So I bought an iPhone 3G. I have installed the WordPress app from the app store, so I am writing my first post straight from my iPhone alongside with some screenshots (you can take screenshots on your iPhone by pressing the home and sleep/wake button). I will post a review for the iPhone and for WordPress app soon. The screenshots are from Big Oven iphone app (free app with lot of recipes), iphone ipod playing Atmos, MacBreak weekly podcast and my home screen’s second tab with my installed app (all of them are free).

Every blog uses rss syndication, which means that it publishes a feed that can be “grubbed” by everyone (human or aggregator). In simple words, the feed is your blog’s content, without the CSS and the style. Readers can read your posts without visiting your blog, by using feed readers (like Google Reader) or by visiting websites that aggregate blog content (like technorati). whether we need blog search engines like technorati is another issue, that will be discussed in another post.

Most blog platforms (like WordPress or Blogger) publish feed for your blog by default. Although the built-in solutions work fine, they do not offer many options for customising your feed. There free solutions though, that publish a feed for your blog and offer many customising options. The most used one is Feedburner. After being bought by Google, Feedburner offers all services for free. You can add your logo on your feed, add links to social sites like digg, add a creative commons license or even advertisement.

Many users prefer to read blog content via feed readers, so it is better to publish full articles to your feed and not just the excerpts. Putting your logo on your feed makes it more professional looking. Remember to double-check your posts before clicking the “publish” button, because most times feeds are being updated really fast and you do not want your post to appear to all those aggregators with mistakes or wrong images!

Solutions like Feedburner, ping automatically the most common used blog indexes. Publishing a feed though, does not mean that you ping search engines too. Using xml sitemaps is the best way for doing so. Add your feed to as many blog indexes as you can (many indexes like technorati find blogs with their own crawler).

Last but not least is the way you offer your feed through your blog. Up-to-date browsers like Firefox 2, Safari 3 and IE7 show the feed icon when a site uses syndication. Putting a feed icon somewhere in your blog is a nice way though to inform readers about your feed. For compatibility with older browsers and text-only browsers (yeah there are some text-only browsers for Linux) put also a “Subscribe to my Feed” link. Using Feedburner for feed publishing will give you a feed-url like http://feeds.feedburner.com/name-you-choose, but if you have access to your server’s DNS settings, you can publish your feed via Feedburner, using a url in this form: http://yourdomain.com/feed.

Many bloggers out there (including me) use the JAW Popular Posts widget plugin, that displays the most popular post somewhere in the sidebar. This widget requires Popularity Contest plugin in order to run. The problem is that Popularity Contest does not run on WordPress 2.5 (it causes a fatal error when activated). The fix is very easy (you just need to edit one file).

If you cannot wait until Alex King releases the next version of the plugin, you just have to download the latest version (1.3b3) of the plugin and

• open the popularity-contest.php file with your favorite editor
• find line 59 and replace

  require('../../wp-blog-header.php');
  

  with

  require('../wp-blog-header.php');
  

• upload the file to wp-content/plugins/popularity-contest (or where the plugin files are located)
• activate the plugin

If you are installing Popularity Contest for the first time on a WordPress 2.5 installation, you have to create some database tables first. Extended instructions on how to manage it can be found here.

It has been about two weeks since I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5. The new version (which was delayed for about one week) brings many changes, most of them in the backend (administration panel). These changes, which change the blogger’s experience when he admins his blog, offer a faster, and more organized admin panel. WordPress 2.5 could have been released as version 3.0 for sure.

The new admin panel is more friendly than the old one (as soon as you get used to it). Anything that is about the frontend of your blog (write, manage, comments, design) is on the upper left corner, and anything that has to do with the backend (settings, plugins, users) is on the upper right.

The new dashboard is well organised. Page elements are divided into small “widgets”, which inform you about incoming links, recent comments, WordPress news feed and recommended plugins. AJAX is used in every edge of the new dashboard, making comments’ moderation, editing and saving faster and more entertaining.

