//beconfused

Unfortunately, tagging isn’t ready in WordPress 2.2. The following are the highlights of WordPress 2.2:

• WordPress Widgets allow you to easily rearrange and customize areas of your weblog (usually sidebars) with drag-and-drop simplicity. This functionality was originally available as a plugin Widgets are now included by default in the core code, significantly cleaned up, and enabled for the default themes.
• Full Atom support, including updating our Atom feeds to use the 1.0 standard spec and including an implementation of the Atom Publishing API to complement our XML-RPC interface.
• A new Blogger importer that is able to handle the latest version of Google’s Blogger product and seamlessly import posts and comments without any user interaction beyond entering your login.
• Infinite comment stream, meaning that on your Edit Comments page when you delete or spam a comment using the AJAX links under each comment it will bring in another comment in the background so you always have 20 items on the page. (I know it sounds geeky, but try it!)
• We now protect you from activating a plugin or editing a file that will break your blog.
• Core plugin and filter speed optimizations should make everything feel a bit more snappy and lighter on your server.
• We’ve added a hook for WYSIWYG support in a future version of Safari.

Yay! Okay, I didn’t type the above, you can read more from WordPress.org blog. //beconfused will be down for an upgrade at 2 AM SGT. It would be a quick update, probably 5 minutes of downtime.

Download the new WordPress 2.2 now.

[Just a tiny note: Update is complete and everything's working quite fine.]

Yeah, I just upgraded to WordPress 2.1.3. It’s such a tiring work to again and again. I now really wish for some sort of a one click updater for WordPress that can just magically overwrite all the old files safely. And I’m not the only one requesting for it.

I kinda stayed with WordPress long enough to be familiar with the interface and all. There are still some things that I wish to see implemented:

* Akismet should really have the features in Worst Offenders. It’s much sensible to sort all the multilinks together and give an option to delete them altogether.
* I would appreciate that WordPress Sidebar Widgets is easier to code. Widgets are easy to code but they’re not really simple enough to code. The whole options thing get really messy after a while.
* Tags. I love what Blogger did to have the hint-as-you-type-tags feature. That’s really helpful.

By the way, K2 users should find Fresh Comments 1.2.1 working for sidebar modules, but you would require the latest nightly!

Oh yeah, and I found this Michael Jackson thingy. How did he do the 45 degrees lean forward in the Smooth Criminal stage live! Yes, he has a patent for that.

An update to Fresh Comments widget.

Fresh Comments 1.2.1 Changes

Just one tiny little change only. As pointed out by blogan, Fresh Comments 1.2 does not work with Nybble Lab’s Sidebar Modules (SBM) due to a mistake in the coding. The issue has been rectified.

What is Fresh Comments 1.2.1?

Fresh Comments 1.2.1 is a WordPress widget that displays the latest approved comments submitted by your visitors and also gives you - the owner - better control on how your recent comments are displayed. Go straight to download Fresh Comments.

How to install Fresh Comments?

(Click on the icon to configure Fresh Comments.)

Easy. Just download Fresh Comments 1.2.1 and extract it to your hard disk. Then upload freshcomments.php into your wp-content/plugins folder and then activate the plugin through your admin interface. Finally, check it out in your admin interface at Presentation -> Sidebar Widgets to add or remove Fresh Comments widget by dragging around.

How to configure Fresh Comments?

(Above is the configuration screen of Fresh Comments 1.1. See how Fresh Comments 1.0 look like.)

Here are the configurable options:

• Title - Give the widget a name to be displayed in your blog.
• Before - This is where you can insert HTML before all fresh comments are displayed. Recommended that you put <ul> here.
• After - This is where you can insert HTML after all fresh comments are displayed. Recommended that you put </ul> here.
• No. of comments - Number of comments to be displayed in descending chronological order for your fresh comments section. (Only takes a value of ‘1′ or more.)
• No. of preview words - Displays only the number of words you specify as a comment preview. (Only takes a value of ‘1′ or more.)
• Format - Allows you to specify how you want each line of fresh comment to be generated. You can click on ‘(reset)’ to go back to the default format. Read more about the formatting options below.

How to format Fresh Comments?

• %comment_author%
• %comment_author_url%
• %comment_content%
• %comment_preview% - Displays the first few words of the comments. The number of preview words is specified in the ‘No. of preview words’ option as mentioned above.
• %post_title%
• %comment_permalink% - This displays the URI of the comment in your post.
• %post_permalink% - This displays the URI of your post.

Most of the tags are pretty much self explanatory. To add a tag, just click or highlight within the formatting textbox and then click on the tag you wish to insert.

