DreamHost recently announced a handy addition to their “one-click” software installs & upgrades.

Now you can upgrade all of your software (like Wordpress, Joomla, etc.) — all at the same time with just one click.

Spiffy!

If you are a Wordpress power-user, with multiple blogs like me; I’m sure you can appreciate how this can save you time and effort of performing upgrades one at a time.

You can log into the web panel and go to Goodies > One-Click Installs to get started.

This feature makes me want to hug someone.

You could spend hundreds to thousands of dollars a year in newsletter services, but with DreamHost it’s free!

Every DreamHost plan comes with unlimited “announcement lists”, which are email lists that you can allow visitors to your site to subscribe to through a simple HTML form. You may then periodically email everyone on the list things like newsletters or announcements via the web panel.

Although they don’t offer design templates, or statistics like paid newsletter services (such as Constant Contact, iContact, Aweber, etc.) the simplicity of features may be perfect for some users.

You can send plain text or HTML emails, and you can require confirmed opt-in for all new subscribers.

To get started log into the web panel under Mail > Announcement Lists - You can set-up your first list in a few seconds with the provided form. You can add emails to your list via the web panel, or you can set up a simple web form which will automatically add users to your list when they sign up on your website.

Complete instructions on creating a mailing list sign-up form are availble here.

In a previous post I explained DreamHost’s “Snapshot Back-ups” — which are pretty spiffy. But did you know that you can backup your entire DreamHost account with one click?

Just log into your web panel under Home > Backup Your Account. Push the shiny button to request a complete account backup of your entire DreamHost account. If you host multiple sites, this is a brilliant time-saver.

Backup can take up to several days to process, but you will recieve an email when the backup is complete and ready to download.

Notes: You can only request full account backups once every 30 days, and databases over 4MB won’t be included in the backups.

I’ve been doing some webmaster maintenance - backups, software upgrades, etc. and ran into a Wordpress install that had over 20,000 comments sitting in moderation. Ooops.

Unfortunately, Wordpress provides no simple way of cleaning up huge amounts of comments. Mass edit mode is limited to the number of entries that can be deleted at once. Mass edit mode would be so much cooler if it had a big shiny button that says “Delete All Comments Awaiting Moderation”, don’t ya think?

Anyways, since I’ve faced similar problems in the past, I figured I would post my solution for our readers and anyone else looking for a quicker way to clear huge amounts of comments from a Wordpress install:

To Delete All Comments Awaiting Moderation in Wordpress:

(Remember to make a backup of your DB first)

From phpmyadmin, select your Wordpress database, click the sql tab, and enter the following query:

SELECT *FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved ="0"

That will select all the un-moderated comments. Then enter this query:

delete from wp_comments WHERE comment_approved ="0"

Voila. Run a check and repair on the Wordpress database afterwards to be sure everything is working fine.

This solution has worked for me on various versions of Wordpress, and saved me hours of manual “mass edits”.

Oooohhhh…. Ahhhhh…. a new look for DreamHost.com

According to this month’s newsletter, DreamHost spent $13.52 to update their look:

Looks like DreamHost PS is now available to the public, as well.

“Hate it or love it, you’ve got to admit it is new.”

DreamHost offers its customers a nifty way to fund charities via “DreamHost Charity Donations”.

If you log into your control panel then under Home > Give to Charity you can see the current organizations that DreamHost is supporting.

You can donate funds to charities directly via the control panel, and the donations will be charged to your DreamHost bill.

The charities are hand-picked by DreamHost, so you can have confidence that your money is going to a worthy (and legit) cause.

DreamHost matches all donations given by their customers through DreamHost Charity Donations, making this a fantastic way to get the most from your donations.

This killed me. The Website is Down:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcQ7RkyBoBc[/youtube]

Created by: http://thewebsiteisdown.com/

Just stumbled upon this nice video tutorial for setting up Wordpress on a DreamHost server:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ABioDz0Gw8[/youtube]

The tutorial by Tech Mindset is thorough and made with the novice user in mind.

The author also has a blog post about setting up Wordpress that should answer any questions not covered in the video.

Google released its newest project Knol to the public.

According to the Google Blog: “Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects.” But many observers are calling Knol the “Wikipedia killer”.

The main difference between Knol and Wikipedia is that every knol will have an author or group of authors that controls their knol’s content. Google also offers revenue share to Knol authors through its Adsense program.

If you are interested check out Knol, or read Elinor Mills step-by-step guide to becoming a Knol expert.

Did you know that DreamHost is owned by its employees?
Now you do.

According to their website: “The benefits are crazy, the people are friendly, and you can wear WHATEVER YOU WANT…except cologne. Wearing cologne in the DreamHost office is grounds for a firing. Or at least a solid 8 hours of harassment.”

If you are interested check out DreamHost’s current job openings here. At the time of this post current positions include System Administrators, Web Application Programmers, and Technical Support Representatives.

They even offer paid internships — which could become a full time career with DreamHost and you could have your mug posted here.

According to DreamHost, they are ALWAYS looking for good technical support staff. Salary starts at $30-35k, the benefits are pretty spiffy, and they allow “flex time” where you can work every other day from home.

Sound good? You can read the full job posting for technical support reps here and read the online application here.

“If you’re cool and enjoy jokes about ninjas and pirates, you’ll probably get the job.”