Spontaneous Monotony

Although Wordpress 2.5 missed its release date last week, there is now a ‘release candidate’ available. For those of you who have lives aren’t familiar with software development stages, a ‘release candidate’ means that the software is considered to be in a release-worthy state, but isn’t officially released yet. Of course the practice of releasing ‘release candidate’ versions for public download over the internet means that the term is now almost as much of a joke as the ‘Google Beta’.

Wordpress 2.5 RC1 is now running on this site. Although its main visible change is in the administration interface. The new interface is - aside from the mysteriously buggered plugin upgrader which presumably is the reason why 2.5 missed its release date - very good indeed. Much easier to navigate, a fresher colour scheme, pretty much everything that I thought was wrong with the Wordpress admin interface seems (touch wood) to have been solved. There is also however a new feature for readers in that your Gravatar will now be displayed alongside your comments - if you have one. Gravatar is a service that - once you register - will allow you to associate an avatar with your email address. Whenever you leave a comment on a Gravatar-using site, it will check your email address against Gravatar’s database so that your avatar can appear. This saves you registering accounts on a billion different blogs (well, other websites too, but blogs are the main users of Gravatar) just for the purpose of having an 80px square image appear next to your name.

Anyway, if you see anything that looks screwed up then I’d appreciate it if you could drop a comment on this post - not that I’m expecting Wordpress to be buggy or anything ;P

Links

• Download Wordpress 2.5 RC1 (direct download link, 1.28Mb Zip file)
• Gravatar

I’m not usually in the habit of posting about Wordpress upgrades unless they offer some startling new feature that you are likely to be salivating over However, this minor security upgrade is the first I have done from my Ubuntu-powered laptop. Installing the necessary software was a breeze (ftp uploading is one of the few things that Ubuntu Feisty doesn’t support out of the box) - just a matter of running Synaptic, searching for Filezilla (there might be better ones, but I use Filezilla on Windows so I thought consistency might be helpful) and then installing it.

Oh yeah, and I’ve got the upgrade to the new major release of Ubuntu to do in the near future. Unlike Microsoft and Apple, who want £250 and £85 for the upgrades to the full featured versions of their new operating systems, the Ubuntu upgrade is free and done from within the usual Updates Manager. Oh yeah, and the updater doesn’t install software without my consent.

I though that rather than re-editing the Wordpress 2.3 post over and over again, I would have this post as a dedicated progress report. I would do it as a page rather than a blog post (only Wordpress geeks are likely to care about what I just said :P), but sadly as far as I know there is no option in Wordpress to have a post not appear on the menu at the top of the page. Anyway, here goes:

• 1st October 9pm: All posts from June 2007 to September 2007 inclusive

I’ve upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress (2.3), primarily because of the new tagging feature. Previously, adding technorati-style tags to posts involved either meaty and irritating-to-use plugins (irritating primarily because they were all incompatible with each other) or as I’ve been doing since the switch to (and from!) Wordpress.com, using a bookmarklet. If I have time I will go back through old posts and convert them to the new tagging system. I’m not going to try to do all 500-odd of them in a weekend, so it will be awhile before older posts (I’ll prioritise ones that the stats say more people read) are included.

Oh, almost forgot to mention. The main benefit of this system (apart from making Technorati plug my site more) is that (as with categories) you can click on a tag to get a list of all posts which include it. For example, when I’m done you would be able to get a list of all my posts about human rights, even though that isn’t a category.

EDIT: Before you think of reporting me to PETA for that headline, you should understand the difference between taxonomy and taxidermy

The recent switch to Wordpress.com has allowed me, among other things, to give Windows Live Writer another try. Sure, it ain’t gonna replace the web interface. Aside from the need to administer my blog (e.g. comment moderation), the ‘hot posts’ (etc.) lists on Wordpress.com are really good for finding stuff to read. That said, there are some times when I just want to write a quick post, and if WLW can do the job then it would make that sort of post easier.

EDIT: Bang goes that idea. Aside from its Technorati tagging plugin using different formatting from my bookmarklet, the post was filled with HTML acronym soup (e.g. ‘b’ instead of the XHTML ’strong’ that both flavours of Wordpress recognise). Bye bye WLW!