Below are some examples of formats you can use:

Format:

<li><a href="%comment_permalink%">%comment_author% in %post_title%</a>: %comment_preview%</li>

Format to HTML:

<li><a href="http://beconfused.com/blog/2006/03/22/busy-week/#comment-9812">Mr. Dew in busy//week</a>: Well, it's okay. I don't think I can do much</li>

Displayed in browser:

<li><a href="http://beconfused.com/blog/2006/03/22/busy-week/#comment-9812">Mr. Dew in busy//week</a>: Well, it's okay. I don't think I can do much</li>

Other examples of formats:

<li><a TARGET="_blank" href="%comment_author_url%">%comment_author%</a> in <a href="%comment_permalink%">%post_title%</a>: <a href="%comment_permalink%">%comment_preview% [...]</a></li>

<li><a href="%comment_author_url%">%comment_author%</a> says, <a href="%comment_permalink%">"%comment_preview%..."</a></li>

(Using Fresh Comment widget in your sidebar.)

Additional notes

If there are any things you spot that is not working, do give me a notice and I’ll fix it as soon as possible. I’m not an experience PHP coder so please forgive me if anything goes wrong.

Fresh Comments 1.2.1 is tested on WordPress 2.0.7 and WordPress 2.2.2 except to make it WordPress 2.1 compatible. The browsers tested are Windows Internet Explorer 7.0 and Mozilla Firefox 2.0.

Download it (2.97 KB in ZIP archive, 10.8 KB after extraction)

The source code for Fresh Comments 1.2.1 is distributed under GPL (General Public License), meaning that you can freely modify and distribute this source code.

Please do comment about my work.

WordPress users should upgrade to 2.1.2 as soon as possible.

If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.

Although not all downloads of 2.1.1 were affected, weâ??re declaring the entire version dangerous and have released a new version 2.1.2 that includes minor updates and entirely verified files. We are also taking lots of measures to ensure something like this canâ??t happen again, not the least of which is minutely external verification of the download package so weâ??ll know immediately if something goes wrong for any reason.

Source: WordPress blog

I’ll bring the site down for 5 minutes to upgrade. Seriously, an auto update feature should be implemented. Maybe get a prompt that there is an update you can you just click one button to just update. Your five minutes started one minute ago.

Download WordPress 2.1.2.

[Upgrade completed on 10:10 am.]

It’s been released, all WordPress users should make some effort to get it updated.

Version 2.1.1 includes about 30 bug fixes, mostly minor things around encoding, XML-RPC, the object cache, and HTML code.

You can download WordPress here. WordPress is the software I used for blogging, I used it since version 1.2 I think, it’s improved a lot since then.

It’s really annoying, I receive about 100 spam comments per day and I am not at all proud of it. Something ought to be done. I have Akismet which is a spam filter and to date, it has caught 55,734 spam comments. But I keep going through my moderation list so as to not miss out people’s comments.

A couple of legitimate comments does get caught once in a while. Maybe they should add spam into the school syllabus or something. We have CME in secondary school I remember. It’s Civics and Moral Education. It’s pretty outdated during my time and they spend much of the syllabus trying to tell you what type of festivals the Indians go to then discuss the technology-related issues.

I thought some time might be allocated to discuss about plagiarism, intellectual property, spam, Windows Live Messenger nudges, forwarding emails with curses and stuff. Maybe some internet related issues may be covered at school.

I am always slow in adopting web applications because they’re such a pain to upload and upgrade. It’s not like your usual computer applications where you just click and it’ll install and upgrade; you’ve got to be careful not to overwrite your files when upgrading.

But when WordPress 2.1 is officially released, I upgraded it within an hour. There are some admin interface upgrades, it now has a more Ajaxy interface and seems to load faster than before.

What that makes me really happy is how easy uploading images actually gotten. I organized my images files in /images/2007/01/image.jpg manually in the past. I upload it with an FTP client (Filezilla) and link it manually. The builtin image uploading tool makes blogging so much more enjoyable for me.

The Users page is updated too, it is currently still a little buggy but I can live with it. I can add users easily. It’s very useful for a multiuser web site. The other feature that I really like is how links can now be assigned categories. Categories are not just for posts now.

Version 2.1 also introduce privacy options which would be helpful for people who don’t wish their friends find their blog. It tells the search engine not to index. I don’t really use that feature but it’s still worth a mention.

My only wish is that tags can be supported in WordPress together with categories. Most of my plugins still work in WordPress 2.1.

I don’t face any problems after the upgrade. But I did do my usual back ups before attempting to upgrade, you should too. Now, WordPress 2.1 is powering this blog nicely.

Blog Stats

There are currently 1,137 post and 4,194 comments, contained within 266 categories. Akismet has protected your site from 54,493 spam comments.

Still running well with more than a thousand posts in the database.