Weblog Tools Collection

Thanks for visiting! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. This blog posts regular Wordpress news, updates of themes, plugins, ideas, hacks, quick fixes and everything about blogging, especially about Wordpress. Go ahead, subscribe to our feed! You can also receive updates from this blog via email.

15 Websites / Services I’d Actually Pay For Ryan lists fifteen websites/online services he would be willing to pay for, if they were not free. Worthy of note is the following in the list: Wordpress.org: The benefit of blogging with WP is so significant (SEO, functionality, flexibility) that it’s well worth paying for. I’d probably pay a $200 for an installation… which makes me realize how much I rely on the product.

This is an incredibly interesting line of thought and I am sure a lot of Web 2.0 companies/services would kill to have more user data and input on this. I strongly believe that revenue models and monetization techniques are the stuff that make or break a company in spite of the fantastic idea/concept that it might provide. In that spirit, here is my list of 12 things online (15 things were hard to find quickly) I am willing to pay for.

• GMail: Without a doubt my one most used tools online. I returned to GMail a few years ago and cannot imagine my life without it. Add other services such as Google Reader and Google (outside of google search, without which I would be completely lost, at least for a few days) is indispensable to me.
• WordPress: I would pay for it undoubtably, but I think the allure would be gone if I had to pay. Whenever I think WordPress, I think GPL and Open Source and I just cannot imagine the two apart.
• Firefox: This was a tough one. I would pay for it, but look at #2. I would however, be willing to pay for the Web Developer Toolbar extension, the colorpicker extension and a few others that I use everyday.
• Akismet: I do pay for Akismet. The service has caught 3,263,951 spam on this blog since I first installed it.
• SlickDeals: I am an addict. If I had to pay to be a member, within reason, I would pay for it.
• StatCounter: Their free service is great, but if they started charging for their basic service, the switching cost of years of accumulated data would force me to pay.
• Techmeme: Nominal, yearly charges would be fine by me, especially if it removed those sponsored posts. I use it too often.
• Skype: Again, nominal yearly charges would be acceptable for the basic PC to PC calling. I already keep my account topped off for when I call international phones once in a while.
• Craigslist: If I had to pay a small fee for the listings, if the charge was only initiated for items that are sold (which I understand would be hard to monitor), I would pay for it. Craigslist is a much better place to buy and sell everyday used items than eBay and I have made better deals via Craigslist than any other online selling venue.
• Woopra: I am getting addicted to the Woopra fever. As I have expressed in the past to JohnP, Elie and others, I would be willing to pay a reasonable fee for it.
• Various WordPress Plugins: I have paid and have dontated to the developers of various WordPress plugins that I find extremely useful and which have become completely indispensable after I have installed them and used them. They include OIOPublisher, Ozh’s Who Sees Ads, Mark’s Subscribe to Comments etc.
• Feedburner: Now another Google service but Feedburner reduces the traffic load from feed readers and I would have paid for the service if it were not free.

What would you be willing to pay for? If famous OSS programs were not OSS, would you pay for them? Does the cost of software make it less or more attractive (not the relative cost, but just the fact that it is not free)? Would you pay for Twitter? How about Flickr or Google Analytics? What if TechCrunch went to a registration model? Would it still be as popular? How much do you spend on personal online services every month today? Are online vendors sharing more of your wallet today than say, two years ago? Do you think this trend will continue to increase?

These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night.

It is time for another WordPress Plugin Competition. Plugin competitions of the past have seen fantastic code, extremely useful and fun plugins and have generated a lot of interest in WordPress and plugin development. Prizes have been very generously donated by readers and well wishers and we already have some donations towards this year’s competition and are looking for more. The final list of prizes will be determined very soon. If you would like to sponsor a prize or donate some money to the competition, please contact me. Lots of eyes see these competitions and your encouragement goes a long way in helping provide incentives. The plugin competition will begin on the 10th of May and will last till the 10th of July.

