• Dougal Campbell just released Easy Gravatars WordPress plugin version 1.1 and it’s also now available at the WordPress Plugin Directory.
• Lorelle Van Foosen talks about a new breed of spammers and scrapers who steal your blog’s content – Spinning Spammers.
• Are you a business owner who uses HP printers and toners? Find out how you can win PHP 120,000 worth of HP products.
• Check out McBilly’s review of the Defensio anti-spam plugin, Akismet’s newest competitor.
• Plagiarism Today has a very interesting article entitled – “Google’s Shell Games“. It talks about Google’s DMCA policy and the issues involved in filing a DMCA notice to Google.
• Is it time to use a different ranking system other than Google’s PageRank? RealRank might be the answer.
• Good news PS3 fans! Sony has partnered with DivX Inc which means DivX media support in the PS3 console coming via a firmware update soon.
• Sonnie shares his view on PageRank, Profit and the Integrity of Blogs.
• Jhay rants about AVG Free and how he gets annoyed when it updates. I also use AVG Free and I agree with him.
• If you love Safari on Windows, you’d be happy to know that the Safari 3 Beta Update is now available.

You might be wondering why I haven’t published any posts the past few days and also why this issue of the Weekend Roundup was very late. The reason behind it was because I was sick. I got the flu last week and have been recovering the past few days. I’m really sorry if I wasn’t able to immediately reply to your comments, emails and publish the Weekend Roundup on time. I’m still haven’t completely recovered but I hope that things would be better this week. Have a good week and stay healthy everyone!

A few days after he posted this on his blog:

Since so many people seemed to be interested, I went ahead and coded up my new Gravatars plugin: Easy Gravatars. It’s designed to be simple to use — just upload and activate. If you want it to be a little harder, you can visit the plugin’s options page to set the size and rating for the gravatars, and even set the location of a default image, and tweak the CSS a little bit.

If you have Gravatars installed on your blog or plan to install it, you can try out this cool new plugin – Easy Gravatars. This plugin is ideal for WordPress users who don’t have much CSS or HTML coding skills or are afraid to touch/edit the comments.php template, all you have to do is install and activate. It will automatically add the icons to the comments without any other changes or editing needed. If you want to add gravatars to your template manually, then you should use the plugin from the Gravatar.com website.

I haven’t tried this plugin yet because I’m still using the MyAvatars plugin. I’ll probably try or :cry: switch to this plugin once Dougal has added the MyBlogLog functionality which he plans to do in the near future.

On a related note, most of you probably know that Automattic acquired Gravatar last week. Now that Gravatar is run by Automattic, avatars are served three times faster than before, works every time and the best part of it is that all Gravatar premium features are now available for free.

Download the Easy Gravatars WordPress plugin.