Category Archives: Blogging

WordPress 2.7, First Impressions

Blogging, Software

After making the effort to upgrade WordPress to 2.6.5 on the December 9th, the WordPress team turned around only days later and released version 2.7 – which has had a lot of tongues wagging. Not wanting to be left behind again, I’ve already upgraded and my initial impression is that it’s fantastic.

While I’m sure there are many under the hood improvements in WordPress 2.7, the most noticeable to everyone is going to be the administration area – which has been completely reworked. The biggest difference with version 2.7 has been the development process that the core team have gone through, it has been very iterative and has had constant feedback from the community while it’s been happening. Not surprisingly then, the overwhelming response to the new administration area in WordPress is very positive.

I’ve only had it installed for a short time, however the things that make it worth the upgrade personally are:

  • Vastly improved navigation
  • Customisable on-screen components – move them around or just turn them off if they don’t interest you.
  • Contextually relevant navigation depending on what your mouse is over, which has reduced the clutter
  • Optional inline editing of many elements, such as posts & comments
  • Appearances count and the tight styling between elements is noticeable
  • Dashboard has been improved yet again and now offers a ‘quick press’ if you just want to jot something down fast

No doubt I’ll find a bunch of other really great features in the coming days and weeks but I’m quite rapped about the enhancements to WordPress in this round of development.

Tardy

Blogging, Software

The upgrade notification in the WordPress administration area finally got the better of me tonight, I’m now running WordPress 2.6.5.

Not unlike every other WordPress upgrade I’ve performed, the process was fast and painless. For those that haven’t performed one before – you can follow the upgrade instructions on the WordPress Codex and you’ll just sail on through it without a care in the world and if something untoward should happen – you’ll have a backup just in case.

I haven’t checked the release notes for the changes between 2.6.0 and 2.6.5 but I’m positive that there has been some pretty serious improvements in the efficiency of WordPress as the site felt immediately faster. Everything else has kept on working, even my horribly out of date theme and WordPress plugins that I run.

With WordPress 2.7.0 recently being rolled out to http://wordpress.com, I can’t wait for it to land as a general distribution via http://wordpress.org. It has a lot of new features in it and an upgraded user interface which looks very slick – it might just be the catalyst for upgrading in a more timely fashion next time!

WordPress Upgrade

Blogging, Software

Just before the end of last year, the team behind WordPress released an update, which was marked as an urgent upgrade for all users. For whatever reason, it’d been quite a long time since I’d updated last – that I’d let this upgrade pass by as well. Not quite sure what made me actually do the upgrade last night but it was such a painless exercise, I’m going to make a point of upgrading in step with the releases of WordPress from now on.

To give you an idea of what is involved in upgrading a copy of WordPress:

  1. Backup my current installation of WordPress
    1. First I downloaded my out dated copy of WordPress, which took about two minutes.
    2. Second I took a backup of the database as well, this took approximately ten minutes as I included everything in the database.
  2. Download the latest and greatest copy of WordPress, takes approximately a minute.
  3. Extract the freshly downloaded WordPress.
  4. Disable any plugins that are running, in case they aren’t compatible with the new version of WordPress.
  5. Set the theme back to the default, in case the current theme had any dependencies on any of the plugins which were active.
  6. Upload the new WordPress files onto the server, takes about two minutes.
  7. Load the web site upgrade file, which upgrades the database schema to the latest version.
  8. Re-enable plugins one by one, making sure they function correctly as you go.
  9. Restore your preferred theme.

After all of the fluffing about, it took about 20 minutes in total and most of that could have been avoided if I chose to only backup selected bits of the database (thus reducing the download size).

As a by product of the upgrade, I have a little house keeping to do around the site. I noticed that one of my WordPress plugins isn’t functioning correctly, since the category management has been completely overhauled since the version I was running. WordPress now supports tagging, which are essentially micro-categories; so it’ll be a bit of an exercise to go back through the last few years of posts and tag them appropriately but it’ll make finding information much easier for users.

Multiple Personalities

Blogging, Life, Websites

I’ve been blogging on this domain since 2004 on various topics ranging from technical to personal and everything in between. For quite some time now, I’ve been thinking that I’m not really meeting anyones reading needs, as the content on the site flip flops between technical and personal so often; such that people that only want technical are forced to filter out the personal fluff and visa versa.

To solve that problem, I had a couple of different options available:

  • separate the current site in halves using a category, such as personal and technical
  • move the technical content onto a subdomain, such as http://technical.lattimore.id.au
  • move the technical content onto a completely different domain

I currently make fairly extensive use of categories within the site to organise my posts. I could have gone through and uncategorised the current posts and placed each post back into one of the two new categories or sections. To help with searching or stepping through the site, tagging all of the existing posts would have aided in that area. While it would have worked, it didn’t feel right to inject ‘useless’ categories into the mix to solve the problem.

Option number two would require multiple WordPress installations. There is nothing wrong with that and it’ll obviously work just fine on a technical level but without a little bit of upfront work, seemed as though it’d end in tears some point down the road.

In the end, I chose door number three and set about finding a new domain name that fit the bill. I wanted something that had a clearly technical inclination and after using a handy domain utility, couldn’t believe my luck when I found that ifdebug.com was available.

At the moment, I’m undecided as to what I’ll do with the existing content on the site. I’m inclined to just leave it here as it’s the simplest option, however there are benefits to moving it over to if debug; we’ll see how it pans out.

In the meantime, expect a steady stream of personal content to be published through this site and the technical goodies to land on ifdebug.com.

Automattic Acquires Gravatar

Blogging, Internet, Websites

The ever popular blogging service Gravatar started by Tom Werner has been acquired by Automattic.

For those that aren’t aware what a gravatar is, it’s a globally recognised avatar. I can hear the question already, what is an avatar and stop speaking Greek. An avatar is a little image or animated icon that people often have displayed beside their names in online forums. A gravatar is generally meant to unique to a user and is used with the intention that it’s easier of recognise a user by glancing at an image rather than by having to read their name.

Automattic acquiring Gravatar is an excellent move for the community in my opinion. In the last year or so, the Gravatar service has been failing after having a solid adoption rate throughout the blogging community. It was a vicious cycle really, as the more exposure they received the more users signed up and the more the service struggled to manage that load. The Automattic crew have quite a bit of experience scaling web sites and services out, after successfully delivering services such as Akismet for fighting spam and the massively popular hosted WordPress.com blogging platform.

A quick message by the founder of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, points out that since migrating the services into the Automattic infrastructure, that it’s already three times faster. It seems they’ve got some pretty cool plans for the Gravatar service in the future as well:

  • Rewrite the service in PHP, the programming language of choice for Automattic
  • Move the image delivery into a Content Delivery Network, reduces their load and lowers end user latency as well
  • Push the 1,000,000 plus avatars currently in WordPress.com into the Gravatar platform so they are available everywhere
  • Integrate the newly rebuilt Gravatar services back into WordPress.com
  • Implement cleaner URL’s for each gravatar

There are a bunch of other features that are coming but those are the ones that I thought were most interesting. Congratulations has to go to Tom Werner for developing a great specialist product to start with that was worth an acquisition. I’m excited to see how that all unfolds now under the management and guidance of the Automattic team.