Just about 7 years ago, Brent Ashley was experimenting with some dynamic browser/server communications using Javascript and IFRAMEs. This was one of the early techniques would later evolve into what we now call AJAX. Brent used this remote scripting to create a live chat that you could embed in your own blog. Congratulations to Dougal for being the first to publish a new BlogChat. There are others on the way, too. I’ll blog them when … Continue reading
I have some more books available to review, this time, a selection from Apress. I can’t decide which one I want to look at first, so I’m going to leave it up to you, my readers. [poll id=”2″]
Sorry folks, no WordPress article this week. We’ve had a death in the family, so we’re trying to get ready for some last-minute, unexpected travel.
With WordPress 2.7 in the bag, the development team is looking ahead to what features should go into version 2.8. To that end, they have announced a survey to find out what features the community thinks is most important. It presents a list of several possible features (theme browser/installer, performance improvements, sortable columns in edit lists, OpenID integration, etc.) and asks how important you think each one is. Then it asks you to provide your … Continue reading
Due to changes in the postmeta API, my HeadMeta plugin had a compatibility problem with some recent versions of WordPress. The problem appeared when there was only one postmeta value (either a ‘head_meta’ or ‘head_link’ entry) associated with a post. If you had multiple entries, or used the ‘keywords’ shortcut, the problem did not appear. HeadMeta 1.4 fixes this problem, and also adds a ‘description’ shortcut for generating a description <meta> tag. It also fixes … Continue reading
Well, that didn’t take long 🙂 With a few last minute fixes since Release Candidate 2, WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” is officially released. This is probably one of the most ambitious releases to date, in particular due to the radically redesigned backend interface. After much testing and feedback, I think the team has given us a very professional looking, flexible, and consistent interface that should serve us for the foreseeable future. Besides the new user interface, … Continue reading
WordPress 2.7 RC 2 is now available. There have been nearly 150 bugfixes since RC1, including improvements to the backend styling, RTL fixes, core and plugin updater fixes, improvements to categegory and tag handling, and much more. Barring any major new bugs being discovered, this will likely be the last release candidate before the official 2.7 release. Huzzah!
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. I’ve been running the new code here for about a month, and I love how much more professional the backend interface looks now. … Continue reading
The WordPress team released WordPress 2.6.5 earlier today. This release addresses a potential XSS (cross-site scripting) attack under some server configurations, plus adds some bugfixes for some other minor issues. As noted in the official announcement, there was no official 2.6.4 release. There was an attempt to fool people into downloading a fake release under that number, so it has been skipped in the official release numbering, to avoid confusion. I would like to take … Continue reading
As a followup to my review of the book WordPress for Business Bloggers, I am able to make a sample chapter available to my readers. This is chapter 5, “Content is King.” This chapter shows that while the book does focus on business blogging, much of the advice is applicable to any type of blog. This section covers suggestions on writing good headlines, post length and frequency, using categories and tags, creating an “About” page, … Continue reading