• Host as many auctions as you like.
• Upload an image for your auction.
• Use PayPal to accept payments.
• Easily Edit, End or Delete your auctions.
• Use HTML to describe your auctions, you can even include video!
• Set a specific end date and time, down to the second.
• Sleek AJAX popup to show your auctions.
• Easy to use backend admin area to manage your auctions.

It’s a great way to sell your things, you can sell an advertising slot on your blog, you can sell a sponsored post, you can sell fda approved diet pills; heck you can even sell your liver, no one’s going to stop you.

WP Auctions gives you full control of the things you sell, and this one is free!

• The ability to restrict bidders to verified WordPress users
• The ability to place auctions in a post or page
• Different payment methods are accepted
• Loads more new features

Personally, I think the biggest different for me is that I switched from using Prototype for the AJAX functionality to jQuery, mainly because Prototype doesn’t play nice with other libraries. I’m quite impressed with jQuery and will definitely use it more in the future.

So, if you want to use your blog to auction off ballet shoes, fat burners or even stink bombs, check out WP Auctions.

@hyder and I have been putting a ton of work into our flagship WordPress auction: WP Auctions. If you’ve never come across it, it’s a plugin that lets you auction items right off your blog. Anyway, one of the big issues we had was that I had used Prototype as the Javascript library for the popup and for the AJAX routines. Now Prototype is all great and that, but we had a major issue whenever someone tried using it with a plugin that used jQuery (or Mootools, one of its derivatives).

Well, I’m pleased to report that I’ve rewritten the popup to work in jQuery now. Not only that, jQuery has a method to interoperate with other libraries, so I’ve made sure that the plugin will now work regardless of what’s living around it. So if one of the moving companies New York wanted to use the plugin to auction off their services and they used Prototype or Dojo or some other library? Well, it would work without any problems. Cool huh?

It’s been interesting working on this plugin, because we’ve had lots of feedback from people using it. We’ve seen people use it to auction paintings, jewellery and pretty much everything. From personal blogs to people down in Westgate, we seem to have quite a bit of traction, which is great news. Hopefully we’ll have the new version out soon .. watch this space!

• Twitter Tools: I’ve been using this since I signed up to Twitter. It’s a complete package that lets you Tweet as you blog, generates posts with a digest of your Tweets, displays your Twitter feed in your sidebar and even lets you tweet straight from your blog. It’s a complete solutions that’s quickly becoming one of the first plugins I install on a new blog.
• Tweet This: This plugin automatically adds a link for the user to tweet about a particular post or page. The default mechanism uses a cool bird in the top right-hand corner of the post, but you can switch this to an unobtrusive link at the bottom of the post.
• TweetRoll: A sidebar widget that invites people to follow you and shows the avatars of the last few people you followed. You can see it running in the sidebar on this blog.
• TwitIp-ID: This plugin integrates Twitter very nicely with your commenting system. It allows commentators to specify their Twitter ID as they leave comments and then displays a cute icon so that someone can follow them easily.
• Tweetbacks: An excellent plugin that scans Twitter and picks up any tweets that refer to posts on your blog. It then adds these Tweets to your comments so that they can be displayed on your blog together with comments and trackbacks. As essential as a tv mount for anyone with an LCD TV.

These are a great set of plugins and worth consideration by anyone who uses Twitter and blogs on WordPress. Check them out and while you’re at it, follow me on Twitter

This blog seems to be getting a few hundred spam comments a day and I’ve just noticed that I’ve just superceeded 48,500 spam comments stopped by Akismet. Not that I mind spam so much nowadays; my plugins do an awfully good job in stopping them get through, but it’s still a pretty big number. Most of them seem to be garbage nowadays though there’s the obligatory ones for pharmaceuticals, cheap  Rolex and Seiko watches and even high speed satellite internet.

I’ve actually noticed that I’m not even running Bad Behaviour on this blog, it’s just Akismet, so having 2 comments to moderate out of the 1000+ that were trapped is pretty good going I thought. Do you get lots of spam?

One great thing about WordPress 2.5.1 is that plugins can now be upgraded at the touch of a button. I love it when technology helps make life easier.

The great thing about the plugin is it’s versatility. You can use it to sell anything you want, from pool cues to tadpoles. Look out for the new version, I’ll be outlining the new features here.

Speaking about pool cues, it just struck me precisely how long it’s been since I’ve played a game of billiards or pool. Not that I was an extremely good player, but I used to be able to hold my own. I think I managed to get a game in last year, but you could tell that I hadn’t played in years! Thing about pool is that there’s a lot of physics involved, balls colliding, bouncing off walls etc and the best way to get it right is to practice, practice and practice some more. I’m pretty sure I could get it back if I spent some quality time playing.

To tell you the truth, I prefer pool to snooker. Pool is the one where you have yellow and red balls, while snooker is the one where you have to keep score. Not there there is more skill involved, just that I find it a more enjoyable game.

What about you? Do you play pool?