There will be prizes for first, second and third places and a consolation prize. The plugins should be officially submitted through email and the Plugin Competition Blog (which will be cleaned for the new competition) should be used as a launching ground for plugin ideas, updates, development news etc. The plugins will be judged by a panel of at least three judges and reader feedback will be an essential part of the judging process. At the end of the contest, we will put up posts for each submission and will open them up to our readers for two weeks. The contest results should be declared by the beginning of August.

All code must be GPL (or compatible) and should be available for download through the Competition Blog and preferably through WordPress Extend. The plugins can be modified and tweaked till the last day of the competition or until the author sends us an email with the final version of the code. In essence, the Plugin Competition Blog is the preferred vehicle of communication for all contestants.

Some relevant details:

• Running time for competition = 2 months starting the 10th of May till the 10th of July.
• True Wordpress plugins only. No manual modifications can be required of users.
• You cannot submit plugins that have been released already. New code only please.
• Plugins can only be submitted via email. We will make that email address public later on in the competition.
• Plugins cannot have opt-out links back to the authors’ pages (from the main blog pages, admin pages are fine). If you have links or donation forms, please make them opt-in.
• All plugins require documentation as in the Wordpress Extend pages. Documentation will be one of the judging criteria.
• Preliminary support for the plugin has to be provided to the public.
• We are looking for innovation, documentation and elegant code.
• Any and all prizes/controversies/issues will be judged and decided at our sole discretion.

More details to be added with time.

Stay tuned and please help spread the word.

New ‘AB Meta’ Markup Tools Could Create a Smarter Web: Wired has an interesting article on a new set of tools from Adaptive Blue called AB Meta which could be used to easily add metadata to your blog pages that can in turn, be used by search engines to correctly categorize and annotate content. Dougal’s HeadMeta WordPress plugin can be used to insert AB Meta into your posts. The Wired article and the Adaptive Blue blog post have some examples on how this works and what should be done.

Disclosure: Adaptive Blue is an advertiser on this blog.

This might be the last WordCamp Dallas 2008 post you see on this blog and since that is the case, better to go out with a bang! In case you were one of the unlucky ones who didn’t have a chance to attend the conference live, the good news is that there were plenty of attendees blogging, vlogging, and live blogging the event. I present to you a list of links which will correspond to the conference schedule.

Matt Mullenweg discussing WordPress 2.5 and beyond. Actually, he announced the redesign of WordPress.org along with the release of 2.5.

John Pozadzides presented his 45 ways to power up your blog.

After Lunch, Jonathan Bailey gave us the lowdown on content theft and protection along with a number of other things that bloggers of any platform would be interested in. Jonathan has also published the slides for his presentation on his own blog which can be viewed here.

Cali Lewis and Neal Campbell shared their experience with using WordPress for powering their websites.

Liz Strauss gave a presentation that was titled, C’mon, Let’s Talk! which dealt with building influence and interaction with blogging. You can check out her full presentation here.

Lorelle VanFossen stepped up to the plate and shared her WordPress Power Tips. Her presentation can be viewed here.

The next day of the event featured a live recording of the WordPress Podcast. The full video of this presentation is now online at WeblogToolsVideos.com.

The next panel was by Chris Smith who went over SEO for Bloggers. The link to the Natural Search Blog contains a link to the presentation that Chris Smith gave the attendees.

Aaron Brazell offered up an extensive presentation called WordPress FAQ. The FAQ answers questions such as can you have too many tags, what is the GPL, and the explanation of hooks. The end of the presentation takes questions from the attendees.

A panel that I particularly found interesting was the Business of blogging session featuring Liz Strauss, Mark Ghosh, Matt Mullenweg and Aaron Brazell. A ton of interesting points and conversations took place during the session and I thought it was one of the highlights of the event. Check out the ustream video that Mark Rizzn of Mashable.com recorded here.

Last but not least, Jacob Santos closed out the event with his presentation on Testing With WordPress. I have yet to see any videos posted of his session but he goes over it in more detail here.

