Building a blog and trying to turn it into a community of some kind is not an easy thing to do, especially if you want to have your visitors opinions’ on different topics you write about. Sure, Wordpress has a nice comments system, but it does not allow you to really utilize the potential your blog might have in terms of communicating with the readers. You just have some sort of simple commenting system, but if you really want to build an active community in your blog you should provide them with more options, making your blog more like a forum where all topics are being started by you, but the visitors can comment and discuss them all they want almost like in a real forum. So here comes the IntenseDebate Comments Plugin for Wordpress that can help you make just that…

IntenseDebate Comments is specifically designed to enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website, so that once a visitor comes and leaves a comment he’ll return to read the following discussion. The plugin has custom integration with your WordPress admin panel making moderation a piece of cake, almost like moderating a forum. With IntenseDebate Comments plugin you get comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting functionality, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations to enrich your readers’ experience and make more of the internet aware of your blog and comments which drives traffic to you. There is a full comment and account data sync between Intense Debate and WordPress to ensure that you will always have your comments even after upgrading or removing the plugin for some reason. IntenseDebate Comments plugin requires WordPress version 2.5 or higher and is fully compatible with the latest version 2.8 so check that requirement before installing it in your blog and if needed you shpuld upgrade the version of Wordpress you have currently installed.

- Download the current version 2.2 of IntenseDebate Comments Plugin
- View the official website of IntenseDebate Comments Plugin for more information…

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…