On the Developer Tutorials Blog today, there's a new post aimed at WordPress users to help them on the path to becoming "power users" with five tips.

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).

On his blog, Michael Kimsal talks about a presentation he sat in on at this year's MySQL Conference given by Joe Stump from Digg.com:

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.

Ever through about starting up your own custom version of a Digg-sort of site? Well, check out this new tutorial from the Developer Tutorials blog showing how to start it in "five minutes flat".

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.

The 'true hacker!' blog has a new post today that gives you a quick four step process for creating some clean, Digg-style URLs for your site with some simple Apache configuration changes (mod_rewrite).

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.