For those that have yet to see what this thing called Woopra is all about, Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.TV interviews John Pozadzides and gives you the low down.

Social Media Marketing at SeaWorld They put up a WordPress blog and uploaded raw content to Flickr and YouTube. They then worked the online communities focused on roller coasters to get the word out. This article is based on a video podcast by Shel Israel of FastCompany.tv. On one of the panels at WordCamp, we were asked a question that roughly translated to the same one that Shel is trying to get answers for. “How do you measure a conversation?” SeaWorld simply put together a blog and some pictures and videos using tools that are feely available, to generate buzz and conversation amongst ethusiasts they might have normally overlooked. The question in my mind is not how we measure but what we measure as the outcome of a social media marketing strategy and how we know that it is time to measure a particular set of results.

We had talked about introducing something new and exciting and I would like to take this opportunity to introduce Weblog Tools Videos to my readers. It is simply an extension of Weblog Tools Collection and a means for us to have the ability to find, upload, view, peruse and aggregate videos related to WordPress, blogging, tutorials, web design etc.

I am really excited about quite a few of the features of Weblog Tools Videos. In addition to the obvious ability to browse through the latest videos and the most popular ones, readers can add videos from various video upload sites, link to videos published elsewhere, upload their own videos and most importantly, record and upload videos from their computers directly from their webcam. There are plans to allow screencast capture and record and post Skype videos and conferences as well. So go ahead and register and start uploading and linking videos.

The power of Weblog Tools Videos is in its users (which is why I ask you to register). When you upload a WordPress or a blogging video to YouTube, your video is lost in YouTube’s content stream, picked up and washed away in the barrage of new content. On Weblog Tools Videos, your multimedia will be exposed to a highly concentrated and well defined audience looking to view and absorb just the kind of media you are looking to produce. Since most of the other features, including the embedding and the social interaction is the same, you could upload your newly produced videos to Weblog Tools Videos and use it/embed it on your blog and/or social content in almost exactly the same way as before (expect an embed plugin soon). In the process, you will receive the attention of the Weblog Tools Collection audience as well as benefit from the exposure on your own site.

Are you videoing yet?

[I did not write this post. It was written with great care and in great detail by MichaelH on the news section and is reproduced verbatim here. For those of you that do not know Michael's work, his work on the Codex and his help with WordPress and its documentation makes him a legend in my books. Thank you Michael!]

These questions and answers were gleaned from the wp-hackers and wp-testers e-mail lists over that last several weeks.

Q. How can I find the Post ID or Page ID?
A. If your browser shows the URL in the status bar, when you mouse over a link, you can see the ID in the as part of the URL displayed in the browser status bar. In FireFox you can show the status bar by checking the Status bar choice under View. A more complicated method to finding the ID is to use something like phpMyAdmin to look at the database table wp_posts–look down the column of post_title to find your Post or Page Title. The ID field on that row will be your Post (or Page) ID.

Q. How do I find the Category ID?
A. In Manage->Categories, place your mouse over the Category Name you are trying to find the ID for and the ‘cat_ID’ will show as part of the URL displayed in the browser status bar. In FireFox you can show the status bar by checking the Status bar choice under View. A more complicated method to finding the Category ID is to use something like phpMyAdmin to look at the database table wp_terms and find the row where name column is your Category Description. The term_id on that row will be your Category ID.

Q. How can I edit my Post slug or my Page slug?
A. The Post (or Page) slug is now displayed as the Permalink under the Title field in writing or editing a Post or Page. If you are using the “Default” Peramlink Settings you will not see and can’t edit the Permalink. Only if you are using a ‘pretty Permalink’ (e.g. Month and name) in Settings->Permalinks will the Permalink be available for edit. When creating a new Post or Page, the Permalink field won’t show up until you complete the Title.

