Sorry for the little downtime (around 40 minutes), but I updated Typpz blog to WordPress 2.3.2! This update fixes a critical security bug and adds the ability to create a custom db error page that will apear if WordPress cannot connect to you database instead of the classic WordPress db error page. The official announcement from the WordPress developer blog mentions:

“WordPress 2.3.2 is an urgent security release that fixes a bug that can be used to expose your draft posts. 2.3.2 also suppresses some error messages that can give away information about your database table structure and limits and stops some information leaks in the XML-RPC and APP implementations. Get 2.3.2 now to protect your blog from these disclosures.

As a little bonus, 2.3.2 allows you to define a custom DB error page. Place your custom template at wp-content/db-error.php. If WP has a problem connecting to your database, this page will displayed rather than the default error message.”

It is recommended for any WordPress user to upgrade to version 2.3.2! Happy upgrading WordPress fans !

After nine months with this theme, I think its time for a CSS reboot. The new theme will be much simplier than this and much more light which means less javascript, cleaner and minimal look, stylish icons and less time to load. You can see some screenshots in the image above to take a look on how Typpz Blog will look in few days. The theme is customized, widgetized and ready to go, but I have to extremely check the plugins to ensure maximum compatibily before I launch it so I am patient .

Tracking the feedback from our users we decided to add some features on Typpz blog. From now on, under each post (in single post page), there will be a list with related posts to help you navigate through the blog. That helps also SEO optimization. Tags are also added to help you searching and finding the post you look for. Tags are displayed above the related posts section and the links to digg and del.icio.us. As you may have experienced when surfing around a blog, some times you make a mistake when posting a comment. We have the same problem some times, so we added AJAX comment editing which gives you 15 minutes to edit your comment after you post it. Just click the text you posted and edit it! Hope that the changes will help you and will improve your experience!

We made some changes to our database, as our store needed some input fields for orders (for customers to write their name, email, adress and anything they want to appear on the cards they orders). The changes include some new MySQL tables and some php scipting code to support the tables. Our store now is fully functional and in a few days we will be able to accept orders. Another change we made is to out blog. We modified the .htaccess file, so wordpress can build nice pemalinks for the posts. Wordpress is based on php and the permalinks it gives are like this: http://blog.typpz.com/?p=7. With the Apache mod_rewrite modification in the .htaccess file of wordpress, our permalinks now are nicier and look like this: http://blog.typpz.com/year/month/day/post-title which are more user friendly and more robot friendly (for better crawling by search engines). To modify your .htaccess file you should give it a chmod 777 (write and execute permission, so wordpress can change it) with your ftp client (like filezilla) and then change the permalink style via wordpress admin. Do not forget to change the chmod for .htaccess file to 644 for better security after the modificitation.

It is time to tell you something about what we use to create our products (like the cards from our Pet Shop Cards collection above). Our equipment consists of:

• Two Dell workstations powered with Intel Pentium D 3Ghz processors, 2GB RAM, running Windows XP Pro
• One Intel Core 2 Duo MacPro running Mac OS X with 8GB RAM
• One workstation equiped with a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor and 2GB of RAM running Windows XP Pro
• One G3 Mac with 512RAM running MacOS 8.1
• Our server which features a Pentium 4 processor, 2GB RAM, running SuSe Linux 10.2
• 2TB of total storage (multiple internal and external hard drives plugged to our systems).
• For printing we use an Epson Stylus Photo 800 inkjet printer, an HP Laserjet Plus laser printer, a Roland HifiJet 52 for quality CMYK printing (we use Light Magenta and Light Cyan colors as extra colors instead of the Orange and Green which are plotter’s selection). For digital printing, we use Xante Illumina.
• For scanning we use a Linotype Hell Topaz scanner, driven by Linocolor Software, running on the G3 Mac.
• For photocopier we use an Infotec which prints on any type of paper (A4, B3, A3 etc).
• All of our stuff is connected to an 100Mbit LAN via a 3com router and to the broadband Internet (we use a 2Mbit connection) via a Speedtouch 585.
• We also own a Wacom Intuos3 A4 Tablet.
• Our workstations have Eizo ColorEdge CE210W displays.
• For monitor callibration we use Pantone Huey.
• For color control we use Pantone Color Que 2.
• The software we run mainly is Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Macromedia Flash, Macromedia Fireworks, Quark Xpress, Adobe Acrobat and since January Adobe Indesign.