When I logged onto my computer last night to do a last-minute blog post before hitting the pillow, I was surprised, but in a good way, at the title of the first post in the WordPress dashboard.

I had a sneaking suspicion that it could be, might not be, but most likely was, a post about me. Interest turned to suspicion, suspicion to tempered excitement, and tempered excitement to elation as I discovered that I had unintentionally invaded all the blogs on the Internet powered by the WordPress engine.

I finally did it everyone. I invaded the WordPress blogs of millions of people everywhere in the form of the latest news post by WordPress guru Mark Gosh from the Weblog Tools Collection. In the dashboards of everyone everywhere are little news posts titled “Uber Unique Prize for Plugin Competition”. Click here to read the post.

The annual WordPress Plugin Competition has started with a prize pool of over $3,500 USD for the winners. There’s already some great plugins developed for the competition including personal favorite of mine SEO Smart Links by Vladimir Prelovac.

If you are a plugin developer, get in there and enter the competition! Maybe I’ll even write a song for you. As for me… what next? World domination of course whahey!

Want to win a free WordPress mug? You can, with a little bit of creativity and a camera, in the WordCast Mugshot Contest!

All you need to do it take a picture of your favorite mug, somehow integrating WordCast into the shot and then upload your picture to Flickr. (Make sure you tag the picture with the word ‘WordCast’ so we can identify entries.)

That’s it! The WordCast hosts will browse through all the entries and come up with the top ten mugshots. Those ten pictures will be placed on the WordCast website to be voted upon by WordCast listeners. The owner of the mugshot with the most votes wins a free WordPress mug! So, what are you waiting for? Start snapping those shutters!

In the ongoing battle-to-the-death between myself, Dave Moyer and Beth Skinner as to who can elicit the most Twitter followers on the amazing Twitter platform, I stumbled upon a great free Twitter resource this morning, whilst in bed, that gives you free Twitter-related graphics that will encourage your WordPress readers to subscribe to your Twitter feed. (Alright, Beth Skinner linked me to it.)

On offer at two sets of follow-me-on-Twitter graphics in both *.png and transparent *.gif forms. If you’re a WordPress connoisseur in need of a dose of cute and quirky, move your mouse cursor over to the free graphics available.

Another way I’ve advertised my nonsensical Twitter-related activities is through using Richard K Miller’s WordPress plugin, What Would Seth Godin Do. This plugin allows you to display HTML code of lines of text which you specify at the top or bottom of each of your blog posts; there are clearly options out there and you are only limited by your imagination Internet! So how do you promote yourself on Twitter?

Tweet tweet! Follow me on Twitter.

It was with curiosity that I ventured into the WordPress community many months ago to see what the hype was all about. Sure, I understood where the community springs from and what keeps it strong; WordPress is free software that now powers an alarmingly large number of websites. It is a behemoth that shows no sign of slowing down, supported by a rich, thriving community of designers and plugin programmers who volunteer their invaluable time to create extensions to the core functionality of WordPress for kudos and software that is already free. But what is it about this community that elicits such impassioned responses from its users, who swear undying allegiance to both the WordPress software and the community surrounding it?

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