50 Great WordPress Themes

50 fantastic and free WordPress themes over at SixRevisions.com
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Wordpress 2.7 - Chock full of changes

Tonight at 8pm EST or tomorrow at 1am if you’re on GMT, version 2.7 of Wordpress will be released and it’s full of new features, mostly in the admin panel (which is really where it counts)

Some include:

Brand new admin layout with collapsible left side menu and navigation features like drag and drop module reorganizing and convenient shortcuts to commonly used elements

Install plugins from main admin area

Batch edit feature allows you to edit multiple posts at the same time. Change author, add/remove categories and tags

Default Media settings lets you specify things like default image size or crop size

Future Upgrades in Admin

One really useful feature is that Wordpress will now allow you to upgrade to future versions from within the admin panel, no more downloading updates and then uploading via FTP etc. Read about more of the features at the link below

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Free websites Blogs and more

Weebly’s super simple drag and drop interface allows you to create and host your own free hosted site or blog.

From the site:

• Create a free website & blog
• Switch designs on the fly
• Drag and drop interface
• Buy a new domain instantly, or
• Host your existing domain for free

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Website Analytics and Beyond

If you are a fan of Google Analytics you will flip over nuconomy. While Google Analytics gives you all types of drillable data about who came from where, what they clicked on, and how long they stayed, nuconomy gives you that and more (and for free…for now)

In the image above you will see a graph of how many viewers watched a particular online video, and for how long. You can tell if people dropped off at a particular moment in the video, how many people watched it all the way through, how many fast forwarded and the list goes on.

And that’s just one example. You can get data about how Flash, Java and other scripted elements are viewed as well as all the usual data…what country visitors came from, what pages they viewed, where they entered and exited, etc. etc.  If you are interested I highly recommend that you sign up now before the beta registration closes. The one caveat I should mention is that it is a bit more complicated to install than Google Analytics, but they claim that even a large website can be done in about an hour.

For bloggers, though I haven’t tried it, there is apparently a plugin (widget?) version for WordPress that can be installed in seconds.

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Essential reading for Webmasters

If you haven’t done so already you really should have a look at Matt Cutts’ blog. He is an engineer at Google and his blog is full of pearls of wisdom about search engine optimization. When trying to learn how to rank better in Google you can’t do much better than reading advice from an insider.

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Free Website Creation Tools

If you want to create your first or your 50th website and want to do it easily and for free, SmashingApps.com has a review of 13 free online tools that will help you create and host a website for free.

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Adsense analysis

If you use Google AdSense ads on your site, you might find this web tool helpful. Upload your data (downloaded from AdSense as a CSV file) and this site will generate any number of charts and graphs including:

• Impressions
• Impressions (Cumulative)
• Clicks
• Clicks (Cumulative)
• Clickthrough Percentage
• Earnings
• Earnings (Cumulative)
• Earnings Per Click

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Check your Blog’s Required reading level

This tool also works on myspace profiles, livejournals, facebook, and most websites
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