Q. Where are my Post Categories and Tags when writing a Post?
A. Scroll down below the Post content box.

Q. How do I rearrange the order Advanced Options boxes like Custom Fields and Excerpt?
A. This is no longer possible.

Q. I don’t see a link to edit a user’s name.
A. In the table of Users, click on the name (represented as a link), to edit that user’s information.

Q. What happened to my Import Links ability?
A. Export Links is displayed under the Related section on the Write->Link screen

Q. Where’s the menu tab to access the Dashboard?
A. The link to the Dashboard is in the dark border at the top left of the screen.

Q. What happened to my child categories? I had the Category Ford both as a Child of New Cars, and as a Child of Old Car, but I can’t do that any longer?
A. Duplicate Category (and Tag) names are not longer allowed.

Q. I can’t upload certain file types and get message “File type does not meet security guidelines. Try another”
A. Unknown file extensions are ‘blocked from uploading’. New extensions and their icons can be added via changes to the functions wp_check_filetype and wp_ext2type in wp-includes/functions.php.

Q. How can I change that red banner in the Dashboard?
A. Change to the ‘Classic’ Admin Color Schemes in Users->Your Profile.

Q. What happened to my Options choices?
A. Options are now called Settings and that menu tab is to the right on your menu next to Plugins and Users.

Q. How do I edit a Category Description?
A. Under Manage->Categories, click on the Category Name you wish to edit.

Q. How do I edit a Comment?
A. Under Comments, click on the name of the comment author and then you will be placed in ‘Edit Comment’ mode.

Q. Where is the WordPress Bookmarklet?
A. It’s gone for now but will likely be available in Version 2.6 but see Dion Hulce’s suggestion in the Forums.

Q. When in the Media Library, what is this error — Fatal error: Call to undefined function: wp_get_attachment_image() in /home/public_html/wp-includes/post-template.php on line 384
A. This is usually caused by a PHP file not being correctly uploaded. Make sure wp-includes/media.php and wp-settings.php are intact (reupload them).

Q. When trying to upload media files I get the message “Are you sure you want to do that?” with a link telling me to try again. Clicking “Please try again” simply reloads the dashboard into the frame.
A. You may need to disable your plugins one-by-one to find the ‘problem’ plugin. Some older plugins, such as Ryan Duff’s old WP-Contact plugin, have been reported to cause this problem, so check under the Plugins tab to see if your Plugins need updating.

Q. Has the option to enable/disable Gzip compression been removed from 2.5?
A Yes, the option is gone. WordPress now leaves compression as a decision for the server.

Q. Why can’t I add media in Manage->Media Library?
A. This was planned for 2.5 but didn’t make it into code so this will be included in a future release.

Q. How do I add links to my Blogroll?
A. A new menu choice, Write->Link, allows creation of new Links. In Manage->Links, there is an “add new” link to the right of the Manage Links heading. Also remember the new Manage->Link Categories to add and maintain Link Categories.

Q. What happened to the Post Timestamp box? How do I change the Post Timestamp?
A. In Write->Post, in the Publish Status area, click on the Edit button to the right of Publish immediately. When editing a Post, there is a similar edit button in the Publish Status area next to the Published on date and time.

Q. My screen is using 1280×960 pixels and I notice that admin screens are left aligned, not centered or stretched 100%.
A. This is the intended design. Viper007bond has Remove Max Width Plugin to change this.

Q. The collation set in “wp-config.php” (DB_COLLATE) is not being used in searches.
A. This will be likely be fixed in 2.5.1 but see this thread at wp-testers for a suggested fix.

Q. I get a “403 Forbidden” error when uploading files. I am also using the Bad Behavior plugin.
A. May need to delete the “Shockwave Flash” from the Bad Behavior blacklist file. See Rick Beckman’s post for a detailed description.

Q. I just tried to upload several media file and my browser crashed when it got to the “Crunching” part.
A. It is possible your system doesn’t support the Flash uploader or needs an upgrade to your Flash Player. Dion Hulse also wrote the the No Flash Uploader plugin to disable the Flash uploader.

