Microsoft recently released an upgrade for Windows Live Messenger. I’ve been meaning to upgrade for a while now, however had heard a few negative comments about it which stopped me from upgrading. This evening I took the plunge, upgraded and so far I’m quite enjoying it.

I haven’t changed any settings away from the default and in liking that:

• the contact list font size is slightly smaller, so you can see more people in the same vertical space
• grouping contacts isn’t new, however the Favourites might be?
• the annoying left hand wall of advertising and other useless services has been moved down the bottom
• hovering a contact provides a context menu with a few useful options such as send email or view profile
• What’s New scrolls through the recent activity of your contact list. Within the settings area, you can choose who you want to see events from, what type and also what you publish (if anything at all). It’s a great way to see at a glance what your contacts have been doing, in case you missed something.

I’m not that interested in the scene (read: themes), animated display pictures or signature sounds functionality but maybe that’ll change in the future. While I’ve only had it installed for a very brief amount of time, I think it is a positive upgrade from Microsoft for Live Messenger.

It took a little bit of effort but the stange characters that WordPress was displaying through a significant number of posts have now been removed.

I went looking briefly about what might have caused the problem and can confirm that it is related to the character encoding in MySQL. There are numerous posts in the official WordPress support forums and on blogs dating back to 2006 – so it isn’t a new problem at all.

After removing them from the site, I’ve subsequently verified that the database encoding is UTF-8 and WordPress is publishing in UTF-8 according to the content type in the meta data. That makes me think that those strange characters could have been present in my site from an earlier upgrade of WordPress and I’ve just never noticed it before.

I think this might be karma for not doing enough housekeeping on my site.

While reviewing a swag of older posts tonight, I noticed some strange characters throughout my posts.

The strange characters were not something that I’d have put there, they don’t make sense and are rather random. Some of them there is a pattern to, for instance a single quote seems to be consistently replaced with three different characters.

At a guess, it looks to be some sort of an encoding problem. I doubt that it’ll be a problem with WordPress itself as it multi-lingual capable, so it’ll probably be something to do with the rich WYSIWYG editor that WordPress uses or possibly a database encoding issue.

My run of bad luck continued tonight as I went to upgrade WordPress on #if debug.

I backed up the database, downloaded a copy of the source files and set about uploading WordPress 2.7 – only to have the power go out twice during the event. That not being enough, I happened to pick a time to perform an upgrade when my web host scheduled my server for maintenance. This was completely my fault, I received an outage notification – I just thought I’d get it all done before the outage window began and I would have if it went to plan like normal.

After I finally got everything successfully uploaded, or at least I thought I had, I was then unable to ‘upgrade’ as the script would terminate without an error and without completing. That resulted in the web site working when you’re browsing it but wouldn’t allow me to login to the admin area – as it kept requiring me to complete the upgrade.

I assumed that the power outage that was the root cause of it – leaving one of the core WordPress files in an incomplete state. I deleted all of the core WordPress files from the server and starting clean and the upgrade of WordPress was then fast and painless.

I still find it amazing that I could be struck by another bit of bad luck, albeit very small and through my own fault walk into a wall – of bad timing.

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.