From the Blog Herald:

WordPress just broke a new record having served up over a million downloads. The number will undoubtedly continue to exponentially grow and I congratulate the developers for their hard work and persistance.

That’s quite a milestone for a blogging software. Kudos to WordPress and the developers!! *woot*

Via ProBlogger.

If you’re like us and hate prefer not to use Microsoft’s products but can’t get away from Word (.doc) documents then this is a good thing for all of us.

ajaxWrite is a web-based word processor that can read and write Microsoft Word and other standard document formats. Anytime you need to open, read or write a word processor file, simply point your Firefox browser to www.ajaxwrite.com and in seconds a full-featured program will be available for you to open, edit, print and save.

The best thing is that it runs on Firefox (yay no IE) and it’s FREE! You can see some screenshots here or go straight to www.ajaxwrite.com to give it a test drive.

Via Ades Blog.

Simplicity is beautiful. iFeedReaders generates XML buttons/links for 32 different RSS readers. All you need to do is enter your blog’s RSS URL and it will give you one unified button. When you click on it you’ll get something like this.

The objective of this site is simple, create a one central place to send your feed and have all the subscription services coded and ready to go.

This is a perfect way to give your readers a lot of options while keeping your homepage nice and clean.

Enough said. Go check them out.

Via Ades Blog.

We’re always on the lookout for free MySpace layouts that we can share with you. Today we bumped across this page on About.com with a comprehensive list of websites offering Free Premade MySpace Layouts. I’m not sure when the page was compiled but the sites listed on it will keep you busy modifying your MySpace profile for a while.

Ross Dunn at Search Engine Guide wrote an article titled Demystifying Your Competitor’s Ranking Success where he shares the secrets of dumbing down SEO in a step-by-step walktrough.

We have all been there, “how the heck do they always get #1?” It is a constant frustration for many a client and, well, even myself occasionally. The fact is that much of the time there are a few solid reasons behind the search engine success of any website and it is important to learn what these reasons are before trying to compete. How is this done? Therein lies the subject of this article; how do you determine what your competitor has done to win the search engine war?

Knowing your competitor’s strategy is important if you want to catch up with them. The tricks Ross shared are nothing new but most of us are lazy when it comes to technical stuff so I hope this would be a good reminder to keep us on track with our web ventures.

When you take photos of a scene with varying lights your camera can’t capture the whole range of lights. It usually meters the average causing your brights to be too bright and your darks to be too dark. A lot of times this sums up to an awful photo.

Joshua Keay is a product designer living in New York City, and in this video tutorial he shows how you can fix these photos with Photoshop in under 5 minutes.

When faced with wildly differing light and dark values in a single frame, your camera can’t record everything, so it has to make a choice. Usually, it does its best to meter for the average light in the scene. That means the bright stuff ends up being too bright or the dark stuff too dark… or a little of both. Those dark areas aren’t lost, however. Often, they’re hiding detail that the camera just barely saw. Make a few subtle adjustments in Photoshop, and you’re on your way to an improved image!

The video is available at Photojojo, so head up there and learn how to fix up those under-exposed areas in your photos in a snap.

While the original Million Dollar Homepage focused on the idea of selling pixels, TagsPage is more of a Web 2.0 experiment with textual tags. It gives webmasters (and bloggers) a chance to promote their website (or blog) with their favorite keyword (tag). It’s a great for SEO since you get a high-quality backlink on your particular term. It also serves as a directory for random surfers to browse through. At $5 a character their prices are cheaper than the original Million Dollar Page, and their approach, we’d say, very worthwhile. And if you’re too cheap a little skeptical about this you can test the waters by posting your tag on their free pages.

Via Elliott Back.

#10 – Targeting Unmonetized Searches
#9 – Creating Controversy
#8 – Maps & Mashups
#7 – Event Coverage
#6 – Top Ten Lists
#5 – Online Tools
#4- Graphic & Web Design
#3 – Leveraging Social Networks
#2 – Blogging & Blog Comments
#1 – Reporting Remarkable News
#0 – Offering Something Incredible

You may find their breakdown useful on their original article, 10 Remarkably Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic.