If you have a WordPress website with OrangeCat and you are on a Gold plan, your WordPress software was upgraded to version 2.6 over the weekend.

Some of the new features that I have found useful are:

1. The new “Press This” add-on for your Firefox or IE bookmarks bar that lets you post to your blog from any web page you happen to be on. For example, if you click “Press This” from a Youtube page it’ll magically extract the video embed code, and if you do it from a Flickr page it’ll make it easy for you to put the image in your post.
2. “Theme Preview” - When you select a theme it pops up a window that shows the theme live with all your content, instead of immediately making it active on your site. This is great for just test driving themes before making a switch over publicly.
3. And “drag and drop” reordering of images in yuor WordPress image gallery let’s you reorder how images are displayed regardless of the order you have uploaded them in.

The WordPress folks put together a video showing some of the new features of version 2.6. I found them pretty impressive and a definite plus in making your blogging easier. If you have 3:29 to make your life better, watch the video:

The Version 2.6 page at WordPress.org has a larger version of the video available.

Most of our clients link to other websites. Linking to other sites can help increase your relevancy rating with the search engines (SEs). When they reciprocate, the inbound links can help with your search engine rankings as well - provided the link is wrapped around keyword-rich text that is relevant to your content.

But just as valid links can help you, dead or broken links can hurt you. When a website has been around for a while, it be a plus in the eyes of the search engines if you have continually added fresh content. But if your site suffers from “link rot” - old links to pages that have been renamed, dropped or relocated and links to now defunct websites - your SE ranking can be hurt by them. Defunct or non-working links show Google et al that your site is not being maintained - and they may penalize you for it.

None of us is perfect. I’ve had dead links on my sites as well. Websites need to be checked regularly. Links to outside pages and sources can break. Even internal links to web pages and images can break over time. A regular link check is the only way to be sure that your website is functioning as you intended.

To help OrangeCat customers prevent “link rot,” we’ve set up a monthly program to check the links on your website and report the results to you. We use proven software to scan your website(s) on a monthly basis and report any problems so you can fix them - or have us or your webmaster do it.

This is really important. Your website is your lifeblood and it’s importance to your business will only increase over time - but only if you make site maintenance one of your cardinal principles.

And if you’re an OrangeCat Gold customer, the LinkChek service is FREE.

More information on OrangeCat’s LinkChek service can be found here.

We have gotten much busier in the past few months and that has caused a problem with service requests that have been emailed in. You know, add an email address or two, change a password, update phone numbers on websites, etc.

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