RePress is an anti-censorship plugin that allows anyone with a self-hosted WordPress site to uncensor a blocked website. The plugin turns the WordPress site into a proxy for the blocked website, rerouting traffic from a user, through the WordPress site, to the blocked website. RePress is under development by Dutch hosting company greenhost. It is currently available for download as an alpha release.

More and more governments from east and west are trying to censor the Internet. For different reasons the governments of countries like Iran, the USA, Syria, The Netherlands and China seek ways to block websites of the web and limit free speech. This plug-in will enable you to get those websites online again for you, your friends and the rest of the world without any hassle.

via Y Combinator Hacker News

Real-Time Blogs is a new WordPress service that allows users to follow blogs and receive instant notifications about new posts and comments using a chat client.

Thanks to Shelby DeNike for the tip!

WordPress 3.2 “Gershwin” (named in honor of jazz musician George Gershwin) has been released. It’s a faster and lighter version of WordPress featuring a refreshed dashboard design.

The focus for this release was making WordPress faster and lighter. The first thing you’ll notice when you log in to 3.2 is a refreshed dashboard design that tightens the typography, design, and code behind the admin. (Rhapsody in Grey?) If you’re starting a new blog, you’ll also appreciate the fully HTML5 new Twenty Eleven theme, fulfilling our plan to replace the default theme every year. Start writing your first post in our redesigned post editor and venture to the full-screen button in the editing toolbar to enter the new distraction-free writing or zen mode, my personal favorite feature of the release. All of the widgets, menus, buttons, and interface elements fade away to allow you to compose and edit your thoughts in a completely clean environment conducive to writing, but when your mouse strays to the top of the screen your most-used shortcuts are right there where you need them.

Automattic has just launched Jetpack, a new plugin that brings WordPress.com features to self-hosted blogs. Some of the new functionality includes WordPress.com Stats, WP.me URL shortener, Gravatar Hovercards, a Twitter Widget, Sharedaddy, Shortcode Embeds and a bunch of other great stuff, with new features that will be released in the future.

Matt Mullenweg has more on the launch of Jetpack.

WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” (named in honor of jazz giant Thelonious Monk) has just been released and is now available for download or upgrade. It features the merger of WordPress MU with WordPress, a lighter Dashboard interface, the new default theme Twenty Ten, plus 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements.

Here’s this year’s “State of the Word” presentation by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg that he gave at WordCamp San Francisco 2010.

Automattic has just launched VaultPress (currently in beta), a new premium backup service for self-hosted WordPress blogs. I think it’s an excellent idea and I know many people will benefit from this service. TechCrunch has more on the VaultPress launch.

The vision of VaultPress is to ensure that blogs and sites under its care are always completely secure, regardless of what happens. Today, this means every bit of content will be safe, from plugins and themes to the smallest comment or post revision, with WordPress-aware, real-time, multi-cloud backups.

Registration is now open for WordCamp San Francisco 2010, a day long conference for WordPress users and developers that takes place on May 1st at the Mission Bay Conference Center. They are also looking for volunteers if you want to get involved.

This release addresses a handful of minor issues as well as a rather annoying problem where scheduled posts and pingbacks are not processed correctly due to incompatibilities with some hosts.

WordPress 2.9 “Carmen” has been released and is now available to download/upgrade.

photo by Scott Beale

There is a particularly nasty WordPress attack making the rounds right now which Lorelle talks about on her blog. If you are not running the latest version of WordPress (2.8.4), you should upgrade immediately. If you’re not sure if your installation of WordPress is running the latest version, you can check by logging into your Dashboard.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg talks about how to keep WordPress secure.

Popular blogger Robert Scoble didn’t upgrade his WordPress blog and as a result, two month of his blog posts were deleted. There’s are active discussion about what happened with Robert on FriendFeed and Hacker News.

Running a web hosting company we see first hand what happens when people don’t upgrade WordPress and their is blog compromised. It’s is not pretty. It can take quite a while fix the damage and often people find out that Google considered their blog a security risk, blocking it from search.

If you’ve ignored the warnings and it’s too late, here’s information on how to recover from a compromised WordPress install.

The good news is that once you are running the latest version of WordPress you’ll be able to do one click automatic upgrades, making the process super easy.

While you are at it, check out these suggestions on how to harden WordPress to make it more secure.

NOTE: This attack only affects self-hosted installations of WordPress. Blogs on WordPress.com are automatically updated.

More Coverage: Slashdot, Mashable and TechCrunch.

