Every online business needs traffic in order to survive, that much we already know.

But in this article, we’re going to look at 4 of the most effective ways to set up windfalls of consistent traffic through one of the best publishing platforms online - blogs.

1. RSS Feeds

Most blogging software such as Wordpress come with a built in RSS feed, which is the equivalent to having a newsletter subscription service, but of course is 100% free and requires no details to be passed over from the subscriber. Most people just let their RSS feed sit there on their new blogs but what you must do is submit your RSS feed URL to as many RSS directories as possible. Therefore, when you post new content on your blog, this is syndicated to your RSS feed and the directories display your most recent posts. This is one of the easiest ways to get immediate exposure every time you post content.

2. Blog commenting

If you’re looking for targeted traffic and some solid one way backlinks to boost your search engine listings, then try commenting on other people’s blogs leaving a link back to your website. Providing you post relevant and useful content/comments on other people’s blogs, the blog owner will “approve” your comments and you link will then become live. This can bring direct traffic and of course help with your rankings in the search engines.

3. Guest Bloggers

There are many advantages to having guest bloggers post their content on your site. Apart from the credibility of your blog going way up (depending on who the guest actually is), you are forming a mini joint venture where the guest is likely to tell his/her own audience about the material on your site, plus you may be able to work out a deal where you can return the favor and get access to their blog audience by appearing as a guest writer on their blog.

4. Trackback links

A trackback is when one blog communicates with another to inform the bloggers that their material has been referenced on someone else’s post. So if you were to write a really good post, I could write about your post and create a trackback on your blog that tells the readers I’ve been talking about you and your post. Not only can this bring direct traffic, but also provides another backlink to your blog which is great for a little SEO boost. When would this be most effective? Probably when I have a contrasting opinion to the original post or if I have something useful (or controversial) to add to the original post.

These are just 4 of many ways to explode your blog traffic, but we’re not done yet. It’s possible to reach dizzy levels of traffic for your new blog right from day one when you have an arsenal of blogger’s traffic tactics at your disposal. Check out http://blogging.jonathan-jenkins.net/ for more details…

I ran across an interesting javascript injection attack that targets Wordpress. Tracking it down won’t be easy for the laymen.The reason is because most people who work with Wordpress are only savvy enough to handle themes and plugins. The rarely go poking around in the core code base. Plus when you find foreign javascript inside one of your Web pages a lot of site developers and admins will think it must be coming from a modified theme file or plugin.

Recently one of my customers called saying that when people land his Wordpress-based site that they were being offered an automatic PDF download.

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I don’t know if you’ve been following the blogosphere’s discussion of President-Elect Barack Obama’s supposed presenting of a forged or false birth certificate (technically, “certificate of live birth”) to quash rumors that he is not a natural-born U.S. citizen.

Frankly, I don’t know what to believe on this issue.  But I do know that one of the main investigators into the matter, Ron Polarik, has posted a fascinating (if rather long and somewhat repetitive) discussion of digital image creation and manipulation on a web site he is associated with.  You can check it out here: “Obama’s ‘Born’ Conspiracy - Forged Images, Phony Photos, and Felony Fraud.”

Clearly, regardless of the ultimate merits of his case, Polarik is a real expert in digital imaging, ditigal image formats, etc.  I work with digital images nearly every day, both in my day job and on the side as a WordPress-based entrepreneur, and I learned a lot from reading his essay.

I do have some experience in photo manipulation using Photoshop. Probably most notably, I deleted my family from a photo with such expertness that no one but me (and of course, the “deletees”– my wife and daughter) could tell, even when I printed the image as an 8×10 to enter into a photography contest.

In my case, the reason was simple.  I had taken a picture of said wife and daughter posing in front of a restaurant in Guatemala. Nearby, some of the local Guatemalans, many in colorful indigenous garb, were streaming through the front door of the restaurant. And there, off to one side, were my family, grinning for the camera and looking exactly like the tourists they were.  If I had left them in, it would have been just another tourist-type snapshot.  By taking them out I was able to produce a photo that was a piece of art, if I say so myself.

Fortunately, my wife and daughter were standing against a fairly simple background — a blank wall painted red. There were cracks and dents in the wall, for sure, but nothing as intricate as a sign or painted patterns or anything.  Plus, there was enough blank wall showing on either side of them that was able to cover them over with a cloned section of that wall.  Then I judiciously used the Photoshop blending tool to smooth out the boundaries between the repeated clone sections.  I’m proud of my work on that photo, even if my wife and daughter still have hurt feelings about being wiped out of the picture!

I don’t know if you ever do this, but I am old enough to still have a “gee whiz” attitude toward today’s computer and web technology.  Even though I use it every day, it is still all a bit magical to me.  That especially goes for the digital image technology that has turned the worlds of photography, graphics and even movies upside-down.  But it also applies even to website and blog technology.  I am impressed all over again every time I write a post (like this one!) and press “Publish” from within my WordPress software, only to have my words miraculously appear on my life website, for all the world to see.

It is because we have come so far, so fast with all of this technology that we can even be seriously discussing whether or not a President-elect (or rather, his campaign workers) may have forged a birth certificate and then posted it where anyone who wants to can examine it and comment on it. Truly, it’s an exciting if somewhat unsettling world that we inhabit.  Gee whiz!

IntenseDebate, the enhanced commenting system that was recently acquired by WordPress’s parent company Automattic, has relaunched to the public (the service originally opened its doors in late 2007, but reentered private beta as soon as it was acquired). IntenseDebate has also released the public beta of its WordPress plugin, which includes a number of features that make it much more appealing to blog owners.

The most important feature is two-way comment syncing, which copies all comments left on your blog through IntenseDebate’s system to your WordPress install.

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Journalism is calling for progress, and the digital world never fails to bring opportunities for it, experts said.

Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, moderated a panel between three leaders in the digital field of journalism on Thursday at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication as part of Cronkite Week, a celebration of the school’s 25th anniversary.

Creator and CEO of WordPress.org Matt Mullenweg; Gary Kebbel, the journalism program director for the Knight Foundation; and Lisa Stone, co-founder of BlogHer.com, engaged in discussion ranging from how to monitor content to the future of advertising online.

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