Gardner will team up with Jason Schuller ( Of Wp-elements.com) for the upcoming revolution project. All future and present themes will be released under the GPL License. The decision comes after Gardner and Schuller met Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider in San Francisco recently.

Gardner initially labelled the  Revolution theme Project X, and released it in August 2007. It took the wordpress theme world by storm, and became so successful that Gardner even launched his own affiliate program for the theme.

The theme currently costs $59.99 for a single user license and $149.95 for a multiple user license. Gardner has 10 Revolution themes, all of which can be seen on the official website.

There will be options to purchase customization, tutorials and support though.

The new competitor is called Defensio. Like Akismet, it needs you to sign up for an API key.

Darren has blogged about it too at Problogger

Have a look at Anne Helmond’s comment over there-

” I haven’t tried Defensio yet but its name sounds so Harry Potter-ish!”

I agree with that a hundred percent. Just like Ole Voldy and the rest of his death munchers use Imperio and Crucio to control their opponents… I feel like waving a stick, twirling it around in an arc and muttering over the spam- Defensio.

A bit of fanfiction- everything in Harry Potter belongs to JK Rowling.This is just something that I felt like creating on the spot.

Tom Marvolo Riddle was an extremely frustrated man. He had just Crucioed a muggle computer owner, Tom Jones, into insanity and brought home a computer with him. That man had the temerity to ask him, the Dark Lord, whether he intended to pay for that stupid box that he had summoned with a flick of his wand. Needless to say, the Muggle hospitals would never be able to restore the man’s health back. St. Mungo’s might have been able to do it, for he didn’t curse the man to the extent that his darling Bella had done with the Longbottoms- Jones was a pathetic Muggle who could not stand pain.

Where his problems should have ended, they unfortunately began. He had brought the box home, for he had heard a kid telling his friend that anything could be found on the internet. And the Dark Lord wished in the deepest echeleons of his heart, that the secret to kill Harry Potter would be there on this’ internet’. It took him close to two days to figure that one out, and several Imperios and obliviates later, the computer was connected to the internet.

Sadly there was no such information available. Pathetic electronic item- he should have known better than to trust Muggles. He surfed through a little more, and decided that he would open a blog and ask for suggestions.

A few days later, Tom Riddle went to his blog, and was assaulted by pharmacy and sex comments. Phentermine, Cialis, penis enlargement…….. his face was contorted with rage by the time that he had finished reading the ”comments ”. He sneered at the thought of the pharmacy pills, but wondered about the penis enlargement. Did he have a penis ? The last time he had sex was a few decades back, and the penis was a small sacrifice in one of the dark rituals that he had performed to augment his power. A wave of pleasure swept through him, as he imagined him and Bella doing that….thing. For now though, he needed to blast these comments away and show the stupid invention its place. He mentally ran through his list of spells- An Evanesco- no, Stunning the comments did not help, the impediment jinx, the reductor curse, the unforgivables- nothing seemed to make the comments go. He conjured fire, and the CPU of the monitor emitted a shrieking sound,and he hurriedly cast the Aguamenti charm. The Elder Wand was not winning this battle…was the wand really that useful when it could not stop a Muggle from defacing his blog ?

Tom Riddle was perplexed. Few problems had ever troubled him in his life- for he had been an excellent student. But these comments, there seemed to be no way to get rid of them. Pity he had killed Burbage- she might have been of some use in such a situation.

Google turned to be helpful for Tom. He stared goggle eyed at the result that it had thrown up, and then grinned maniacally. A second later, the wand that had once belonged to both Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald did its owner’s bidding as the deathly words for spam came out of his mouth, in a soft hiss – Defensio.

When you see spam in a blog, it simply kills off any enthusiasm that you might have had to read the blog. And your impression of the blog owner is – well, it doesn’t look like he cares for his readers. Wordpress has a couple of anti spam plugins that do their job very well. Akismet is inbuilt into your wordpress installation. You need an API key to activate it, which can be obtained by registering at wordpress.com. Spam Karma is another plugin which works well to kill spam. You can find a whole list of anti spam tools here

And speaking about spam, I was going through Aaron’s blog, when I found this extremely hilarious post.  Spammers are coming up with newer ideas every day…….

Try it out if you wish to. Of course you need to have the ability to tweak and identify bugs- do not try this if you do not know what to do

Censortive 

Click on the link to find out more about the plugin. Will mainly come in handy for those guys who value freedom of speech and don’t want their blogs to be censored for the usage of certain keywords.

Interesting idea for a plugin, I must admit

If there is one thing which fascinates all bloggers irrespective of their age in blogosphere, it is their attraction towards stats. There are plenty of stats plugins available, although this one will certainly prove to be one of the more popular ones.

You need to have a wordpress.com API key to activate this plugin. If you have Akismet installed already, chances are that you would have the key. If you don’t, headup to wordpress.com and sign up for a free account and a key which has a host of privileges attached to it.

Here is the plugin