I’m probably one of the few people who wasn’t impressed with Wordpress 2.5. I personally believe that Wordpress 2.3.3 was alot user friendly. At first I thought I’d appreciate Wordpress 2.5 when I get used to it. But then, three weeks of using it gave way for more problems (messy Wordpress theme, errors with plugins, troubles with widgets etc.).

After using Wordpress 2.5 for about three weeks, I decided to revert back to Wordpress 2.3.3. From switching to Wordpress 2.5 and back to 2.3.3, I noticed a potential problem with using Wordpres 2.5. (Note: This is just an observation.)

photo credit: MatthewCo

Right after updating my blog from Wordpres 2.3.3 to Wordpress 2.5, I noticed a sudden increase in the number of spams in my comment and trackback. Before the update, I usually receive about 20-50 spam (comments and trackbacks). Also, before I updated my blog to Wordpress 2.5, the total spam caught by Akismet was nealy 4,500, which was accumulated since I started using Wordpress in November 2007.

Since I started using Wordpress 2.5, on its first day, I received more than 600 comment and trackback spams. I didn’t mind it at first as Akismet is doing a great job in catching spams. On average, I receive about about 150 spams everyday, which is a 200% increase than when I was using Wordpress 2.3.3. Today, the total spam caught by Akismet is over 12,500 (comments + trackbacks).

I experienced receiving tremendous amount of spam after I updated to Wordpress 2.5 so it was my primary suspect. All my plugins, including Akismet, were all updated and yet I still receive lots of spam. It should have not been a big problem if Akismet was able to catch the spam comments and trackbacks but on the third week, spams started to show up in my comments and trackbacks that I needed to manually delete them.

To satisfy my curiousity, I reverted back to Wordpress 2.3.3. Guess what happened? After 24 hours, I just received 24 spams (14 comments + 10 trackbacks).

Was it Wordpress 2.5? Was it Akismet? Or it’s just some circumstances?

I would really appreciate if you share your experiences after you updated your blog to Wordpress 2.5. Did you have the same observation?

Thank you for your time.

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In case you haven’t noticed, I removed ProjectWonderful from my sidebar today. I have had no luck with it after using it for over one month. Moveover, I think that the revenue generated given the space and position it occupied was not worth it.

For 1 month, the three ProjectWonderful 125X125 banners only earned over $25. That’s a little over the price of one 125X125 banner advertisement on my blog. I also noticed that the highest bid price I got so far was only $0.80 and the lowest was $0.02. The huge range and price deviation occur because the price paid by advertisers depend on the number of bid (demand) and how much bidders are willing to pay. So even if you have a high traffic site when there are no advertisers bidding, your earnings will remain low.

Another reason why ProjectWonderful isn’t wonderful at all and why I took it off my blog today is because of the off-topic advertisements frequently shown on my blog. I know that Project Wonderful allows you to filter advertisements and approve only those that fit your blog’s topic but this means additional work to the blogger and lesser opportunity to monetize your blog. The earnings are just too meager that when you consider the time and efforts you put to keep advertisements relevant to your content, it’s not just worth it.

Other than the meager earning and the irrelevant advertisements, another reason why I took off ProjectWonderful from my blog is because it slowed the load time of my sidebar. This caused the advertisements and links below it to load very slow as well. As a result, my click through rate (Google Adsense) and page view (Links to other posts) are also adversely affected.

Lastly, since Project Wonderful requires you to install a script, it does not only slows your blog’s load time but it makes your blog not search engine friendly. If you’re considering optimizing your blog for search engines to get more of pages indexed in their seach result and increase your traffic, then you should minimize using scripts. By removing the long script of Project Wonderful, I am able to optimize my blog for search engines and give their crawlers an easier job.

To be fair, there are other websites like Entrecard.com that are making some decent revenue from Project Wonderful. Entrecard.com receives over $300 every month from Project Wonderful. I personally believe though that Entrecard.com can make more money from the space and position occupied by Project Wonderful.

What about your experience? Any luck so far? I’d love to know why you are keeping Project Wonderful despite the meager income you generate from it.

Thank you for your time.

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One of the reasons why some bloggers are active Entrecard users, other than the traffic, is the boost in their Alexa Traffic Rank. Now that Alexa has overhauled its traffic ranking algorithm to include more sources of data, will Entrecard traffic still be effective in boosting Alexa Traffic Rank?

I was doing my usual Entrecard dropping when I noticed that alot of the top Entrecard users’ Alexa Traffic Ranks have gone down dramatically. Here are a few of the most popular Entrecard users whose Alexa Traffic Rank increased after the changes in Alexa algorithm took effect.

• Ahkong.net – From 5X,XXX to 166,5777 (increased by over 100K)
• JoanJoyce.com – From 6X,XXX to 178,765 (increased by over 100K)
• LeeDoyle.com – From 6X,XXX to 128,108 (increase of about 60K)
• AGeeksJourney.com – From 3X,XXX to 171,153 (increase of about 140K)

These are only a few of those who suffered tremendous decline in their Alexa Traffic Rank.

Of course, Entrecard is still a great way to generate more traffic to your blog but is it still effective to boost Alexa traffic rank? Do you think that the new Algorithm implemented by Alexa is better compared to the old one? Has your rank been affected by the changes?

I would love to hear from you. Do share your experience through the comment.

Thanks for your time.

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