Wordpress Version Check v0.90 is now available.

The follow minor changes have been made in v0.90:

1. Improved check for Tiger Admin Plugin - When detected alternate CSS is used for message display. Thanks to MarkJ for the new and improved CSS.
2. readme.txt included in the zip file with installation instructions.
3. Updated version number to 0.90.

The following new features have been added in v0.90:

1. Added support for wp-dash plugin with a builtin WordPress Version Check widget.
2. For advanced users who are installing this plugin on multiple blogs that they administer for others you can now enable email notification of new messages.

(Read on …)

As I get more and more into blogging I have seen the number of different feeds that I read on a daily basis wax and wane a fair bit. For a while I have played with a number of different desktop based feed readers and more recently web based feed readers. It is now over a year since I started reading blogs on a daily basis and the following article chronicles my journey through a number of feed readers.

If I remember correctly I started with Sage. Sage was very easy to use and it was good at keeping track of what articles I had/hadn’t read and provided a nice look-and-feel to the feed display.

I stuck with Sage for quite a while but it didn’t quite hit the spot with regard to integrating the tracking of a large number of feeds. I found myself frustrated by the process of switching between the different feeds to read the new items - what was missing for me was an integrated view with the unread posts in chronological order - In other words you have to read through a feed at a time which involves a lot of switching around the UI and can suck up a lot of precious feed reading time.

(Read on …)

Elliott feels that he has had a bad experience on the WordPress codex and is troubled by the way it is being run. He feels that the codex has become an unfriendly playground and that he no longer wants to play.

It truth what happened was he arrived at the codex with his own preconceptions about how the site was run and how he should behave. He ran straight in without finding out what was going on and how new content was being authored.

The codex has a set of guidelines about contributing and in particular “Creating a new Page”. These state specifically that the recommended process is to create a Temporary page under your user page and work on the drafting process. Then when you feel the page is ready you move out of your User Pages and into the main content of the codex.
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Next Week, July 23^rd to 30^th, is WordPress Backup Week and I encourage you all to backup you blogs.

I have recently started backing up my site using skippy’s excellent wp-db-backup plugin. If you don’t want to use a plugin to do your backups Podz has some excellent instructions for setting up a cron job to do the backups.

One thing that is worth noting which ever backup route you take is that you should keep your backups off-site to be safe. What I mean by this is that using a cron job/plugin to create backups which are then emailed to an account hosted on the same server as your blog is not necessarily a wise idea.

(Read on …)