Category — blogging

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[Update:As of December 14, 2008, the final release of WordPress 2007 is now out.]

I happily installed Wordpress 2.7 RC 1 on my four Wordpress sites yesterday. A ‘Holy Grail’ feature I have wanted since I started using Wordpress a few years ago is finally here – core auto-upgrading (see below). And it works - Yippee!

For a good summary and description of what’s in WordPress 2.7 I suggest listening to Episode 48 of the Wordpress Podcast where (starting at time index 39:13) core developer, Mark Jaquith, walks through the new Wordpress features.

Upgrade Automatically

For years, every time a new WordPress version came out, I always sighed. It has been such a pain to update. I’d frequently let many versions slip by without installing them.

Yesterday I spent the entire afternoon upgrading my four WordPress installs from v. 2.5 to v. 2.7. No longer!! Upgrading the core now takes just seconds. To do an upgrade all you need to do is select “Upgrade” from the “Tools” menu (see picture below), then click on the “Upgrade Automatically” button:

CONTINUE READING →

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For weeks now I have had a persistent problem with my wishhh.com service. It was taking an inordinate amount of time to connect to the service (sometimes as much as 2 minutes or more). After ruling out every possible issue, I decided to upgrade my Apache server to the latest release (version 2.2.10). I’m delighted that the upgrade solved my problem.

I had installed Apache server three years also and made only a few changes to its configuration files since. Being a bit rusty, I searched for an online ‘how-to’ upgrade guide. The only guide I found was Evaria.com’s upgrade tutorial here. It was helpful but a little bit for my tastes. I followed that tutorial and took notes along the way. This post fleshes out the details a bit further.

Note: This post describes my upgrade from Apache version 2.0.54 to the latest version 2.2.10 (as of December 1, 2008). If you are upgrading from a different version, you’ll need to make adjustments to the instructions below to reflect your specific circumstance. If needed, you can view my server specs at the end of this post for.

Before you Begin

• Gather Your Info: Information on the latest version of Apache HTTP Server can be found  here. 
• Download the Package: Before de-installing your current version, be sure have the latest version at the ready. You can download it from one of the mirror sites linked into here.  I downloaded this ‘Win32 Binary without crypto (no mod_ssl)’ .msi installation file was: 

        apache_2.2.10-win32-x86-no_ssl.msi
  

• Upgrade Info: Basic upgrade information can be found here. Unfortunately, I could not find step-by-step upgrade instructions on the apache.org site -  hence this post.

CONTINUE READING →

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Following my recent post about the Windows Live Writer (WLW) technical preview, the WLW team has responded to several of my concerns in this thread on the Windows Live Writer (Beta) forum.

Two of my concerns related to how the WLW cropping tool works and how the the watermarking functionality works.  This post demonstrates what I want/need out of a cropping/watermarking tool compared what the cropping/watermarking functionality in the latest WLW tech preview build provides.

The three pictures below show the differences between the source picture, what I want/need, and what the WLW Cropping tool gives me.

This picture is used in my So You Think You Can Dance (Season 4 - Top 20) post.

1. Source Picture

The source picture was taken with my Canon  Powershot SD 1000 camera from my Dell W2200HD Plasma TV. The larger image (click on left thumbnail above to view the source) is 2592 x 1944 pixels and 1.8 MB in size– way too large for a blog.

CONTINUE READING →

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I’ve been using Windows Live Writer (WLW) since early April 2008 (see post here). For the most part I’ve been delighted with it.

[June 26 2008 Update: I de-installed the technical preview and reverted back to the older WLW release. The "Open Blog Posts Much Slower" Wordpress bug was driving me to distraction.]

A new (unnumbered?) WLW ‘technical preview” version came out recently (download here - see details here). I downloaded it and have been using it for a couple days. Unfortunately, this version has solved a few  problems and introduced new one’s. I describe the benefits and problems below along with my wishlist  for a few new functions.

New Technical Preview Benefits

Refresh Theme Option is Faster: This is not exactly something I need to do often but when I use the View/Refresh Theme function, it is faster than before and it doesn’t stop to ask me the annoying question (can it make a temporary post?) that it used to ask.

Structured HTML Formatting: When you look at the HTML source code WLW ads structures to it. This is terrific. It makes it much easier to find my way around and edit the underlying code. Note: There is also a handy new ‘Source’ access tab along the bottom.

Other: There are new image border styles,  but so far I haven’t used them. There is a built in word counter (you need to turn it on in the options – more details are here).

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For months now, I have been hearing good things about the offline blogging tool Windows Live Writer (download). Two weeks ago I was listening to Leo Laporte and Paul Thurrott’s most recent Windows Weekly podcast (No. 53) were they once again were singing its praises. Since ‘The Daleisphere‘ just set sail, I decided to give it a whirl with my new blog.

After two weeks, I’m sold! Compared to the WordPress editor, this is one fantastic piece of kit.

In this post I describe some of the key benefits that convinced me to switch, include links to online demos, describe the WLW add-ins I’ve found useful so far and list some areas that need improvement.

The Good:

Untethered Blogging: WLW has untethered me from the net. Previously I had used the WordPress editor and/or the WYSI plugin-editor exclusively. This meant I needed to be online to write posts. Now I can write my from anywhere, on any computer, at any time, whether online or off. So far I’ve written most of my Daleisphere posts on a lazy-boy recliner in front of the TV!

CONTINUE READING →

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Until two days ago, I was blissfully unaware of the fact that Google had purchased Feedburner back on June 3, 2007 and in the process made two of its key services, FeedBurner Stats Pro and MyBrand, available to bloggers for free (see announcement).

FeedBurner Stats Pro provides bloggers with detailed statistics about how often their RSS feeds are being used, which posts are being read/accessed the most, what feed readers are being used etc.

MyBrand allows the blogger to use a blog-branded RSS feed URL (in my case http://feeds.daleisphere.com/thedaleisphere) rather than a Feedburner-branded URL (eg: http://feeds.feedburner.com/thedaleisphere even as Feedburner continues to manage the feeds in the background. The obvious advantage of MyBrand, aside from the branding aspect, is that bloggers are no longer locked into Feedburner and can seamlessly transition their feeds to a competitive service without requiring their readers to update their feeds. (More details here)

CONTINUE READING →

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Wordpress 2.5 rc 1 was released on March 18. I am using my new blog, The Daleisphere, as a Wordpress 2.5 testing ground before rolling it out to my other video game law and imedia law blogs.

[March 29 Update: The Final 2.5 Release is now available for download here]

So far I’m impressed!

There has been some controversy over the new design. They’ve moved some commands/menus around, removed some superfluous options, updated the dashboard and a few other odds and sods. So far I think it is intuitive, elegant, attractive and easy to use. Heck, its downright purdy! Installation was easy. All of my plugins and themes but one (see below) work fine. In the five days I’ve used it I haven’t experienced a single glitch.

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So, why The new blog?

I’ve been a blogger for years now. My video game law and imedia law blogs were created to promote my legal practice. Occasionally I’d sneak in posts like this one, or this one, or this one, that were decidedly not about law at all.

As I drilled down into my Google Analytics stats, I noticed that the popular posts were frequently the ’snuck in’, non-legal, posts. So, I thought, why not create a blog just for those kinds of posts?  And The Daleisphere was born.

Focus & Approach

New authors and playwrights are taught to write about what they know. The Daleisphere will be about what I know - topics within the ’sphere’ of ‘Dales’ interests and influence (see below), but decidedly outside of the topics covered in my professional blogs.

CONTINUE READING →

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