Jan 24
Sep 19
Earlier today, Ryan Boren announced the release of WordPress 2.3 RC1. The official release is expected to be released any day now. Being the big geek that I am, I decided to install 2.3 RC1 so that I could check out many of its new features. Here’s a couple of screenshots that I took while I was playing around with WP 2.3 RC1.
Jan 22
Update 1/28: I finally got around to upgrading all of my blogs (TiVoBlog, RaianoFamily) to WP 2.1. I had one minor problem which was caused by an outdated plugin (Subscribe to Comments). If I had upgraded to the latest version of this plugin prior to the upgrade I wouldn’t have had a problem. I guess the moral of the story is that you should check whether or not your plugins will work with WordPress 2.1 prior to upgrading.
I just finished upgrading this blog to WP 2.1. I probably will upgrade RaianoFamily and TiVoBlog later in the week once I am happy with how 2.1 is running on this site. In case you missed it, 2.1 contains a number of new features including the ability to auto save posts as well as a tabbed WYSIWYG editor so that you can switch between “code” view and a “visual” view.
Here’s a more complete list of all the new features taken directly from the WordPress development blog:
- Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
- Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
- The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
- Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.
- New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
- You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
- Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.
- Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.
- Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.
- More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.
- Pages can now be drafts, or private.
- Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
- The dashboard now instantly and brings RSS feeds asynchronously in the background.
- Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
- Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages.
- The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.
- A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.
Jan 17
I just noticed that Akismet has caught 48,903 spam comments on TiVoBlog.com. 48,903 is nothing compared to what TechCrunch is up against however, it still is a pretty big number.
I remember back in the days when there really wasn’t a good spam blocking plugin out there. Now with Akismet, I’ve come the conclusion that there truly isn’t a need for anything else. I’ve only had a couple of instances where Aksimet didn’t block a spam message.
How many spam messages has Akismet blocked on your site?
Jan 06
Here’s a listing of the WordPress plugins that I use.
| Plugin | Version | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Adhesive | 3.2 | Allows easy marking of sticky posts in WordPress 2.0. Licensed under the MIT License, Copyright 2005 Owen Winkler. By Owen Winkler. |
| Akismet | 1.2.1 | Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use this service. You can review the spam it catches under “Manage” and it automatically deletes old spam after 15 days. To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. By Matt Mullenweg. |
| Clean Archives Reloaded | 1.0.1 | A nice, uniform, single-query, moo.fx-enhanced way to display your post archives. Credits: Chris O’Rourke for the moo.fx enhancement idea and Shawn Grimes for the plugin on which this plugin is based which used code by Sebastian Schmieg. By Viper007Bond. |
| Contextual Related Posts | 1.1 | Show last 5 contextually related posts on single blog posts, increase exposure By Mark Ghosh (LaughingLizard). |
| Comment Quicktags | 1.9 | Inserts a quicktag toolbar on the blog comment form. By Owen Winkler. |
| Customizable Comment Listings | 0.9 | Display Recent Comments, Pingbacks, and/or Trackbacks, as well as other comment listings using the comment and/or post information of your choosing in an easily customizable manner. You can narrow comment searches by specifying post IDs, comment types, and/or comment status, among other things. By Scott Reilly. |
| FAlbum | 0.6.9 | A plugin for displaying your Flickr photosets and photos in a gallery format on your Wordpress site. By Elijah Cornell. |
| Feedburner Feed Replacement | 2.2 | Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while letting through some important User-Agents. By Steve Smith. |
| Get Recent Comments | 1.5.2 | Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar. Visit Options/Recent Comments after activation of the plugin. By Krischan Jodies. |
| Google Sitemaps | 2.7.1 | This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. By Arne Brachhold. |
| Most Commented | 1.02 | Retrieves a list of the posts with the most comments. By Nick Momrik. |
| Search Meter | 1.1 | Keeps track of what your visitors are searching for. After you have activated this plugin, you can check the Search Meter Statistics page to see what your visitors are searching for on your blog. By Bennett McElwee. |
| Subscribe To Comments | 2.0.8 | Allows readers to recieve notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. Based on version 1 from Scriptygoddess By Mark Jaquith. |
| Viper’s Video Quicktags | 3.0.0 | Creates quicktags for embedding various video types, including those hosted at YouTube and Google Video, into WordPress. Uses the ButtonSnap class by Owen Winkler. By Viper007Bond. |
| WordPress Database Backup | 1.8 | On-demand backup of your WordPress database. By Scott Merrill. |
| WordPress Reports | 0.4 | Generates reports from Google Analytics and Feedburner data By Joe Tan. |
| WP-ContactForm | 1.4.3 | WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post. It currently works with WordPress 2.0+ By Ryan Duff. |
| WP-FLV | 0.2 | This plugin eases insertion of Jeroen Wijerings FLV Video Player By Roel Meurders. |
| WordPress Reports | 0.4 | Generates reports from Google Analytics and Feedburner data By Joe Tan. |
Jan 05
I just finished upgrading this site to WordPress 2.0.6. As usual, it was as easy as can be. The folks over at WordPress.org are awesome! Now I need to head on over to my other blogs and update them…
In case you care, here’s what’s new in this latest release:
- security fixes.
- HTML quicktags now work in Safari browsers.
- Comments are filtered to prevent them from messing up your blog layout.
- Compatibility with PHP/FastCGI setups.
Oct 27
I just finished upgrading all of my blogs (TiVoBlog, AlexRaiano, RaianoFamily & GrumpyCoWorker) to WordPress 2.0.5. As usual, the upgrade was extremely easy.
Hey Jim and Craig, when are we going to upgrade you to 2.0.5?
Let me know if you have any problems with this site or any of my other blogs. I really don’t expect a problem but you never know…
Aug 05