As you may already know, Anubis Marketing uses WordPress almost exclusively to build, maintain, and manage our site and our client’s sites. There are about a million reasons why, but the bottom line is that they have a great number of people (mostly unpaid, yet extremely highly-skilled volunteers) helping to keep WP at the top of it’s game. Thus, we get new releases of the same software, only greatly improved each time. I remember using version 1.2 (I think, maybe 1.3?) back when I first got started, and I can’t say enough how awesome I think it is.

Anyway, WordPress has a new version, with some really great new features. My friend Aaron Brazell always writes up some great stuff when this happens, and this time’s no different: 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.5. He covers all the changes and visual improvements in the new version, as well as the new features like 1-click plugin updating and improved widgets.

The new admin interface (dashboard):

Pretty nifty, huh?

All in all, this version’s been on the board for about 6 months, and is considered a major release. There are lots of changes and “upgrades” and is something we can’t wait to implement on our client sites. However, that being said, we never do the upgrades until we’ve had a chance to play with it ourselves, so it’s going to take a little time to get all the upgrades completed. If you’re one of our clients, you’ll receive an advance notice email with a scheduled date and time of your site’s upgrade.

Popularity: 90% [?]

Now, I’m not going to try to convince you that this would be a great opportunity for a business blog, because I still feel that business blogs should be hosted, designed, and maintained by the company/entity itself. However if you’ve been considering getting into personal blogging, and want to get a feel of the “blog culture” without spending too much (or any) money, you could try Thoughts.Com.

Thoughts.Com is a totally free blog community where users can not only write blog posts on any topic they choose, but find themselves instantly attached to a whole bunch of readers. Bloggers can post photos, videos, podcasts, rate other members’ posts, and once a year, Thoughts.Com gives away a vacation to 5 of their bloggers!

Another pretty cool feature of this blog community that I haven’t seen much in others is their forums. Pretty much every topic under the sun is covered in there, making this a real community venture outside the realm of normal blog commenting. Unlike other free blog communities, the forums aren’t strictly limited to site issues or questions. It’s a community forum, where you can find others with similar interests and have a chat.

The format is pretty simple, and it’s easy to find other blogs based on a simple tag cloud. Comments and ratings seem welcomed by pretty much all bloggers, and the ability to either blog anonymously or put it all out there is pretty nifty too.

Again, if you’re really serious about blogging and trying to make some money with your blog, this isn’t the route I’d recommend. But for something fun, and a pretty large (despite it’s new-ness) community, it could be a cool thing to check out.

Popularity: 100% [?]