The WYSIWYG editor, Tiny MCE 3.0 offers permalink editing option and autosave seems to work nicer. There is no “Save & continue” editing button in the new editor. This button is divided to: “Save” button and “Publish” button, which makes the operation cleaner. Last but not least is the “Toggle Full Screen” button of the new editor, which lets you write your post in full screen mode, like editing a document in MS Word. Photo and media can be added easier and photo galleries can now be created without using external plugins.

The biggest surprise though comes when you access the plugins page in the new WordPress 2.5. Plugins can now be automatically updated with a single click, without using FTP access to your server. You just provide the FTP access information (username, password) to your WordPress installation and if a plugin is outdated, you click “Upgrade automatically” and WordPress automatically replaces the older version with the newer one.

WP 2.5 offers also many security enhancements (Technorati will stop crawling WP blogs that use WP 2.3.2 or older). If you want to further secure your blog, you can edit your wp-confing.php file and add one more constant called SECRET_KEY and use the unique key that Wordress.org will provide to you. More info on that here. It is also recommended to upgrade to version 2.5.1 as it fixes a critical security issue, especially if you use the open registration mode in your blog.

In general WordPress 2.5 is a milestone, a great upgrade, which makes blog’s administration much easier and faster as long as you get used to it. Remember to check plugins and themes compatibility before upgrading! Simpla widgetized theme works great with WP 2.5

WordPress 2.4 is scheduled to be released on 24th of January! The changes in this version will be many and most of them on the backend (admin interface). The new interface seems to be much faster and uses much AJAX and caching! I think that its more easy-to-use as long as bloggers get used to it. If you want to take a preview on the new interface you can see the online demo here.

This demo includes all the core features and aesthetic changes of the new interface! Maybe there will be a beta or release-candidate version of WordPress 2.4 and bloggers could see it in action before 24th of January!

Happy New Year to everyone

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 !

As you may have noticed, I have changed the Typpz Blog theme. Now I use Simpla theme. I choosed it because its light, clean with pal colors and meets my needs. The drawback of this theme is that it does not support sidebar widgets which means that it does not take advantage of WordPress 2.3 or older versions with the widget plugin installed. Although it is very easy to make it support widgets (widgetize it) and use it as every up-to-date WordPress theme. Lets see how (if you dont like the manual way you can download Simpla Theme widgetized at the end of this post).

Widgetizing the sidebar

Open the sidebar.php file located in simpla theme folder with you favorite editor on in WordPress admin panel, delete everything it has and paste the following code:

<div id="sidebar">
<ul>
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>
  <li id="pages">
    <h2>Pages</h2>
    <ul>
      <li><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/">Home</a></li>
      <?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?>
    </ul>
  </li>
  <li id="categories">
    <h2>Categories</h2>
    <ul>
    <?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name&optioncount=1&hierarchical=0'); ?>
    </ul>
  </li>
  <li id="links">
    <ul>
    <?php get_links_list(); ?>
    </ul>
  </li>
<?php endif; ?>
</ul>
</div>

Save sidebar.php and then create a new file, name it functions.php and paste the following code (be carefull, functions.php should contain only the code below):

<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
  register_sidebar();
?>

Your theme is now widgetized which means that in your WordPress admin panel, in presentation tab you can drag & drop widgets in your sidebar.
Widgetizing the sidebar caused a CSS probem with the doted lines used in the sidebar sections (there is an extra nested <ul>). You can easily fix it by modifying the following code in style.css file just after the #sidebar rules: Find the lines

#sidebar ul li{
    border-bottom:1px dotted #ddd;
    margin-bottom:0.3em;
    padding:0.3em;
}

and change them to:

#sidebar ul li{
  margin-bottom:0.3em;
  padding:0.3em;
}
#sidebar ul ul li{
  border-bottom:1px dotted #ddd;
}

Your theme is now ready to run and use every of the WordPress 2.3 features. I do not like the page titles used by Simpla (Typpz Blog>>Blog Archives>>Post Name). I want just the post name. To do that you have to open the header.php file, find the line with the following code:

<title>
<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?>
</title>

and change it into:

<title><?php if(is_home()) {
echo bloginfo('name'); } else { wp_title(''); } ?></title>

Adding a Header Image

To add a header image (like Typpz.com blog here) instead of the blog title, open header.php file, find the <div=header> section and change the code in it to:

<h1><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/"><img src="URL" alt="logo" border="0" /></a></h1>
<p class="description"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></p>

where URL put the location of your header image!