Q. I can’t edit the Post slug/permalink and I’m sure I’m using pretty permalinks
A. To help debug the problem, answer these questions. What is your permalink structure? Can you provide the permalink for a post that does not show the Permalink field in the editor? Do you get any JS errors in the console? If you have plugins activated, does the problem persist if they are deactivated?

Q. The Change button (beside the Remove button) in Design->Widgets isn’t working. When I click change (beside remove button) it doesn’t save the changes to the widget.
A. Clicking Change doesn’t actually do a save and reload. You have to click “Save Changes” at the bottom to make the changes stick.

Q. In older versions, below widgets we had the option to select how many ‘Text’ widgets we want to use, but I don’t see that in 2.5.
A. The option is no longer needed. Widgets that allow multiple instances (e.g. Text widget) can be added as many times as you like by just clicking on the Add button. Remember to “Save Changes” when done adding the widgets.

Q. Can I revert from Version 2.5 to Version 2.3.3?
A. The best way is to restore your 2.3.3 database and files. If that is not possible, then any user that accessed the 2.5 blog or was added in 2.5 would need the MD5 password reset in the user table.

Q. I have several production blogs using Version 2.3.3 and I just upgraded to Version 2.5 on one of those blog. All the blogs share a common user table for the user names and passwords, but when I login to the Version 2.5 blog with a user, why can’t I use that same user to login to the 2.3.3 blogs.
A. Version 2.5 has enhance the password authentication so the passwords created/used for a 2.5 blog will not work on a 2.3.3 blog. Ryan wrote MD5 Password Hashes plugin to use the old password hashing (like what is used in Version 2.3.3) in a Version 2.5 blog.

Q. How do I add a youtube video to a 2.5 Post?
A. In the HTML mode, paste the youtube URL (youtube tells you this) into the post. In the Visual mode, paste the youtube URL into the popup activated when you click on the “Insert/edit embedded media” icon on the 2nd toolbar row.

In addition to these questions and the provided answers, if you have any new ones that you would like to add, please leave us a comment and we will add them to the list.

So we had a really good time and wished that all of you were there. The presentations were all top notch and audience participation was very good. In his keynote Matt mentioned that attendees would get the most from this conference if they mingled and connected with each other as much as they paid attention to the people up on stage and I noticed a lot of mingling going on. It was wonderful to finally meet a whole bunch of people. I have all the pictures that I took (I should have taken the D70) on my Flickr account with the agreed upon WordCampDallas2008 tag. If you have any questions, have any media from the event that you would like to share or have any questions for any of the events/presenters, please let us know.

Special thanks to Charles for organizing the event and to John for being a terrific host.

The Twenty-Five Most Valuable Blogs: At first I thought this was linkbait but a read through the article and the other content on the blog changed my mind. There is some analysis of each blog/blogging company with details about the company, guesses on revenues and page views, future prospects, operating margins and employees, advertising statistics and finally a comment on property valuation as multiples of revenue or multiples of operating profits. From my quick glance I would say that the revenue numbers are not perfectly on the money but since these figures are almost never publicly discussed (except on make money online blogs) I guess there is some error built into the valuation. Daniel’s excellent Daily Blog Tips($1.8M) makes it into the list at number 18. The Gawker properties tops the list at a value of $150 million and other big names include TechCrunch($36M), Mashable($10M), GigaOm($8.4M) and RWW($5M).

A few things surprised me about the entry. I try to keep a very short list of reads and trim and add to them all the time. The fact that the top twenty blogs were on my reading list was a strange surprise. Another surprise was that there was not a single link on the original linked post. (Not one link. I wonder if that was done by choice since their other articles contain links.) I was also surprised by the detailed reasoning for the valuations and the stream of numbers that were presented. Considering that the blog in question is on Wall Street and finance, I should not be surprised but I am not used to seeing this level of financial proficiency on blog valuations.

All in all it was a pleasure to read and compare.

