is no policy against showing your own ads.
WordPress 3.0 got released just yesterday. And now, at 4.15 in the morning I got some time to upgrade my WordPress and have a look around to this latest update.
The most important change in this version was to merge WordPress MU with normal WordPress. So if you have multiple blogs, you can use WordPress 3.0 to run all your blogs from a single WordPress installation. But just like MU, you can only install blogs in sub-domains under a domain name( like example.anirbanroy.info and blog.anirbanroy.info under my domain name). Most likely you are using different domain names for your WordPress blogs. Then you need to use the WordPress MU Domain Mapping Plugin to map your WordPress blogs under a single installation to separate domain names.
Another very important feature is that WordPress team has released a whole new default theme called Twenty Ten that will support all the features of the current WordPress version. You can use custom menus, backgrounds and page headers with this new theme. And custom means custom! You can practically handcraft your navigation using custom menus. And you can even choose to show different header images for each of your blog post! By the way, don’t worry, Kubrick theme is still there if you are a legacy fan 
Admin dashboard colour has gone lighter and currently as I can see you will get any update notifications like for plugins and themes also in Dashboard settings in the left sidebar. There you can bulk update all those from a single page. Get Shortlink option has been added to the blog post to ease url shortening through WordPress without need of any third-party url-shortening services.
I thought of adding some screenshots of these new features. But when you find a more than decent video from WordPress official site, it is better to just embed it 
If you have played around long enough with WordPress, then you should know this simple trick. And as a newbie you would find this feature provided by WordPress quite useful, especially if you are looking to give your blog some static website look.
Just go to Settings> Reading from your WordPress dashboard. There you will find the option to add any page that you have created in your WordPress blog like “Who Am I” or “Contact” as your homepage. And you can switch back to show your latest blog posts as the home page any time. You don’t need any custom template for that.
This is just another example why people say that WordPress is flexible
Sometimes you may be migrating your blog to different server or importing blog posts or database from backup. Or it may even happen that your blog is broken due to some configuration problem in your hosting server. Then it is somewhat professional to show a maintenance page to your visitors. It gives a good impression to the readers and gives them some sort of info about when to come back.
That’s where I have found this WordPress plugin real handy. Without any hardship you can show a real pro-looking maintenance page to the users. And moreover you can give access to the real state of the blog depending on the WordPress user role. Like your blog administrators can have access to both front-end and back-end while subscribers can only have access to the back-end i.e. WordPress dashboard and they will see maintenance mode in front-end.
And you can write your own custom message and use dynamic placeholders to show your blog url, title and expected time when your blog will be live again. But one thing that you have to remember is that maintenance mode will not get deactivated automatically. But that is not that serious issue as you can show different message instead of expected time in that case. You have option to show messages like “coming back soon” when the time that you entered expires automatically.
Another nice little thing that I found worth mentioning. You can select urls that you want to exclude from maintenance mode. Suppose you want to keep your About And Contact pages working. Then you just have to specify the url paths in the plugin’s options page. And you can keep your trackback and feeds active on the same page.
Lots of options, easy interface
If you experiment with your WordPress blog a lot, then it is good to have it.
I stumbled onto this interesting backup service for WordPress a few months ago, but somewhat couldn’t endup writing a post for it. Most of you use different WordPress plugins to create a backup of your WordPress database and store it in your mailbox or hard disk. Though nowadays you get enough space in your inbox or hard disk, but still what about saving a bit of space especially if you can store it in a secure server? This service is provided by Backup Technology and like your normal WordPress database backup, you need to install their WordPress plugin.
I will go through the features quickly:
- You will get 50mb of disk space on their secure server.
- You can automate your backup schedule & mark a previous backup as locked so that it won’t get overwritten by a new backup.
- If you want you can get your WordPress backup sent automatically in your email.
- Using the built-in ZLIB support available in nearly all PHP installations nowadays, the WordPress plugin can reduce the size of a 50mb WordPress database to a 5mb compressed file.
- And you can use the plugin to encrypt your backups with DES, AES128 or AES256 encryption for total security.
