The new version 2.8 of WordPress called “Baker” has been officially released for download. Wordpress 2.8 represents a nice fit and finish release for WordPress with improvements to themes, widgets, taxonomies and overall speed. In the new version there were over 790 bugs fixed from the previous release. Visually Wordpress 2.8 feels a lot like the previous 2.7, with just with some minor tweaks here and there…

First and foremost, Wordpress 2.8 is way faster to use because of a lot of changes in the way it does style and scripting. There is also an automatic updated for themes much like the core and plugins updates introduced in the previous version. If you make edits or tweaks to themes or plugins from your dashboard, you’ll appreciate the new CodePress editor which gives syntax highlighting to the previously-plain editor. Also there is now contextual documentation for the functions in the file you’re editing linked right below the editor. The widgets interface has been completely redesigned in order to make them even more usable and straightforward even for new Wordpress users. Finally you should explore the new Screen Options on every page in order to utilize all the available space on your high-resolution widescreen display.

- Download WordPress Version 2.8 Baker
- For a full list of new features of Wordpress 2.8

I’ve found a new interesting hosting company besides DreamHost that I’ve mentioned some time ago. The new company (actually the company is not new, but available on the hosting market for 10 years now) is called Certified Hosting and it has some quite attractive offers for all your hosting needs. And unlike with DreamHost, here you can start with a shared hosting and then when your needs grow over time to even upgrade to a pre-configured dedicated server or even configure your own. And thin month the company is celebrating it’s 10-th anniversary so there are even some very good promotions you can use to get nice discounts on most of their hosting plans and solutions…

Now you are probably going to start with the way more affordable shared hosting solutions being offered by Certified Hosting and they come in three different flavors called: DORK, GEEK and NERD. The prices below are for payments on a monthly basis, if you pay for a year or two ahead you can get quite nice discounts and you should definitely do that.

- The DORK hosting is the cheapest at $8.95 per month, but allows you to host only 1 domain on it. Of course you get unlimited monthly bandwidth and storage space, but the CPU time you can use with your website is still limited and when your blog or website gets really popular you’ll have to upgrade.

- The GEEK plan is a bit more expensive at $9.95 per month, but also gives you the ability to host unlimited number of websites along with the normal unlimited bandwidth and hosting space. Again limited CPU time usage on the server so even if you host a lot of less popular websites or blogs their combined load on the server may reach the limit and you’ll need to upgrade.

- The NERD shared hosting plan is the top one that will cost you $14.95 per month. It is like the GEEK plan, but with an additional dedicated IP address and a private SSL certificate to access your blog over a secure web connection. You can also setup an anonymous FTP account only in this hosting plan.

Besides the unlimited bandwidth and space you get the above three shared hosting plans also come with unlimited FTP accounts, POP3 and IMAP emails, email forwarders and autoresponders, unlimited parked domains, subdomains and MySQL databases. You also get CGI-BIN and SSI (Server Side Includes) support, Frontpage Extensions, PHP 5, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Perl, Python, Image Magik, SSH Access, Spam Assassin Protection, Web File Manager, Cpanel Control Panel and much more. That combined with a great uptime, support and a 30 Day Money Back Guarantee definitely makes Certified Hosting a great place to host your blogs and websites.

The dedicated server hosting solutions start from $99 a month and scale up depending on the hardware resources you’ll be needing, but that will be needed only when your blog becomes very popular and receives thousands of visitors per day. You can pay for your shared and dedicated hosting at Certified Hosting with any major credit card or trough PayPal or Google Checkout.

- To learn more about the hosting services being offered by Certified Hosting…

Nowadays the spam comments in blogs have become quite a serious problem for almost any blogger. There are a lot of automated solutions that try to block the automatic spam bots that visit your blog and leave a mess in the comment sections of your posts. But why should you add additional heavy load to your hosting server with very advanced spambot protection solutions that are hard to implement and configure and not always provide 100% protection when there are some very simple and still quite efficient solutions?

One such solution is the Block-Spam-By-Math Wordpress Plugin that protects registration, login and comment forms from spambots by just adding a simple math question to it (example: “What is 4+3 ?“). This approach should give you 100% anti-spam protection and if any spambot bypasses it you can quickly and easily modify is just a bit to get back your full protection. So say bye-bye to the SPAM comments with the help of the quick and simple solution provided by Block-Spam-By-Math that needs noting more than to upload and activate it. And the best thing for this plugin is that it not only protects your blog from spam comments, but also from automated registrations and login attempts. And the only small drawback is that by default you also get the math question when you are logged in and need to post a comment to answer to a question from your visitors…

- Download Block-Spam-By-Math Wordpress Plugin