WordPress Development Blog: 2.5 Sneak Peek  I love the staccato description Matt uses to start the post: A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? The first Release Candidate for WordPress 2.5 is out for those that have been waiting patiently to try out the new features. Matt details out the updates and the new features of 2.5 on the development blog and the good news is spreading in the WordPress circles.

In addition to many underlying changes and updates to the code, the administration back end of WordPress gets a major rework in this version. The release candidate is not for everyone and can be downloaded for testing and bug searching.

If you make frequent backups and you’re interested in helping us out with development by testing the new code, download and install Release Candidate 1 of WordPress 2.5, and join our testers mailing list to report any bugs you find in the code.

We’re also interested in feedback on the new interface and would love to hear your opinions, thoughts, rants, raves, and anything in between. We created a special email address just for the occasion: 2.5-feedback@wordpress.org.

WordPress 2.5 Delayed a Week: According to this milestone in the WordPress Trac, 2.5 is delayed by a week or even more. There is a lot of work being done on styling, bug fixes and open tickets and even though the milestone is delayed to 3/17/08, a well polished release will be more appreciated and will be better for the community than a rush to release.

In the meantime, Lorelle is tapping her feet waiting for the new release and Six Apart is trying to make waves in the wake of WordPress 2.5. Ozh is happy to have the chance to fix some more plugins, Tadd provides some sage advice to people complaining about the wait. I am very excited about this release and what it brings to the table and will be upgrading as soon as I can.

While we are on the subject, in reading through the comments left on Jeff’s post yesterday, we hope we did not cause any added confusion to the impending release. WordPress has gotten more complex since the 1.2 days but that is expected of code reaching a higher level of maturity. However, along with the complexity, WordPress has also gained much anticipated features, has been keeping up and in many cases, leading publishing technology and has become a beacon of success in the blogging and Open Source communities. A lot of the technology that is in 2.5 never existed back when WordPress was forked out of b2 and much of the code and many of the advances have come about due to the hard work of the developers, contributors and supporters of WordPress. Hundreds of developers, contributors and well wishers help shape WordPress and the community is in a very large part responsible for the wonderful peice of software it is today.

The WordPress developers have a feel for their code and they will know when they are ready to put it into production/release. This model creates some confusion because of the nature of the development cycle, but the delaying of the release date and the tweaking and fixing till a comfort level is reached, is not a bad thing at all. On the contrary, if followed with due diligence and with care, this development model can help put together some really good code and it works well in the Open Source (or any shared development) environment. Strict deadlines are more detrimental than a constant update model which has been proven to be more productive and easier to manage.

I have observed and participated in WordPress development from close and afar for many years and though the development cycle might seem disconcerting, I can safely tell you that this effort will bear delicious fruit for sure.

Thanks for being a user and a supporter of WordPress. Here is to a successful WordPress 2.5 in the coming weeks!

FeedBurner Quietly Kills All-Time RSS Feed Stats: I know I have looked at my all time feed stats in the past but since it would take forever to generate and timed out the last time I tried it, I am not sure this is a big loss for me. However, worthy of note is the fact that FeedBurner has languished quite a bit since being purchased by Google and they seem to have rested their laurels after making the Pro features free for everyone. In all honesty, I am quite satisfied with their (now free) service, their uptime record (knock on wood) and their feature set, so I am not as peeved about their lack of updates or lack of new features.

[EDIT] FeedBurner claims the lack of all time feed stats were unintentional and things are or should be back to normal soon. Now we might never know what really happened and whether these apologies are a cause of a knee jerk reaction to all the negative publicity or a real bug. Thanks to the heads up in the comments.

Cinch is a very easy way for a blogger to create interesting Podcasts with no equipment of any kind except for a phone. Follow the instructions below (or as on their website) to test it out quickly for yourself.

• Call (646) 200-0000 from any phone (You have to know the number/callerID of this phone, Skype would probably not work)
• Thats it! BlogTalkRadio puts out a podcast feed with an MP3 at a pre-defined URI. Just visit http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/number_you_called_from   (replace number_you_called_from with your phone number)
• Use some sort of a plugin for WordPress to import the said feed into your blog and you be podcastin’!

