Word of the new release has already started spreading, but most people will find out about it when they log into WordPress and it tells them there’s a new version. I’ve uploaded two blogs using the in-built upgrade mechanism and everything was smooth, thought I had to restart the process a couple of times till it completed. Presumably users on faster servers won’t have the same issue.

Most of the changes are a step in the right direction I think, faster admin UI and better handling of widgets are among those. I’m a bit unsure about the theme uploader/upgrader as I think some people may lose theme customisations this way and I don’t think I like the new plugin interface, but all in all I’ve been looking forward to this drop.

One interesting thing to report. The WordPress admin interface was broken with Firefox 3.5b99, but this new drop of WordPress has resolved that issue because of an upgrade in the Javascript components used by the admin interface. So go ahead and upgrade to the latest versions of stuff, things seem to be working nicely!

(P.S. I’ve noticed that the upgrade has disabled one of my plugins that provided paged comments, but seeing that this is now a built-in feature of WordPress, I was quite happy for it to deactivate it)

From that point forth, I decided to start up a number of different blogs each focused on a particular niche. It means that each blog only gets a few posts a week, but that’s probably a good thing, as content stays on the front page for longer (lower churn). Here are some of my blogs in case you’re looking for something to read:

• MBA Geek: I try to keep my pure business posts here. Based on my current employment in the Isle of Man I’m doing more “enabling” work than actual technology, so there’s been some interesting things to post about.
• A bit of this and a bit of that: My personal blog, which contains a real variety of stuff, mostly personal and my family, my diet, holidays and lots more
• The Joke Shop: Pretty much all my jokes go here. It’s pretty busy I must say
• WordPress Guru: My WordPress exploits go mostly here, though I do put some more mainstream ones on this one. Might turn this into a WordPress consultancy one day .. who knows!
• AskOwen: If someone asks me a technical question, say about automated OS recovery, then I use it for a way to store the question and it’s answer.

I have another couple of blogs but those are the main ones. But the net effect is that taking those topics out has allowed this blog to mature into something that’s a bit more me. Ok, it’s still very varied and rich, but hopefully it’s a bit more consistent. What do you think? Do you enjoy reading it?

Before my experience, I wouldn’t have recommended installing caching plugins unless you’re receiving substantial traffic (not that I don’t like plugins), but I’m currently rolling it out to any blogs I have that get even 100 page hits a day (just rolled it out to AskOwen). It’s not like I’m listing the list of best diet pills and expecting 1000s of page hits an hour, but I do get a lot of traffic from bots trying to leave spam on the site. Most of those hits tend to be on the home page, so even if a few of those get served out of a cache, it still have a knock-on effect on browsing experience.

My three words to success this week are going to have to be “cache .. cache .. cache”

Arthur’s still 2, but he soon will be old enough for me to buy some for him (read ME). keke

This is something I’ve really needed. I hate it when I remember that someone posted something a few days earlier, but I can’t remember who and just can’t find it. With over 300 blogs in my reader list it’s nigh impossible to trawl through them all and find the post I’m after.

It seems like they have good response from the industry for this new feature, though some blogs ask for further features. One thing I’m sure about though, is that Google will continue innovating this product and we’ll see better things added on in the future.

Off to migrate my OPML and move it into the Cloud …

The site also allows you to plan your trip, by creating an online itinerary and adding different destinations to it. You do this as you browse through the site reading about each place. Once you’ve created a perfect holiday you can then share it with other readers, again, more user-generated content.

Finally, the site also allows travelers to create their own travel blog. This can be a great way to capture your experiences in one place, together with pictures and video and anything else you want to add. Your experiences then help inform future travelers and help them plan their travel.

Check it out.

The article points out that the site owners claim this is mainly down to the human element, that they have encouraged and trained their citizens to report spam as soon as it happens and deal with it swiftly and effectively. I’m a bit more cyncal than that and believe it’s down to the policy and technology.

• WordPress.com have a strict policy that restricts their bloggers from monetising their blog. This cause shocks in the PayPerPost community some time back, where PayPerPost blogs were kicked out for contravening WordPress’ TOS. It’s a harsh rule, but it eventually boils down to a lack of incentive for people to set up splogs on WordPress.com. If there’s no financial incentive in doing this, nobody will bother.
• One word: Askimet. Askimet impresses me every single day. It blocks around 500 spam messages a day across my blogs (and increasing daily) without batting an eyelid. Askimet was one of the main reasons I switched to WordPress and WordPress.com uses it as an integral part of their service, keeping their blog clean from spam.

If you want more details, head down to Jonathan’s post

There’s some touches to the site that stand out as being particulaly cool. I like the random quote that appears at the top of every page and the really cool “Share This” button which switches to a page where you can select a whole bunch of social networks you can share the link with. And the live Search is a really cool plugin too.

Good work, my friend, it’s look great. Oh .. and I love that you’ve implemented DoFollow

• 101 Shareware and Freeware programs that every nerd needs
• Metasploit – For all your security testing
• Legal Andrew does blogtipping – I’ll try this sometime
• The Cat-eating Monkey gets brought to justice – finally!
• Top 100 April Fool Hoaxes
• Btrieve Time Machine – Wow .. remember Btrieve? It’s been around 25 years!
• Strategic Planning Blog – Must keep an eye on this

Enjoy!

So, here’s what I’ve done. The blog now run these plugins to make things more interesting:

• Gravatars2 is a plugin that adds Gravatars (Globally Recognised Avatars) to each comment. You can either get your own from the Gravatar website, but if you don’t have one, it automatically assigns you one from pool of around 100 images. So, you may end up being Homer Simpson today, or even an anime character!
• Brian’s Latest Comments is producing the “Latest Comments” list that is at the top of my SideBar. This points people at the recent conversations happening on the blog and increases their net worth
• DoFollow is a plugin that removes the evil NoFollow from WordPress‘ comments. Sometime back, this tag had been introduced by search engines to try and minimise comment spam but the truth is .. well it hasn’t. This plugin makes sure that people who comment get a link back to their site, both for people to click on and follow, and also for search engines to index. I would recommend this to anyone who encourages commenting on their blog.

Of course, there’s no way I could do all this without some proper spam filtering, and Askimet is still up there as one of my must-have plugins that everyone should turn on. I’ve added a little image on the sidebar that shows exactly how many spam comments it has caught so far. Impressive huh?