As you probably know version 2.9 of WordPress created a small bug with the cron jobs feature, so scheduling posts ahead of the time was not working correctly. The WordPress community acted pretty fast to fix everything, though, and the new release is already available.

You should see a notice to upgrade on your dashboard. Otherwise just head to WordPress.org and download version 2.9.1 manually.

There were some other minor issues fixed as well, so if you are using 2.9 make sure to update.

If you visit WordPress.org you will notice that the classic blue download button now says “Download WordPress 2.9″. This is a major upgrade, and brings some really cool new features, including:

• Trash bin (no more problems with accidentally deleting posts or pages)
• Built-in image editor
• Batch plugin update
• Easier video integration
• rel=”canonical” tag support
• database optimization

The interesting thing is that when I logged into my WordPress dashboard a couple of minutes ago I didn’t see the message “Your WordPress version is out of date. Please upgrade!”. I am guessing that since 2.9 is not a security release they are not displaying that message to users of older versions.

Either way I am waiting a bit to upgrade. It is possible that within a couple of weeks version 2.9.1 will be released fixing some small bugs.

What about you, are you running 2.9 already? Are you liking it?

Building your email list (opt-in email list, that is) is one of the most important things you could do as an online entrepreneur. Why? Because email is the most intimate and responsive communication channel available today, and you must leverage it.

That is why I agreed to promote the Squeeze Theme when Nate Whitehill contacted me about it. Because I know that people buying it will be doing themselves a favor.

Cutting to the chase, what is the Squeeze Theme? It is a squeeze page creation tool for WordPress. Squeeze pages are those long pages you see with a bunch of information, with the single goal of squeezing the email address of the visitor or closing a sale. You might not like how those pages look, but it has been proven time and again that they convert much better than anything else.

In other words, if you setup a simple landing page with just a headline, an opening paragraph and an email subscription form, you will probably get a conversion rate below 0,5%. That is, for every 1,000 visitors that you send to that page 5 will subscribe to your newsletter.

If you use a properly crafted squeeze page, on the other hand, your conversion rate could easily reach 3%, meaning that for every 1,000 visitors coming to the page 30 would sign-up for the newsletter. Quite a difference huh?

Nate created the Squeeze Theme with the goal of letting WordPress users with zero coding knowledge to create and customize their own squeeze pages. In other words, you will be able to customize the whole thing without touching a line of code. You do all that through the options page of the theme. Here is a screenshot of it:

The theme also allows you to integrate images, videos, test with different layouts and so on. If you run into any problems using it you will be able to use the Member Resource Center and the support forum. As you can see, it is a complete solution for people who plan to build squeeze pages and email lists.

If you are interested click here to get the details or purchase it, as they are currently offering a discount of 34% on the theme (the offer runs until December 1st only). By the way, the sales page itself was built using the Squeeze Theme, so check it out to see what you will be able to do with it.

This is a guest post by Vlatko. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

If your blog is on shared host but starting to get some serious traffic, then you are probably having problems with slow database queries, and in the future you might even be suspended because of exceeded CPU quota. The outcome will be frustration on your side and annoyed visitors on the other side.

The first reaction will be to file dozens of support tickets with the hosting company. After that you might consider moving to VPS or Dedicated Server, but before doing that you should try some tricks to improve the loading speed of your blog and survive higher traffic on shared hosting.

Important: before attempting to do anything with your blog please make a fresh backup of your database and WordPress files.

1. Use just few necessary plug-ins.

The less plug-ins you have, greater loading speed you achieve. So deactivate and delete the plug-ins that are not really necessary for your blog.

2. Use pure code in your sidebar instead of widgets.

This one seems radical but it’s very easy to implement. Make a research and you’ll find code examples for showing recent posts, categories, tags, etc. on your sidebar without use of any widgets.

3. Disable post revisions.

Post revisions are only building up your Database with records. The only thing you have to do is to put the following line in your wp-config.php file:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

4. Remove extra tables in Wordpress Database.

Login to your host, go to your phpMyadmin, open your blog database and you’ll see the table structure of your wordpress database. The default DB tables for wordpress are these ones:

• wp_comments
• wp_links
• wp_options
• wp_postmeta
• wp_posts
• wp_terms
• wp_term_relationships
• wp_term_taxonomy
• wp_usermeta
• wp_users

If you have some extra tables (which are not used by your plugins at this moment) delete them. They are there just because you’ve installed and uninstalled plugins in the past. Some of the plugins create extra tables in the DB and when you decide to remove them some of the tables are staying there. You don’t need them, so drop them.

5. Clean up your Wordpress Database.

For this step you’ll need one very useful plug-in. It’s called Clean Options.

Install it, activate it and use it to clean up your wordpress database. It will erase unnecessary, redounded, orphaned records. Then you are done with this plug-in, so deactivate it and delete it. After doing this, please test your blog and plug-ins for functionality. If some of your plug-ins stopped working, just reinstall them and you’ll be fine.

6. Repair and optimize your Wordpress Database.

Go to phpMyadmin again, select your database check all the tables, and in the dropdown menu select repair. Select the database again, check all the tables, and in the dropdown menu select optimize.

7. Change php code with html where applicable.

This tip is probably the most powerful of all these tips. The point is that in the header (sometimes footer and sidebars) of your wordpress theme you have php strings that every time when your blog loads they call your blog name, location of favicon.ico, stylesheet, ping file, feeds, charset etc.

All these php requests are slowing down your blog so why not changing them to static html code.

For example the following code:

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”screen” href=”<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_url’); ?>” />

Can be changed to:

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”screen” href=”http://your-domain-here.com/wp-content/themes/your-theme- folder-here/style.css” />

You can also:

• make your pingback URL static,
• make your feed URL’s static,
• you can remove the blog’s WordPress version,
• make your blog’s name and tagline/description static.

The easiest way to do this is to compare the actual header code of your blog with the outcome header code (right click, view source code in your browser). Look at the original php code and see what the results are in the outcome source code of your blog. By doing this you will realize which php lines you can change to static html lines. Don’t be afraid to experiment.

8. And finally use WP-Supercache plug-in.

Probably you’re already using this plug-in, but for the ones who don’t you should know that it will greatly speed up your blog since it saves and stores static html pages of your blog and serves them to the browser without any heavy impact on your host.

9. Bonus tip:

Optimize your files (CSS, Javascript, images, video) and don’t overdo it with external loads (CPM combo ads, scripts etc.)

The intention of covering these tips was not to give you thorough technical knowledge, but to inspire you to experiment and research. These tips will give remarkable results and you’ll be really stunned when you’ll see how fast your blog loads even on a shared host. I personally tried all of them and I can guarantee that they have truly amazing effect.

Vlatko is the owner of TopDocumentaryFilms.

Last week I was reading the official WordPress blog and I came across an interesting plugin: WordPress Exploit Scanner. It basically scans your database entries and site files looking for suspicious lines of codes. On top of that it also looks for suspicious plugins, posts, pages, users and WordPress settings.

Here is a screenshot:

It is worth to run this plugin once in a while, and especially if you believe that a malicious user might have compromised your installation recently or in the past.