Our good friend Matt Freedman has been keeping pretty busy lately. It was just last week that we told you about his Comment Approval Notification WordPress plugin and this week, he’s got another great offering that will keep you in touch with the rest of Internet.

Twitter is a great networking and microblogging platform. Just as you may want to another blog from time to time, you may also want to link to a friend’s Twitter profile. Instead of typing out the URL by hand, you can simply make use of Matt’s Twitter Links WordPress plugin. In a nutshell, this replaces any instance of a Twitter username in your posts with a link to that person’s Twitter Profile.

Naturally, it would not be a good idea for the plugin to scan your entire post, replacing every second word with a hyperlink. That’s why Matt has it setup that it will only scan through terms that are prefaced with the @ symbol. For example, if I were to write @bluefur or @mattfreedman in a blog post, those would link to twitter.com/bluefur and twitter.com/mattfreedman, respectively.

You can find more information about Twitter Links on Matt’s blog and you can download it here.

CORRECTION: As per Matt’s comment below, the plugin is meant to work only with comments at this time and not within the blog posts themselves. He may change this with future revisions, however.

Matt Freedman of MattsBlog.ca is a good friend of the BlueFur community and he’s got a really useful WordPress plug-in that he recently developed and released.

As I’m sure you have noticed, many blogs hold comments in moderation for a number of different reasons. If you leave a hyperlink in your comment or use certain language, the comment could be held in moderation for the blog owner. This may also be the case it’s your first time leaving a comment on that blog. How can you know when your comment has been approved?

That’s where the appropriately named Comment Approval Notification WordPress plug-in comes into play. In a nutshell, it sends out an automatic email to the site visitor when his or her comment has been approved by the blog owner. The automatic email can be formatted however you like and Matt has set it up with a number of “shortcodes” so that you can completely customize what it says.

A relatively simple plug-in like this can help drive some traffic back to your blog, because many people leave comments and then forget about them. The email can serve as a reminder, getting them to visit your blog again. More information about the Comment Approval Notification plug-in can be found on Matt’s Blog.

It’s just like sending that email that you regret moments later. With most blogs on the Internet, the moment that you hit the submit button, your comment either enters moderation or is immediately published for everyone to see. You may want to make some changes to your comment, like fixing a URL or correcting a simple typo, but what’s done is done. They say that as soon as it is up on the Internet, it is forever.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The very useful Ajax Edit Comments 2.X WordPress plugin addresses this very concern, because it allows visitors to your blog to edit their comments for a certain amount of time after they hit submit. This works in a similar way to the comment functionality that you find on a website like Digg.com.

Installation and setup couldn’t be easier. Simply download Ajax Edit Comments and upload the unzipped folder into your WordPress plugins folder via FTP. Activate the plugin through the WordPress control panel and it should be alive and kicking. Further still, admins can set it up so that registered users can edit their comments for an indefinite amount of time.

If you are tired of all those comments that read, “Oops. I mean to say…”, then you may want to consider Ajax Edit Comments.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the “Save” and “Publish” buttons are right next to one another when you are in the “Write Post” tool in WordPress. While WordPress is set up to auto-save your content at regular intervals, there are times when you’ll still want to hit the Save button, because you want to make sure that it has actually saved everything that you have written.

You’ve probably experienced the scenario where you’re almost finished writing a world class blog post and then something goes awry, effectively eliminating all of that hard work. Not a pleasant experience, to say the least. That’s why it’s so important to save early and save often. You do it in Microsoft Office and you should do it in WordPress too.

Unfortunately, because the “Save” and “Publish” buttons are right next to one another, you may accidentally hit Publish when you really want to click on Save. As a result, your half-completed blog post can go live and this is obviously not a good thing, especially if you still have a lot of content to write or a lot of editing to do.

A simple trick to overcome this problem is to make use of the timestamp feature, even if you plan on publishing the post immediately after it is done. Upon opening the Write Post tool, go to the area where it says “Publish immediately” (above the Save/Publish buttons) and click on the Edit link next to it. Bump the timestamp to some date in the future.

This way, if you accidentally hit Publish, the post will only be timestamped to go live in the future and not to go live immediately. When you are ready for the article to go live, simply switch the timestamp back to the current time and it will be published immediately.

Attention bloggers if you have manually installed WordPress then you should immediately upgrade to 2.6.3. There are security issues in 2.6.2 which are now fixed in 2.6.3.

For those who installed WordPress with Fantastico, Netenberg usually has the upgrade released a week or two later. We do post Fantastico updates on the blog so keep an eye open for that.

Please also note we will post when it is time for Managed Blog hosting customers to upgrade in this blog.

There are different schools of thought when it comes to the application of blogrolls. Some people say that it will take away from your PageRank and hurt your Google rankings, because you have permanent outbound links on every page of your blog. Others say that linking out to the rest of the blogosphere is mutually beneficial and it’s a great way to make friends on the Internet.

The trouble with the standard blogroll is that it is simply a list of links. Visitors to your blog have very little way of knowing what to expect when they click through to one of the blogs on your blogroll. That’s where the helpful Live Blogroll plugin for WordPress comes into play. Instead of displaying a simple link, your blogroll can actually pull the live RSS feed from the blogs on your list.

What happens is that when a visitor hovers their mouse pointer over one of the links, a small window pops up overlaying your content and this window shows the most recent items in that blog’s RSS feed. This is all done with AJAX and the style of the pop-up can be adjusted through CSS. This sounds like it could be a pretty handy plugin, but some people may not like the intrusiveness of the pop-up windows.

You can find out more information and download the Live Blogroll plugin at Prevolac.com. Thanks to Damien Riley for the heads up.