Well, it didn’t take long to go from a release candidate to a full release and now WordPress 2.2 is out. Without the new tagging system, which we should now see in 2.3, WordPress 2.2 takes care of a lot of behind the scenes issues that needed some work.
Here are the biggest features mentioned on the development blog:
Check out the full details at WordPress.org and it is time to upgrade.
Over on David Dalka’s blog he makes note of some interesting news coming from the Yahoo owned MyBlogLog.
There are several changes in the works:
1) The biggest news is that there will be a rebranding of MyBlogLog. The exact timing and new brand were not revealed. (YahooBlogLog or MyYahooLog? Time will tell.)
2) A complete site redesign is on the way!
4) Yahoo! is hard at work to remove the offensive photos so that MyBlogLog would be palatable to more conservative business blogs.
No one is surprised about the re-branding that is coming, but they are going to be adding some interesting features. I don’t know if it will be too little, too late, as it seems like the MyBlogLog idea is already fizzing out.
I’d love to hear some positive stories about MyBlogLog, and so if you have them, please leave them in the comments.
Over on The Closet Entrepreneur there is a post about criticism, something that people are great at, except when it comes to constructive criticism.
The good form of criticism is known as constructive criticism, it offers valid feedback both positive and negative. Giving constructive criticism can lend much needed assistance to an individual by giving them feedback on things that can be improved and issues that can be avoided. Giving constructive criticism can also help establish your credibility and expertise by ensuring that you know what you’re talking about, and the people who benefit from your constructive criticism will be more likely to credit you in some way or form for playing a part in their success. Constructive criticism can also keep feelings from being hurt by focusing on things that can be improved while avoiding personal attacks or insults.
It also pays to learn what constructive criticism is, so that you don’t feel offended when someone offers a piece of advice, or criticisms.
Check out the full article to get some ideas on how to give criticism.
Hot on the heels of the Release Candidate 1 release that we saw recently, the WordPress team has pushed out Release Candidate 2. This means that we are close to the final release of WordPress 2.2.
Ryan has put up a list of the changes, as well as a link to the new candidate.
And here’s the lowdown on what went into in RC2.
Some important changes included:
Ever wish that WordPress would include a system for creating a zip file that included all your favorite plugins? Well, WPZipper has come along, and is working at fulfilling that need.
You can download a fresh version of WordPress with the plugins you select, or just a zip of all your favorite plugins. The system couldn’t be easier. I almost wish they included a way to add in themes as well.
It also brings up the question of trust, as this is not an Automattic project. It looks like some people are trusting the site though as they have already reported over 20,000 plugin downloads via their system.
A great idea, and one that should have been adopted by Automattic a long time ago.
Not that they couldn’t undercut Noah and his site by integrating such system into their new Plugins section of WordPress.org.
Ryan Boren has put up a post pertaining to WordPress and the fact that it has not adopted PHP 5, despite the fact that PHP is now at version 5.2.2.
Nick Lewis, Larry Garfield, and Dries Buytaert are discussing the slow rate of PHP 5 adoption and how projects such as Drupal and WordPress should help encourage PHP 5 uptake by phasing out support for PHP 4. WordPress currently supports PHP 4.2 or greater. We don’t even use functionality that was introduced in PHP 4.3. Whenever we accidentally use a PHP function present only in 4.3 or greater during our development cycles, we get a fair number of complaints from testers who don’t have 4.3. PHP 4 is thoroughly entrenched. If we were to change WordPress to require PHP 5 right now, we would abandon the majority of our users. Given the current state of affairs, requiring PHP 5 in the near future would seriously marginalize WordPress.
I totally agree with Ryan on the whole PHP 5 thing, as I have a variety of web hosts, and not even half of them are supporting PHP 5 yet. Some plan on doing it soon, and others tried and failed. It is just one of those things where you have to laugh because applications don’t support PHP 5, so people don’t really need it, and thus hosts don’t install it or support it. Because hosts don’t support it, applications don’t program for it, and the whole cycle starts again, with no progression.
