December 3, 2008 – 2:21 pm

WordPress die-hards everywhere are anxiously awaiting the official release of WordPress 2.7, which should be very soon now. A few days ago, WordPress 2.7 RC 1 was announced, and this Friday, Automattic will roll out the latest code on wordpress.com to help flush out any remaining issues that need to be addressed. [...]
November 12, 2008 – 12:30 pm
I recently received a copy of the book WordPress for Business Bloggers
, by Paul Thewlis, published by Packt Publishing. [...]
By Dougal
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Posted in WordPress
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Also tagged Advertising, analytics, bloggers, book, Business, packt, paulthewlis, Review, SEO, Themes, WordPress
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October 15, 2008 – 7:00 am

This is the first installment of “WordPress Wednesday”, which I mentioned in my previous post about making changes to my site. This first one is going to be a little long, and I’ve been editing the draft off-and-on for over a week. [...]
By Dougal
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Posted in WordPress
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Also tagged .net, app, article, Atom, avatar, avatars, branding, categories, CSS, Design, dom, feedburner, Feeds, Google, gravatar, gravatars, howto, improve web site, improve website, plugin, Programming, redesign, RSS, Search Engine, search engine optimization, SEO, social networking sites, stickiness, sticky, subscribers, subscription, Syndication, Tags, Themes, traffic, WordPress
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October 13, 2008 – 12:07 pm
I’ve been saying for years that I want to redesign this site, but I still haven’t made many substantive changes. One of my favorite sayings is, “The cobbler’s children oft go without shoes.” It certainly applies to this site, as I spend a lot of time doing web development, studying programming, CSS techniques, SEO, user interfaces, and many other related disciplines that make up this craft. [...]
By Dougal
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Posted in Announcements, Personal, WordPress
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Also tagged app, CSS, Design, lifestream, plugin, Programming, SEO, Themes, WordPress
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August 29, 2008 – 12:23 pm
This is another one of those articles that will be of interest to a minority of WordPress users. In particular, if you use the XCache PHP opcode cache and Neosmart’s XCache object-cache plugin for WordPress. For those of you who don’t know what the heck I’m babbling about, a PHP opcode cache is a bit of software which helps your web server do less work when turning all your PHP code into web pages that a browser can render. [...]
By Dougal
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Posted in Plugins, Tech, WordPress
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Also tagged .net, cache, caching, Development, object-cache, opcode cache, Perl, PHP, plugin, Programming, WordPress, xcache
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UPDATE 2008-04-16: Well crud. I was just re-reading the WP 2.5 announcement post for something else, and spotted a bit about security updates between 2.3.3 and 2.5. So my previous advice about 2.3.3 being okay was incorrect. This is one of the areas where I disagree with the core developement team — if it was up to me, there would be a 2.3.4 security release for those who have good reasons why they can’t upgrade to 2.5 right now.
Okay, people, if you are running any version of WordPress older than 2.3.3 2.5*, you need to upgrade now. [...]
By Dougal
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Posted in Blogs, Search, Security, WordPress
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Also tagged payattention, Search, Security, Spam, Technorati, Themes, upgrade, Upgrades, WordPress
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March 29, 2008 – 11:09 pm
If you already run WordPress, then you’ve probably seen the other announcements in your Dashboard about the release of WordPress 2.5. There are plenty of details in the Development Blog posting, so I won’t rehash the feature list here. I’ll just point out a few important details.
First of all, in my post about Release Candidate 1, I mentioned that I had problems with the plugin updater. Since that time, I have been able to upgrade complex plugins with out a problem. [...]
Earlier today, I released Easy Gravatars version 1.2. The only change (besides confirming that works in WordPress 2.5, currently in beta, due out next week) is that when installed under WordPress 2.5 or newer, it will use the new core get_avatar() function to generate the image tag. And since get_avatar() is a pluggable function, other plugins could conceivably use it to generate avatar icons from other services, and Easy Gravatars would then use the new service too.
If that doesn’t make sense to you, don’t sweat it. [...]