I’ve upgraded all my blogs to WP 2.6.1, and so far I’ve noticed that my blogs are loading much more quickly. I continue to thank the blog gods for the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade Plugin, because now I don’t break my code every time I upgrade like I did when it was a manual process

I finished tweaking the new theme on MomReviews, so far it seems to be loading correctly each time with no sidebar weirdness, so I’m happy with it for now. But since I get bored with themes quickly, I’m sure I’ll be looking for a new one soon! Speaking of MomReviews, I’m giving away a BeLight Diaper Bag over there so stop over and enter.

In my sidebar is a button for BuyBlogReviews.com. I bid on three jobs over there today, two of which involve being sent a product to review first plus getting paid a little cash for your time. I haven’t had experience with their customer service yet, but if you are interested, check it out by clicking that button. I don’t think I get paid anything if you do so there’s no obligation

Have a great weekend everybody!

I’m always looking for new ways to entice readers to subscribe to my blogs’ feeds, add my blogs to their Technorati Favorites, sign up to get my feed by email, and add my posts to social bookmarking sites. Feedburner has the links for the feeds, Wordpress has a plugin for the social bookmarking, but there are lots of people posting graphics in the “Web 2.0″ style that are really eye-catching.

But what I’m wondering is, do readers really use bookmarking icons? For example, at the end of this post you’ll see the graphic that says “Bookmark” with icons that link to Digg, Delicious, Stumble, and more. But do readers actually use them? Or do readers who regularly submit posts to Digg or Delicious or who often Stumble posts have their own methods for doing that? I know that personally, I use the Stumble toolbar to Stumble posts, and to be honest, I never use Digg unless someone I know emails me and asks me to Digg something for them.

And yet, I have the bookmarking plugin on all my blogs. I think at the least, the icons will remind people that hey, I want to Stumble this post or add it to Digg or whatever. Then they can use their own methods to do so. On my other blogs I get a ton of traffic from Stumble, so I plan to keep the icons on my blogs for now. What about you?

Sometimes it really bugs me that I always seem to be the last one to know about something. I’ve been noticing that when I post comments on blogs, it shows the URL and link to my latest post for whichever URL I’ve used in the comment field. I finally took a closer look and saw that it is the Wordpress Comment Luv plugin, which you can find at here. I’ve installed it on all of my blogs, and I’m hoping it encourages more comments. For some reason MomReviews, which gets pretty decent traffic and has a lot of feed subscribers, gets the least number of comments of all my blogs besides this one.

So if you comment, look for a link to your most recent post underneath. It’s wicked cool!