Ryan solves this issue by asking the PHP group to create an end of life date for PHP 4, forcing hosts to go ahead and make the transition, which will then require application developers to make the change as well.
If PHP is the chicken and applications are the eggs, I say the chicken gets to go first.
Check out Boren.nu for more details.
Leo has posted an article on Freelance Switch that gives some great life hacks that you can use to get those creative juices flowing, and putting those fingers to the keyboard.
He starts off with a great bit which empathizes with his audience, and honestly, it felt like he was writing about me. I have had periods of time where I have nothing worthwhile to say, but my job is to write. Sometimes it seems next to impossible, and so it is nice to see that others feel as I do.
But writing productivity doesn’t come easy. All writers grapple with procrastination: you know you should be writing right now, but you find a million other things to do instead.
It’s not an insurmountable obstacle. You can squash the distractions and procrastination and crank out articles like a maniac with some simple hacks.
His tips include things like writing first thing in the morning, shutting off all distractions, and spending time brainstorming. If you want to read the rest of his tips, I suggest you check out his post on Freelance Switch.
D. Keith Robinson is a great writer, and having come off his latest redesign, he has some words about the current state of the web that I think holds especially true for bloggers.
He talks extensively about content and context, and those are words and concepts which most of us bloggers have to work on understanding better.
Context is very, very important and becoming more and more so as the web bleeds out of the browser and we start to see more and more cultures blending on the Web.
Does is make sense to display your content outside the browser? Does your content make sense in a mobile context? Will it be accessed via RSS? Are your users multi-cultural? “The Web� is no longer a single, location- and browser-based context, although that might be your primary method of delivery. Design your content to the contexts that make the most sense. If you have more than one (browser and mobile, for example) your content could very well benefit from being designed differently for each.
Check out his post called Teaching the Traditional Web.
iBegin has released a weather service, called iBegin Weather. Living in Canada, nice looking weather interfaces are few and far between. iBegin has done a great job in created a fast-loading, easy to use, and easy on the eyes (I like their weather icons) service that is also free.
But how it pertains to blogges is their Weather Widget. Highly customizable, it is a great way to put weather on your website without all the usual branding elements that the other guys plaster all over it.
In fact, I even use it on my own personal blog (right side - London, ON Weather).
They also provide RSS feeds so that you can easily keep up with the weather you want to follow, though this has quickly become a feature that is expected by such sites, but one that I hadn’t used before.
If you are looking for an easy way to keep up with weather, or show off how good or bad the weather is in your city, check out iBegin Weather.
Full Disclosure: iBegin is operated by Ahmed, one of the guys behind Bloggy Network.
Matt Mullenweg posted his thoughts today on being interviewed by different groups, and it made me laugh more than once. I can see the frustration behind the writing, as main stream media thinks of WordPress and Automattic like a Web 2.0 startup.
I think what they really want is an unusually young founder, possibly with a partner, who stumbled on an idea in an epiphany moment, implemented it in days, and then enjoyed overnight success, preferably capped with some sort of financial hook such as a huge VC funding or selling out to a large company for millions of dollars.
It’s not uncommon to get leading questions trying to hit a point in the above patterns… Yes, WordPress really is four years old. I was 19. No, I didn’t create it alone, if I did you would have never heard of it. Actually, it entered a rather crowded field, not even close to being first. No, not planning to sell it, there isn’t really anything to sell, it’s more of a movement. No, I didn’t make 60 million dollars in 18 months.
I really feel for Matt in this respect, but honestly, any press is good press, and WordPress, and thus Matt deserves the attention. Despite all my nitpicking, its a great piece of software, and if it brings the wrong type of entrepreneur to the web, my only hope is that they think of something good before flaming out, so that the community can reverse engineer it and adopt it as part of WordPress.
Sidenote: Best post from Matt on his blog for a while now, definitely a must read.
Smashing Magazine has put together a large list of CSS tips and tricks from some great people, including Jonathan Snook, whom I look up to.
CSS isn’t always easy to deal with. Depending on your skills and your experience, CSS coding can sometimes become a nightmare, particularly if you aren’t sure which selectors are actually being applied to document elements. An easy way to minimize the complexity of the code is as useful as not-so-well-known CSS attributes and properties you can use to create a semantically correct markup.