The only major drawback I see is the phone number at the end of the RSS URI. Since this would probably be exposed over the web, if I were concerned about my phone number, this method would not work for me. However if you import the RSS feed (and import the MP3 generated), you should be fine.
Thanks to a post from Dave Winer.

WordPress.com as OpenCourseWare: Link to and discussion of using WordPress.com and consequently WordPress, as a platform for low cost, highly searchable and taggable OpenCourseWare type applications. The example blog is about blogs, wikis and such and might be an interesting read by itself. I have personally used the various iteration of educational CMSs such as WebBoard and WebCT and they have left enough to be desired that I have come running back to my beloved WordPress and bbPress to setup private blogs and forums for use by my classmates. Thanksgoes out to the work done by various educators around the world who are making good use of WordPress and thanks to Stephen for the news.

Utterz: is a Web-based service that posts to all of the above, from anywhere, even by phone, whether it’s text, photos, video, voice, or a mash-up of all the above. Same with PCs. You can just e-mail or SMS the posts to Utterz, or make a phone call to leave a voice record. After the content is received, it’s forwarded to the blog or blogs you specify in about 10 minutes. This online tools brings us one step closer to having a personal Twitter. If you setup your own WordPress blog (hosted or on WordPress.com) and use the Prologue theme (new zipped release by popular request, thanks Joseph Scott), you can have many of the flexible posting features of Twitter on your own platform. Since Utterz is a remotely hosted service, I am not sure the benefit of a “personal” Twitter are realized quite as well, but it is definitely a start and provides much broader flexibility and control than Twitter. I am quite hooked on Prologue and have started to use it on wltc.net. I have left registration open for authors on wltc.net for those that are interested (probably a bad idea, time will tell).

Prologue, the WordPress.com theme that mimics Twitter like functionality has undergone a series of updates. The updates are as follows:

• The front page now shows a stream of recent updates instead of one update per user
• Pages now have their own template and look much better
• Avatars are only shown once for sequential posts by the same author (front page and tag pages)
• Post titles are no longer empty, they are generated based on the beginning of each post
• Works out of the box for WordPress.org 2.3.2

Probably the biggest update is the fact that Prologue now works out of the box for WordPress 2.3.2. It didn’t work before because of a function that was used within the author template which wasn’t available in 2.3.2. Because of these updates, Prologue which is now at version 1.2, will have the changes reflected in Subversion (for self hosted WordPress.org blogs) and is available through the Theme selector in WordPress.com

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You:

You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you’ve written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers.

I could not have described this post (on Wired) better. It is a flash animation that follows a blog post as it makes its way through the Interweb. If you ever wondered how all these disparate peices fit into the blogosphere, this is the food for thought.

Netenberg has released version 2.10.4 r12 of their popular one click install package called Fantastico De Luxe. Fantastico De Luxe is the most widely used application installer throughout the webhosting industry. One of the reasons why it is so popular is that it gives users the ability to skip the process of uploading files and configuring databases and instead, replaces the process with a much simpler one step process.

Many WordPress installations have been performed through Fantastico. However, there are a few disadvantages when installing WordPress in this fashion. First, when WordPress releases an update, the folks at Netenberg have to go through the update and add it into the new version of Fantastico. The amount of time this takes can vary, but I believe if the release contains significant security patches, the Netenberg team tries their best to get the update out as soon as possible. Another disadvantage is the time it takes from when the new version of Fastastico is released to when your web host upgrades. Not all web hosts are on the same time frame. But I know that Fantastico does have a central server that dedicated webhosting servers can hook up to in order to pull down the latest upgrades.

At any rate, the new release of Fantastico contains an update script to take your WordPress install from 2.3.1 to 2.3.2. So be sure to check out your own Cpanel to see if the upgrade is available.