If you're a wordpress power user, you'll inevitably have some questions about how you can improve your blog or add new features. Here are five tips that will make life easier for people wanting to maximize their use of Wordpress.

The list is:

• Quickly Find Page/Post ID
• Custom Front Page
• Password Protect Wordpress
• Protect from the 'Digg Efect' with HTML
• Stop Hackers

Each of them with their own explanations (and links to other resources detailing how they're done).

One key thing he's repeating is using a service layer to access data asynchronously. His advice right now is to group data requests at the top of a user request, do them asynchronously, and then use the data in the rendering when it comes back.

They've published a PEAR package as an example of this asynchronous method that interfaces with Digg's API (http://services.digg.com). You can read more about the subject of his talk on the MySQL Conference website.

So, you want to start your own Digg or Reddit? Look no further. With PHP and MySQL, you can create your own Digg site in just five minutes. All you need is a PHP web server and MySQL database server; follow these instructions and you'll be up and running in time.

They use the Pligg software to do all of the hard work and describe its installation, configuration and use - simple and easy. You can find out more about Pligg on its website.

Digg is a user content driven site, users submit links to article and sites that interest them and other uses either give it the thumbs up or the thumbs down. The most popular sites get onto the front page and can have literally thousands of hits this is reffered to as the Digg effect. We are going to go step by step how you can develop such a site using Drupal CMS which is available from drupal.org if your unfamiliar with Drupal we have an overview here.

The real key to it all comes in with the plugins you install into your Drupal setup:

• Vote Up/Down module
• Links module
• Voting API
• Actions
• Voting Actions
• CRE recommendation

This article is just the first part in the series - check out part two and part three for the rest of the installation.

I quickly discovered that XML decoding under PHP 4 is a pain in the (****) when you do not have access to install further modules. So quickly moved onto JSON, but the lovely function json_decode is PHP 5 only. But I did a bit of search and found several PHP json classes without any dependencies.

With this, and some help from a bit more code, he was able to create the sample he shares in the post - a script to grab the latest stories and display their titles to his page.

This is usually caused by a large amount of traffic that is overloading your database (because each page that is loaded requires a query or multiple queries). A great way to not only improve the speed of your entire blog, but help prevent the above error from occurring is to install a plugin called WP-Cache.

The WP-Cache plugin automatically caches your pages without the need to install any outside methods. The post steps through how to get it installed and how to

You might have noticed that Digg has a cool way of maintaining clean URLs. Digg actually uses LAMP - Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP. But where are the .php extensions? The answer is here. 4 steps to implement your own Digg style clean URLs.

His method turns on Apache's rewrite engine (you do have mod_rewrite enabled, don't you?) and adds a rule to push all of the requests to two default PHP files. There's also a ForceType method that can be used to achieve the same effect. One .htaccess file later, you're in business and the PHP script only needs to access the $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] value to get the parameters.

What WP-Notable does is it allows you to include icons and links to where users can submit your site to the different websites, 15 of them to be exact. The 15 are: del.icio.us, digg, spurl, wists, simpy, newsvine, blinklist, furl, reddit, fark, blogmarks, yahoo, smarkling, magnolia, and segnalo.

I'll be honest, most of those I have never heard of, but it can't hurt to have those options to your visitors who have heard of them and are using it. To see an example of WP-Notable in work, just go to any article and underneath it you'll see the 15 icons with shortcuts to submit that article to those services.

The installation of the plugin is as simple as uploading and activiating, and Ryan includes a sample usage to integrate into your page.

It's pretty straight forward. For all of your posted comments you check if the owner of them is viewing them within 3 minutes of posting the commen. 3 minutes is usually enough time to notice you made a typo, but if you disagree I'll leave it to you to figure out how to adjust the code.

For example, I make a comment, realize I spelled something wrong and then I can click on my comment to edit it. Of course using AJAX means this all happens without having to reload the web page. Therefore the edits are seemingly quick. So let's add it to any web site.

He steps you through the process, first creating the DIV for the each of the comments, then some Javascript to make it editable. He then creates a timer to monitor how long it's been since the comment to limit the editing to three minutes. Finally, the code bits to load the text from the database and to save the text back in once it's been edited.

We host a wide variety of sites, covering everything from converting your garage into a living space to video game addictions. Because we are such a small operation, being hit by a link from a big site such as Digg would be both a blessing and a curse.

In order to place our ads on each page, we use PHP's auto_append_file feature to run our advertisement code. By using PHP's other neato function, auto_prepend_file, I can create a small piece of PHP code to detect when the site is being hit by Digg. In this situation, I have chosen to use Lighttpd to handle the increased loads, because of its proven high performance with large numbers of concurrent connections.

In his example code, he shows how you can detect when a user is coming from a digg.com page and take them to a cached version of the page they've requested (with the .cache extension).