For those of you in the Indianapolis area who have been looking for a local blogging focused conference, be sure to check out Blog Indiana 2008.

Local bloggers from across Indiana will gather at the IUPUI Campus Center on August 16-17th, 2008, for Blog Indiana 2008, a 2-day blogging and social media conference that aims to promote education, innovation and collaboration among Indiana’s fast-growing blogging community. The conference is sponsored by the IU School of Informatics.

Blog Indiana 2008 is a 2-day conference for both experienced and new bloggers alike. Sessions will include topics such as blogging for beginners, using blogs in your business, monetizing your blog, political blogging and more advanced topics. In the past, most blogging and technology-related conferences have either been too expensive or too far out-of-state. Blog Indiana 2008 seeks to bring a low-cost, high-value conference to Hoosier bloggers.

From looking over the sessions, this should be a decent introductory crash course for anyone who is curious as to what blogging is all about and/or anyone who wants to dig in and learn a little more about blogging.  At $49.00 for both days that is a deal as far as conferences go.  Seating is limited to 200 people so register soon if you’re interested.

(We probably won’t make it to this one but would love to hear any attendees thoughts afterwords.)

Following the success of the offical WordPress Extend Plugins Directory the WordPress Extend Themes Directory has just been added.  As this takes off the WordPress Extend Themes Directory will give WordPress.org users easy access to numerous WordPress themes that are open source (GPL) and that are free of “link bait” (this has been a huge problem in the past).

Just a word of caution for anyone who is using their WordPress install in order to power a podcast via PodPress…DO NOT UPGRADE TO WORDPRESS 2.6 just yet.  There is an issue with PodPress 8.8 that won’t allow you to add and save the audio file(s) in WordPress 2.6.  Dan from Mighty Seek said an update should be avaialble 10 days from now, so keep your eyes open for that.

UPDATE

The new version is still not out, but Andrew Ozz has posted a quick fix for those of you who don’t want to wait and are comfortable updating the plugin code yourself.

For those of you who haven’t heard yet, development of the WordPress Spam Karma plugin has officially been discontinued and the current code has been released GPL Version 2.  While this isn’t a plugin we use ourselves, we do see it running on probably around 10% (+/-) of our clients’ blogs, thus the announcement has caught our attention.

To address what the future of Spam Karma may hold, we can only speculate from what we’ve seen in the past with other open source projects.  Here are some common scenarios:

• The project will just die. Since this is already “off the ground” we doubt that happens, at least not right away.
• An individual or a group of people will pick it up and run with it.  The majority of WordPress plugins fall under this category.
• A development firm will pick it up and take over development. This could be likely due to the high profile of the plugin as long as the development firm consistently has the time and resources to devote to the development and upkeep of the plugin.

So, with that said, we’ll keep our eyes open to see what happens.  In the meantime, Spam Karma 2.3 Release Candidate 1 seems to still work with WordPress 2.6.

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WordPress 2.6 has been released.

Key new user features include:

• Post Revisions
• Google Gears support
• Image captions and better image control
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one
• Improved WYSIWYG editor
• Theme Previewer
• Word Count displayed when writing and editing posts and pages
• Press This bookmarklet

If you need assistance with upgrading or have any questions regarding WordPress, please contact us.