Blogging

Just to whet your appetite on the upcoming WordPress version 2.7, I’m posting a couple of screen shots of the new look and feel. Some pretty good usability features are going to the next version. The new version is replacing the top menu with some nice looking icons on the left side.

The change will maximize the screen area for tasks like editing or creating a post. This should be a welcome feature with the increased popularity of netbooks which offer less screen area.

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WordPress 2.6.3 has just been released which fixes a low risk vulnerability in the Snoopy library. Snoopy is currently used to fetch the feeds shown in the Dashboard.

The new version is available at the WordPress download page. If you don’t want to download the whole release to get the security fix, you can download the following two files and copy them over your 2.6.2 installation.

1. wp-includes/class-snoopy.php
2. wp-includes/version.php

If you have ssh access to your blog, here are the commands to update by just replacing the two files:

cd ~/public_html/wp-includes/
wget http://trac.wordpress.org/export/9310/tags/2.6.3/wp-includes/class-snoopy.php
wget http://trac.wordpress.org/export/9310/tags/2.6.3/wp-includes/version.php
mv class-snoopy.php.1 class-snoopy.php;mv version.php.1 version.php

I’ve been trying out the WordPress 2.7 nightly builds for some time now. WordPress 2.7 just entered into a feature freeze state. The new UI (user interface) is soooo so georgeous that it’s going to be a pain to wait for the release date.

You should see what Matt, Ryan and the WordPress guys have done. It looks like I can postpone having to buy a 22-inch monitor (but I probably doubt that for wanting a bigger screen). Here’s a quote from Jane of the WordPress Devt Team on the WordPress development blog on how they plan to do it:

… screens just to access sub-navigation menus; we wanted the most-used screens to be within a click or two at most. If you’ve been using the nightly builds, you got used to the arrow controls that allowed you to expand and contract the menus. Then you got used to the box-style with icons that not only opened and closed vertically, but could be minimized horizontally as well, leaving a remnant of icons to provide a kind of “advanced mode,” …

And a screen shot of the “add new” post screen:

It’s beautiful! What’s also great is that the menu on the left can be collapsed to just mere icons! Minimizing the screen area occupied by the menus (great guys)!

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Before Bill retired, most of the news gave out philantrophy as the main reason of his retirement. Being a big event in the world of technology, Microsoft scheduled a press conference for Bill to answer some questions that people are itching to ask him.

In a press conference just before the actual retirement of Bill from Microsoft, one of the reporters who was close to Bill asked the most obvious question.

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When you use WordPress as your blogging software, one of the things that you need to setup is an upload directory. By default WordPress is configured to use the wp-content/uploads directory. You can think of it as “box” where your media files or images are saved when you upload them while creating your articles under WordPress.

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Bankaholic.com (blog about banking, financial news, credit) just got sold for a cool 15 million US dollars. The site is being maintained by a single person — Johns Wu. From what I’ve read on my email, Johns started the site to provide financial for students going into college. It seems that Bankrate has acquired the blog site and according to the agreement Johns Wu will continue to maintain the blog even after the acquisition.

Wow, this is the first time I’ve heard of a blog being sold for 15 million. Look’s like Johns won’t be having any more money problems not that his site isn’t making him a bundle right now.

I’ve finally installed a copy of WordPress 2.7 (still under development) from the svn on my computer last week and it’s looking good. The menus are now on the left side (looks like it’s time to think about a 1680×1050 22-inch monitor).

Lot’s of new stuff, like now you can already edit basic meta stuff without having to open and edit an article.

I love what seems to be a direction into putting the “media tools” stuff on the right side of the “add/edit post/page” screens ‘coz I think it’s a lot more easier to be able to interact with the media and the editor at the same time when creating a post.

I one of those people who’s interested in UI’s and usability and with my last post about the WordPress menu user survey, I decided to create a mock-up screen of the WordPress using Inkscape (trying to learn the software).

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How to handle hotlinking. For the last couple of days, my attention was drawn to the problem of hotlinking, inline linking, leeching, piggy-backing, direct linking, offsite image grabs, bandwidth theft or whatever you may want to call it. A lot of discussion about hotlinking is on the Internet as to whether it should be allowed or not allowed.

I try to be a bit more tolerant and usually wouldn’t mind getting them every now and then. This morning, what caught my attention was that the amount of hotlinking to images by certain sites which may cause degradation to other visitors to my site especially if the hotlinked images are large.

Is hotlinking bad for your site or not? Doing a search on the Internet will usually show you steps on how to stop others from hotlinking to your site. Some users would stop the hotlinkers cold by forbidding them access to the files. Others would redirect them to images that displays warnings.

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Feeling a bit artistic and inspired (by the “proudly pinoy” logo) this morning, I decided to create some logos for the Pinoy Ubuntu, Pinoy WordPress and Pinoy Firefox user. I wonder just how many Pinoy Ubuntu, WordPress and Firefox users are out there.

If you’re a Pinoy Ubuntu, WordPress or Firefox user, I’d like to hear about it. Feel free to use the logo if you like it.

I think believe WordPress is a great blog online publishing software and I use WordPress on this blog and also in several other sites. For instance I use it in JavaMidlet to write about news and articles about mobile Java. I’ve also converted from a previous CMS the Ortigas Online site to WordPress and actually using it as a CMS (more on this later).

Several days back, I’ve read about the recent plan of WordPress to change the admin menu in version 2.7 from a horizontal one to a new vertical menu. Didn’t make it to the survery so I’d just want to write about a suggestion I have on how to handle the menu change due to user requests to handle screen space.

First of all I think that the location of the menu is just fine where it is right now (on top). Most of us if not all use software that have menus on top — Windows, Linux, MacOS, Solaris … I think it’s just easier to navigate if the menus are on top — consistently in just one place.

If the issue is screen real estate, I think there’s a simple and elegant solution to that problem that is currently being used by the operating systems that most of us use right now. That is use auto-hiding top heading / menu.

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