We’ve taken a close look at some of the most interesting and useful CSS tricks, tips, ideas, methods, techniques and coding solutions and listed them below. We also included some basic techniques you can probably use in every project you are developing, but which are hard to find once you need them.
A great list of tricks and tips. I don’t agree with all of them, but I think that like most coding methodologies it depends on the purpose, and the coder. Still, a list worth bookmarking.
Robert Nyman talks about Amazon’s S3 service, which provides pretty much anyone with a great online storage system and talks about their upcoming pricing changes, which will make it even more affordable for some people.
Basically, what this means is that I pay about 20 - 24$ a year for a safe and reliable backup of about 10 GB of data. Not too shabby, eh? If you’re looking for safe and very cheap backup, I would really recommend Amazon S3. No need to worry about malfunctioning external disk drives, burning backup CDs/DVDs all the time or other issues. Transfer the files to Amazon and you’re safe!
There are also recommendations for various tools you can use to access the S3 service. I, for one, am excited to give the service a try to back up all my personal photos, coding projects and design work. Check out Ryan’s post for more details.
Kyle Neath of Warpspire has come out and expressed his feelings in concern to the WordPress community saying simply that he is not happy.
I felt like Hemingway was my little chance to give back to the community.
But that relationship has gotten more and more sour over the past year and a half. What started off as an unexpected success has turned into a bratty little kid. You see, at first I was amazed at how many people loved and used Hemingway. But recently, I’ve started to wish less people used it. I even considered taking down the support forums, download pages, and instantly marking anything with “Hemingway� in the subject like Junk-mail.
It’s because of this dark side that Hemingway hasn’t seen any updates — including a painfully easy update to work with Wordpress 2.1 (renaming of a single function). It’s on purpose, and I realized it’s not laziness or lack of motivation — it’s out of spite. That’s a terrible way to think of your creation, but I’m afraid to say it’s true.
His post is probably going to be echoed by many of the major theme creators that really gave to the WordPress community what it needed most: quality designs for users.
A sad state of affairs when something like this happens, and I hope that the community will head over the Warpspire and give Kyle a pat on the back for all the effort that he has given so freely to the community.
Lorelle give a great image saving tip today for people looking to do any type of graphic design, including themes for WordPress. Use revisions in your file names, so you never save over your previous work, and it allows you to go back if you hit a dead end.
For example, while working on the Lorelle on WordPress swirl logo, after making a dramatic change to the step-by-step process of designing the logo, I’d save it as logo-v1.pspimage, then logo-v2.pspimage and so on, increasing the number as I go.
At any point in the design development, I can stop and go back to version 4 or 6 and begin the process again if I don’t like where the design is going. If I’ve saved over the original file, I can only undo the changes I’ve made so far back. It helps to have it saved at different steps along the process to make it easier to go back to a part way spot instead of starting over.
A great tip, and one that I don’t heed often enough. I just recently saved over a color variation in a design I was working on, and of course the customer wanted that color set.
Om Malik has highlighed a new content publishing service called Weebly. Their site looks simple enough, but with $650,000 in Angel investments, and a person from the YCombinator staff, could they compete against the big hosted blog platforms like WordPress.com and Typepad?
Well Om has put up his opinion on that, and I agree with him:
The AJAX-based interface allows you to add (or subtract) different types of elements to the blog — text, pictures, videos, Google Maps, AdSense (currently in development, not live) — thanks to a widgetized architecture. You can get going in less than an hour, though it won’t allow you to set-up a personal domain just as yet. (That is coming soon.)
While the service is impressive, Weebly faces some considerable if not insurmountable challenges. Scaling the hosted blogging business is quite a challenge, as some of the more established players have learned. The company still has to figure out a viable business model. Rusenko thinks it can work on white-label versions for internet service providers, though that is easier said than done.
