The Fearless Blogger

from Crestock.com

As a blogger, I’m always happy to find new resources for free/royalty free images. I thought I’d pass this info along to those of you who feel the same:

Crestock.com has released a new WordPress plugin called Freebie Images:

Spice up your blog with professional, high quality, free stock photos & images! With an amazingly simple Drag and Drop interface, blogging has never been this easy!

(The following information is from the Crestock.com blog)

What is it and what does it do?
The Freebie Images Plugin gives you a micro format search interface inside your WordPress Admin where you can search for and add images to your blog post – free of charge. The images are perfectly sized for blogs – between 300px and 400px width.

How does it work?
The plugin uses Crestocks existing search algorithm, so the search results – and images – are the same as on Crestock.com.After doing an image search, youre presented with the search results.

Adding the images to your post couldnt become much easier – when youve found the image you want, simply drag & drop it into your blog post, in the position where you want the image, and thats it.

You also get access to most of the advanced filtering options on Crestock.com with a single click, for example:

• Number of images per page
• Image Orientation
• File type
• Pagination

Where can I get it?
The plugin can be downloaded from Freebie Images.com – the Plugin home page.

Please Note
I should caution you that Crestock.com is describing this as a “public beta”. In other words, don’t expect perfection (or in other other words – use at your own risk!). From a quick glance at Crestock.com’s blog post, it looks like people have reported some bugs  (it wasn’t clear if they were issues with the plugin or from lack of documentation for proper installation).

I’ve not yet had a chance to give the plugin a try, but will report back once I do.  In the meantime, feel free to share your experiences in the comments below.

For More Details
Launching Freebie Images WordPress Plugin | Crestock.com Blog.

bbPress is forum software created by Automatic, the same folks who brought us WordPress. Until recently, it’s development had been relatively slow.

Seems like things are starting to move forward, based on an announcement made in the bbPress.org forum today:

Hi everyone, bbPress 1.0 is moving beyond Alpha stage and skipping Beta to go straight into a series of Release Candidates towards a final 1.0 release. The first RC is now available for download.

We’ve made this decision to push towards 1.0 final as the scope of what was going to be included in 1.0 has been whittled back and we have had some serious real world trials through TalkPress.

I’ve been playing with bbPress for the still-in-progress URLuscious.com, so plan to try out the new upgrade in the next few days and will keep you posted when I have a live version available for folks to check out.

For more on bbPress, visit the site at bbPress.org.  Justin Tadlock has also recently posted the first in his series of bbPress-related tutorials on his site.

I’m excited to announce my latest endeavor: URLuscious!
URLuscious is part of my master plan to demystify all things techie-geeky; helping non-techie folks incorporate the web and its social goodness into their lives.

The mission statement:

Make it easy for anyone to quickly and easily have a website or blog that looks great and is easy to maintain – regardless of your creativity, technical knowledge or experience.*

*translation: Websites so easy, even your mother can do it!

Blog-in-a-box
URLuscious’s flagship product is Blog-in-a-box, a service that includes installation, configuration, hosting and user training for a WordPress blog.

Having a blog has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. I’ve talked to so many people who would like to have a blog or website of their own, but don’t have the time or technical comfort level to get one started. Others want the benefits of a self-hosted WordPress blog, but feel locked into their current system or don’t know how to make the switch.

My goal is to remove these intimidating and/or frustrating barriers so that anyone can have the rewarding experience I’ve enjoyed.

Sneak Peak and Gift Certificates read more

I’ve previously written about Chat Catcher, a plugin for WordPress that “collect” tweets about a blog posting so they can be displayed with the posts comments.

Shannon Whitley, its developer, has another great plugin in the works:  Twitter Connect.

Twitter Connect adds a blue button to your blog  (pictured above) that visitors can click to use their  Twitter credentials to leave a comment.  Similar to Facebook Connect, this process tells the blog who you are without you having to share your Twitter password.

It’s brand-spanking new (or else you’d see one of those buttons on my blog by now!) – Shannon just wrote it today.

Shannon based the plugin on the work done by Adam Hupp of Facebook.  He writes:

Although this plugin is nowhere near as complex as the Facebook Connect code, it provides the basic login into WordPress and will display avatars with each comment.

You’ll likely be seeing the button on this site sometime soon.  In the meantime, head over to Shannon’s blog to try it yourself!  Twitter Connect (sort of) | Shannon Whitley.

(Worth noting:  In my Chat Catcher post, I mentioned how impressed I was with Shannon’s responsiveness and proactive service approach.  I’d like to make a follow up comment here to share that Shannon has continued to maintain that level of service, even as the popularity of his plug-in has grown.)

After seeing a tweet about sitetweet.net, I headed over to the site to see what it was all about:

sitetweet allows webmasters to post immediate messages on Twitter about specific behaviors on their site. Usually installed on strategic pages, you can configure sitetweet to send a special message when a user performs a certain action on your site. You can use Twitter’s options for private posts in case you want to control who follows your login.

Some interesting uses:

• receive details on goal completions;
• register specific searches;
• receive notifications from vistors from specific sources. read more