There’s nothing worse than these shitty blogs consisting of nothing more than posts scraped from other blogs. Shoemoney wanted to make the scrapers work for him too, by getting some more backlinks from them. So he enlisted the help of Joost de Valk, and the result is a plug-in called RSS Footer. This Wordpress plug-in simply adds a link back to your blog in the footer of the articles in your RSS feed, like this:

Pretty slick, eh? At least now if someone if scraping your content, you’ll get full credit, as well as a backlink to your site. Joost has also added the option to add a link back to the post itself, with the title of the post as anchor text. This looks like this:

Definitely a plug-in worth adding to your Wordpress blogs!

Zac Johnson decided to use an incentive (a free MoneyReign T-Shirt) to generate more tips for his Top Spots list.. The Top Spots list is a “Fancy-Schmancy Tip Jar For Your Blog”, powered by Jim Kukral’s ScratchBack. For people that don’t want the headache of manually coding up their own Paypal Donations button, ScratchBack is a pretty easy alternative.

My only complaint with ScratchBack is that they’ve hardcoded all links with a nofollow tag, instead of giving users the option whether or not to use the nofollow tag on outgoing links..

Over the years, I’ve gone through a number of different web hosting companies. It’s a tough business, built on razor-thin margins, and often service and performance suffer as a result. Some hosts try to cram too many users on a single server, which results in pages coming up very SLOOOOWLY.. Worse yet, many places skimp on their support staff. Of course, you’ll never notice this when things are working correctly, but when your site goes down and you try to contact support, you’ll soon discover what a hellish experience it really is!

Thankfully, there are still some good guys out there giving us great service at reasonable prices. How does this sound?

10 Gigabyte Hosting Space
Host 6 Domains on 1 Account!!!
2,500 POP/Imap Email Accounts
250 GIGS of Transfer
SSL, FTP, Stats
CGI, PHP, MySQL
2000/2002/2003 Front Page Extensions
Free Domain Forever!
Free Site Builder (NEW)
Superb/Responsive Support Engineers
$6.95 Per Month

And BlueHost specializes in customer satisfaction.. Sure, I wouldn’t mind more domains hosted on one account, but most people don’t have such needs.. For $6.95/mo, nothing can touch it.. If you’re serious about your website, then sign up with BlueHost and put those worries to bed!

Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced Apple’s new lineup of iPods a few days ago at an event at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. I’ve been content with my old 4GB Mini for quite awhile now, but these new offerings really have my head spinning! Here are the highlights:

• The iPod shuffle get new colors.
• The iPod nano got a bigger screen, video capabilities and an interface update.
• Big iPods are now iPod classics, getting a new UI and hard drive capacity up to 160GB. This looks like the one to get if you’re a fan of Internet video.
• The most anticipated introduction, the iPod touch, brings the iPhone touchscreen interface to the iPod line. It’s basically an iPhone without the phone capabilities, with 8GB and 16GB capacities. It also has wifi capabilities!
• The price on the iPhone was cut to $399, and the 4GB version was dropped. The iPhone is a success, but not the runaway success that Apple expected. Slashing the price by over 30% should bring it to a price range that’s palatable to a larger audience.
• Jobs also introduced the iTunes WiFi music store, which will allow users to browse and purchase songs via wireless connections. Purchased tracks are copied back to your computer at next sync.

Talk about a dilemna. The iPod touch sounds great, 16GB of storage for your music/videos, and wifi access so you can surf the web and check your e-mail. Of course, you’ll need to find a wifi hotspot in order for it to be useful. Or for the same price, you can give up 8GB of storage and just get the iPhone. I’m not real fond of AT&T’s service, but for only a few more bucks than I’m currently spending on my Verizon bill, I can have unlimited data on an iPhone. It sure would have been nice if I could have left the laptop at home last week, and just checked my e-mail with my phone.

Of course, rumors are already swirling that a 16GB 3G-capable iPhone is going to be released in mid-November.. Whether there’s any truth to the rumor has yet to be seen, but I think I might wait until then before making a decision. Just look at the early adopters of the iPhone who are now kicking themselves - If they had just waited a few months, they could have saved $200!