WordPress has just released version 2.8 “Baker” which includes a bunch of new features, changes, upgrades and improvements.

WordPress has launched their new video sharing service VideoPress that runs on an open source framework and outputs video in a variety of formats, including HD.

WordPress has just launched their new website WordPress.tv, a visual resource for all things WordPress, including How To tutorials and video from regional WordCamp events.

WordPress 2.7 (“Coltrane”) has just been released. This new version of WordPress includes a completely redesigned dashboard and posting screen with drag-and-drop customization. Another new feature is the the long-awaited built-in upgrade system which will notify you by email when there is a new release and you can then upgrade WordPress right from the Dashboard using FTP. Here’s more on what’s new in 2.7.

We’ve recently started using the WordPress plugin Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) by mitcho to show possibly related posts on Laughing Squid blog. It works much better than most of the other related posts plugins we’ve used in the past. You can disallow by category and tag, limit by match threshold using matching scores and it can also add related posts to your RSS feed.

Disqus, the excellent service that we use for our comments on this blog, just got even better with today’s launch of Disqus 2.0. It features a new WordPress plugin that allows you to sync your comments on Disqus with your WordPress database. They have also improved comment integration in the WordPress dashboard, along with performance and UI enhancements. If you were on the fence about using Disqus for your WordPress blog, now is a great time to give it a try.

Disqus has also re-worked their user profiles, turning them into comment blogs that track your comment activity, as well as updates on other social networks like Twitter, Facebook, etc. If you ever comment on blogs that use Disqus, you should claim your comments. Here’s my profile on Disqus.

WordCamp San Francisco 2008, an all day conference for WordPress users and developers, takes place Saturday, August 16th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Registration is now open and they are also looking for volunteers.

WordPress for iPhone App, which works for both .com and .org, is now available for free in the iPhone Apps Store, plus it is being released as an Open Source app.

Introducing the first Open Source app that lets you write posts, upload photos, and edit your WordPress blog directly from your iPhone or iPod Touch. With support for both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress (2.5.1 or higher), users of all experience levels can get going in just seconds.

WordPress 2.6 has just been released. Here’s an overview of the new features.

WordPress is having a party to celebrate their 5th birthday this Tuesday, May 27th at 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco. RSVP on Upcoming or Facebook.

Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, announced the first release of WordPress (version 0.7) on May 27th, 2003.

Over the weekend, WordPress released WordPress 2.5, the result of over six months of development. It comes with a bunch of new features and improvements, including a redesigned dashboard developed in collaboration with Happy Cog Studios, dashboard widgets, tag management, a password strength meter, new built-in photo galleries, plugin auto upgrades and a bunch of other great stuff.

WordPress 2.5 also includes one of the features I’ve been waiting on for while, the search feature now searches both posts and pages (previously it was just posts).

When upgrading, make sure to check to see if your plugins will work with the new version. Here’s a list of WordPress plugins that have been tested for compatibility with WordPress 2.5.

Michael Biven, our Chief Technical Tentacle of Laughing Squid Web Hosting, recently wrote an excellent post on “Optimizing Performance for WordPress”, where he explores various ways to improve the performance of WordPress by keeping it updated, installing a caching plugin, decreasing comment & pingback spam, outsourcing media & javascript and a bunch of other great tips.

We use almost all of these recommendations on Laughing Squid (the above graph shows Laughing Squid’s blog traffic the last 30 days), which has helped to keep server loads low and things running smoothly when it comes to front page Diggs and ongoing high traffic from sources like Google search and StumbleUpon.

WordPress 2.3.2 is an urgent security release that fixes a bug that can be used to expose your draft posts. 2.3.2 also suppresses some error messages that can give away information about your database table structure and limits and stops some information leaks in the XML-RPC and APP implementations.

If your blog runs on WordPress, you should upgrade immediately. To make the upgrade process easier, try using the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin.

The WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin, created by Keith Dsouza of Techie Buzz, is one of the best WordPress plugins ever written. It makes upgrading WordPress quick and super easy, letting you know exactly it what is doing each step of the way.

It it does a backup of both your files and database, grabs the latest version of WordPress, disables and then re-enables your plugins and even puts your blog into maintenance mode during the upgrade.

Of course there is always the chance that the upgrade will fail, so if that happens you’ll need to follow the WordPress upgrade instructions to do a manual upgrade.

Here’s more information on the latest version of WordPress.

Big thanks to Chris Messina for turning me on to this plugin.