PureBlogging

Welcome to this week’s edition of Weekend Links! Every Friday, I reward the active members of this community by featuring an interesting post from the top commentators.

If you would like to see your post featured here, just join the conversation by commenting regularly and next week you just may make the list.

Here’s this week’s list:

• Jamaipanese discusses X-Seed 4000, a really big freaking building, to be built in Japan.
• CutieGadget reviews the Cutie Crayola Camera for kids.
• Ashwini gives us a peek at the new Orkut design.
• JoLynn Braley answers the question, “If you eliminate sugar from your diet, what exactly do you eat?“
• Search Engine Marketing shows you how to get Rosetta Stone for free. It’s also the last day to enter his free Nintendo Wii and free Playstation 3 giveaways.
• Roberta Ferguson tells us that Britney Spears passed on a hit single. I think Britney also missed out on brains, parenting skills, and underwear… but maybe that’s just me.
• Webd360 talks about the importance of commenting on other blogs and shows how to find new blogs to comment on.
• vandelay lists 9 essential tools for bloggers.
• tallfreak gets to meet Sarah Silverman. Congratulations… that would be cool.
• GnomeyNewt reveals the secrets to staying persistent and motivated.

Did everyone see my LSU Tigers play last night? Man, I’m excited about this season! Geaux Tigers!!

Congratulations everyone, you’ve been stumbled… Have a great weekend!

Shareaholic is a new Firefox extension that simplifies the process of submitting a web page to your favorite bookmarking sites.

Shareaholic makes it easy for you to submit the web page you’re viewing to digg, del.icio.us, facebook, google bookmarks, magnolia, reddit, stumbleupon and twitter. If you prefer, you can also e-mail the web page to a friend.

The ability to easily submit web pages is handy but I think the most useful feature of Shareaholic is its ability to track bookmark submissions in real time. You can see if an URL has already been submitted, how many times it has been saved on del.icio.us, how many times it’s been dugg, and how many comments it has received.

Bonus feature: Also find out how popular the page you’re on really is. Track real-time statistics from digg and del.icio.us.

If you do a lot of bookmarking and sharing this might be a handy little tool to try out.

Jeremy Schoemaker, who most of you probably know as Shoemoney, recently revealed that he has been the target of a corrupt DMOZ editor. Basically, he was told by the editor that he would have to pay $5000 to keep his ODP listing. Where I come from, that is called extortion.

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t stop there. Joost De Valk reports that that his DMOZ editor account was disabled because he asked why Shoemoney’s URL was removed.

So I posted something like that in the commentthread to the above post, and I added a note to Shoemoney’s URL in DMOZ asking why the URL was removed.

Now pay attention: within 36 hours after doing that, my account was disabled!

And this is not the first time that DMOZ editors have been linked to some rather shady activities.

When you consider the corrupt editors and the fact that it’s impossible to get a site listed anymore, why does Google and others still put so much weight on being listed there? I just don’t get it.

DMOZ is dead but apparently nobody bothered to tell Google.

There were some truly amazing plugins submitted for this year’s WordPress Plugin Competition. PureBlogging was a proud sponsor of this year’s competition and I wanted to give the winners a little recognition by posting the results.

• Grand Prize: OneClick by Anirudh Sanjeev
• Second Prize: MyDashboard by Barry
• Third Prize: WordPress Automatic Upgrade by Keith Dsouza
• Consolation Prize: Who Sees Ads by Ozh

You can get the list of winners and an explanation of the winning plugins from the official announcement.

A big thank you goes to Weblog Tools Collection for organizing the competition and congratulations to all the winners!

Are you ready WordPress 2.3? The new version is now in feature freeze and the first public beta of WordPress 2.3 is scheduled to be released today.

According to Ryan Boren:

WordPress 2.3 went into feature freeze last night in preparation for its eventual release on September 24th. From now on we’re concentrating exclusively on testing and bug fixing. We are scheduled to release the first public beta of 2.3 this coming Monday, August 27th. We’ll be doing a new beta release every Monday and bug hunts every Wednesday. On September 17th we enter a hard freeze and release the first release candidate.

WordPress 2.3 includes several new features including tagging, improved post and draft management, and plugin upgrade notification. It will be interesting to see how tagging has been implemented in the new version.

A calendar of events for the release can be found here.

Welcome to this week’s edition of Weekend Links! Every Friday, I reward the active members of this community by featuring an interesting post from the top commentators.

If you would like to see your post featured here, just join the conversation by commenting regularly and next week you just may make the list.

Here’s this week’s list:

• Jamaipanese survived Hurricane Dean. I feel for you… we have to deal with hurricanes here in South Mississippi too. I’m glad you’re ok.
• Michael Fultz discusses raising kids for fun and profit.
• CutieGadget reviews the Choc-u-Lator, a cute chocolate calculator.
• Search Engine Marketing lists the top 15 funniest consumer goods labels.
• Ashwini explains why updating your blog on Sunday is a good thing.
• JoLynn Braley discusses persistence and determination, 2 key components for successful weight loss.
• Tyson talks about Andrew Keen, blogging enemy number 1. Also, don’t forget about his contest.
• Saman Sadeghi gives another great Windows tip with how to disable Windows security alerts.
• Roberta Ferguson explains the proper way to interview a rock star.
• vandelay gives a few tips on creating a more valuable blog for your readers.

Congratulations everyone, you’ve been stumbled… Have a great weekend!