So if you are looking forward to try new things, and care about more security, this service is worth to give a try. You are getting this WordPress service free of cost after all
Each time you edit your blog post WordPress sends a ping to the blog pinging services automatically. So if you edit the post several times after it has been published, WordPress will send pings same number of times unnecessarily. Blog directories and blog ping services like Ping-o-Matic track those pings & based upon the frequency of those pings they may consider your blog as a potential spam & ban it from their services.
So if you update your blog posts a lot, you better have some extra protection from being marked as a spammer. There are some plugins that can prevent WordPress autoping. One popular WordPress plugin is MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer. You just have to install it. Then you will get the options to enable and disable pinging. Even you can set the maximum number of pings at a certain time interval like one ping in 15 minutes. And from the log below the page you can find the pings that the plugin has prevented and the pings that went through. A cool plugin altogether. But for activation of this plugin you have to submit your email address and click on the confirmation link in the email. From then on, you will receive newsletters and offers from MaxBlogPress. You can unsubscribe from the mailing list any time.
But what if you get the exact same plugin without having to disclose your email address? CBNet Ping Optimizer is just a perfect alternative to MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer. Everything is same. You will get the exact same functionalities and same user interface and you don’t have to register your email address.
So what will you choose
I have seen many WordPress blogs taking this approach. They use to close comments after 30 days or 2 months of writing the blog post. So if you have some current affairs blog or a blog that updates your on offers & price of products, you can think of trying it. But I am not a big supporter of this method. Even with those blogs you may want to comment something so that later users get the correct info for that time. Only solid reason that I find is for dofollow blogs. If you have a dofollow blog, other webmasters might try to take advantage & there is every possibility that they would make a meaningless comment on an old blog post that has nothing to do in current context.
So now I will just tell you how to do it because the choice is up to you
So to close comments on WordPress blogs after some specific days just go to Settings> Discussion from your WordPress dashboard. Search for the line “Automatically close comments on articles older than” & then you can find the option to specify the number of days after publishing the blog post. Don’t forget to check the checkbox & save it. You are done. Comment option for all of your WordPress blog posts will now get closed after that specified days.
Just few days have passed & WordPress developers have been forced to release a maintenance version for WordPress 2.9. The main issue is that current WordPress 2.9 is triggering a bug in certain versions of PHP’s curl extension & for that pingback & scheduled posts are not working properly in different hosting environment. Besides, they have fixed 14 tickets in this maintenance upgrade.
So, if you are having any problem after you have installed WordPress 2.9, you can give it a try.
By the way, this blog is working perfectly after I upgraded to WordPress 2.9 & I am quite happy with it
At first I thought I won’t mention it as existing WordPress users can see the upgrade notification from their dashboard. But still there are so many bloggers who are interested about WordPress & still don’t use it. So just to let you know WordPress 2.9 is out & I have upgraded to it without any difficulty.
Then I tried to upgrade all my plugins simultaneously with only one click to the latest versions as I have six old ones. It took me some time to find it, as the batch upgrade option is not present in Plugins, but rather in Tools> Upgrade option. I had a very good video preview in a post made in WordPress.org about all the new important features of WordPress 2.9. If you want to explore a bit, go there & you will learn where to find them & how to use them.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post comparing Blogger.com & WordPress.com free hosting. And one of the demerits of WordPress.com is that it doesn’t allow the use of free custom domain. So now I thought of letting you know about a free WordPress blog hosting where you can use your own domain for free. Moreover, there is a revenue shaing program where you can earn 75% of revenue from your blog through Google Adsense.
The free custom domain feature of Blogetery is like Blogger.com. You just need to purchase a domain & then you can update DNS to point it to their server. They support both full-domain mapping (e.g. example.com) and sub-domain mapping (e.g. blog.example.com). So whether you want to host a standalone blog in this free blog hosting or just want to create an add-on blog for your pet project that you don’t want to host on your server, you can use it in both ways. It has some cool features with lots of themes & plug-ins to choose from.
It has been online for more than a year. So if you are looking for a free WordPress.com alternative, feel free to try it.