Other fixes and addons

If you write long posts you probably need a “goto top” button at the end of your pages. Open index.php file, find the line <?php endif; ?> and paste the following just below that line:

<p align="right">
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>/#">TOP</a>
</p>

As I have posted you can display the WordPress tags under each post.

Download simpla theme widgetized! Simpla is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, which means that you can use Simpla widgetized for free and just give a link back to Phu and me !
After you download the theme, you’ll need to extract it to your /wp-content/themes/ directory. Then log into WP and activate the theme from within your presentation panel. Both Simpla and Simpla Widgetized use valid XHTML and CSS!

Download Simpla Widgetized Theme

Many users have been using the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin in their WordPress installation to have tag management in WordPress versions before the latest release 2.3. The problem is that version 2.3 does not support the UTW tags. There is an option though to import UTW tags in the built in tag system. Remember to import tags in parts of 1500 tags (if you have more than 5000 tags). After importing the tags you can add the tag cloud widget in your sidebar.

If you want to embed the tags in your theme, you need to modify index.php and single.php. Just copy the following code

<?php the_tags(‘title’, ‘separator’, ‘end’); ?>

and paste it under the <?php the_content(); ?>. Index.php is the main page of your blog. Modify single.php if you want tags to appear also when viewing single post pages. Where title, write what you want to appear before tags (in my blog that is Tags:), where separator write what you want between tags (here it is “,”) and where end write what you want to appear after tags (I’ve left it blank as I do not want a word after my tags).

WordPress 2.3 is out for a while. For the past 4 months I have been using WordPress 2.1.3 for Typpz Blog. After extended back-ups (database export, contenet files etc) and plug-in deactivation, I updated the blog to WordPress 2.3.1! All plug-ins worked after reactivation, except the post listing plugin which is listed in the WordPress site as non-compatible with the latest version of the blogging platform and the ultimate tag warrior which in not needed as the new WordPress comes with built-in tag support. Tags were not imported as they should from Ultimate tag warrior, so I have to tag my posts again.

I have to say that the blog now corresponds much faster. I also liked the update notifications for new versions of the installed plugins. I recommend to everyone to upgrade to WordPress 2.3. Remember before upgrading: Backup, Backup, Backup (few clicks can save your blog in case something goes the wrong ).

During the previous week, the new version of WordPress (2.3) was released to public. The new version provides some great features to bloggers, like tag support and update notifications. Tag support is a great add-on (which was already used with the appropriate plug-in) that helps users and web spiders-crawlers to navigate through your blog more smoothly and easily. Update notifications is the other most expected feature. One-click updates are the dream of anyone using WordPress. That means probably end of database back-up and ftp deletes and uploads any time a new version of WordPress is released. Taking back-ups though should be in your timetable regularly .

The new version supports sidebar widgets by default. The problem is that many users used themes that need some plugins installed to operate properly, which means that if these plugins are not working with version 2.3 they will not be able to upgrade until a new version of the confusing plugin is released. For example, the theme I use, needs the sidebar listing plugin which does not support version 2.3 of WordPress, so I still use the previous version of the platform.

For sure WordPress 2.3 is a recommended update for everyone that is able to upgrade, but remember to check your stuff before you do (themes, plugins etc) and also pay attention to the official extended instructions for backing up your database and upgrading. No one wants to lose data because of luck of attention to the instructions! If you are using WordPress 2.3 or have tested it, feel free to post a comment and tell your opinion about it.