I have to admit though, having played with it for only a few seconds, it does have some interesting ideas powering it, but it is no WordPress. We will see how they use their money and time. WordPress.com came from no where to have nearly a million users, so it’s not impossible that Weebly could come in and be the next big thing. I will definitely be watching.
For those of you excited about WordPress 2.2’s impending release, Ryan Boren has linked to the Release Candidate for people to try out. He also reminds us all that tagging is not part of 2.2, but that they have found a great way to do it that will probably be implemented in WordPress 2.3.
Check out his post for more details and the link to download WordPress 2.2 Release Candidate 1. Remember though that this is not the final version of WordPress 2.2, and so if you need support, you should subscribe to the WordPress Testers list.
Ryan Boren has posted about the t-shirts that WordPress has used to promote its product and let its users show their support.
His post is listed on the WordPress Dashboard, but I wanted to talk about it here for a minute because something really bugs me. I am considered an international WordPress user, as I don’t live in the United States of America, and as such, I don’t get to attend all the cool conferences and events very easily, especially since I live closer to the east coast than the west coast, where Automattic is located.
There are four, soon to be five revisions of the shirt, and yet, I still can’t buy one and I really want one. I think while the Automattic team might not make much money from shipping us international WordPress fans the shirts, that they should make it a priority to set up a capable storefront anyways. I want to show my WordPress support, and look like Matt Mullenweg too!
Thanks Ryan for reminding me about this, and check out his post to see all the current versions of the WordPress T-shirt out in the wild. Oh, and the second version is the best so far. I look forward to seeing what you guys come up with for the next shirt.
Ryan Caldwell over on Performancing’s blog has written up a great piece on finding good writers for your blog. It is not how we here at Bloggy Network find great writers, but its an interesting process for sure.
This is what you do. Post an ad on Craigslist describing the blogging position and the terms, along with a request that applicants email you with a simple cover letter explaining why they should get the position. I usually get about 30-50 applicants per Craigslist posting. You might also consider posting your position in the Performancing Blogger jobs forum.
Once you’ve gotten your 30-50 applicants who actually took the time to write a cover letter, email them back with a link to a 5-10 question application form carefully designed to weed out the half-hearted and the posers (see the link above for an example).
Of the 30-50 initial inquiries, you’ll probably get about 60% of them to fill out the application. But this is good because it filters out the lazy people from your applicant pool. Read through the applications and sort them into three folders: 1) definitely not 2) maybe and 3) definitely.
If you’re lucky, you’ll only have 5 or so applicants in the “definitely� folder. If that’s the case, you can move on to the next step. If not, you need to identify about 5 “finalists.�
I agree with him though that finding writers can be a difficult task, especially when you are going to be paying out of pocket until the site is really established and rolling, and even more so when you don’t have lots of instantly recognizable blogger “street cred�, but with some patience, and testing the waters, there are more than a few great writers out there.
One of the hardest parts of design can be picking out a proper color scheme for the design. Some designers use photos, others use their understanding of color theory to pick out that perfect palette and then there are people like me that need others to help get the right colors to go together. Over on ColorSchemes.org there is a great list of links for those looking for help in their color quest.
It includes online tools, software you can download, websites that will help you pick out the right scheme, and information on techniques.
If you are constantly designing and redesigning, this resource might just help you figure out what shades of blue to use.
07 May
Posted by David Peralty as Blogging News
Darren Rowse has had some interesting prizes for his previous group writing projects, but I don’t think any will strike up as much interest as the $1001 prize he currently has available for his latest group writing project.
The subject for the project is “Top 5″.
Here is what Darren says about that:
Your task with this project is to take the theme of ‘Top 5′ in any direction that you’d like to. I’ve chosen this theme because it should be adaptable to most types of blogs. For example a personal blogger could write about their top 5 favorite foods, a celebrity blogger could write about the top 5 things Paris will do when she gets to jail, a tech blogger could rate their top five gadgets of the year, a productivity blogger could write their top 5 ways to save 20 minutes a day etc.
Write it in any style you like, a rant, list, poem, essay, video, pictorial, haiku, podcast….. anything.
Check out the full rules and details on Problogger, and good luck to all those that enter.
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