Automattic Releases WordPress iPhone App
Today Atomatic released version 1.0 of their WordPress iPhone application. The app works really well and I’m actually using to right now to write this.
It doesn’t have many features other then being able to create posts and save them locally as drafts on the iPhone, edit posts, and change post satuses but it works well.
I haven’t had any buggy issues and have easily set it up both with this blog and CyberSurge (by the way, I would have linked to CyberSurge but there is no way to put links in posts with the app, check the update below).
The only other feature I’d like to see added (other then the linking) is the ability to moderate cooments. To be able to mark a comment as spam or even reply to comments from within the app would be great and theoretically could easily be added, but we’ll have to wait and see what Automattic decides to do to the app in the future.
Update: I updated the post from my computer to add links and images, the app doesn’t exactly make it easy to add images and it’s impossible to add links.
Technorati Will No Longer Index Vulnerable WordPress Blogs
So Technorati has decided to no longer index blogs that may be affected by a security issue in WordPress before version 2.3.3. Now WordPress has already reached version 2.5 but I’m not exactly sure how to feel about this.
On one hand I’m glad someone is standing up and telling the community that they really need to stay up to date or bad things may happen but at the same time I feel like it isn’t an indexers job to tell me that my blog needs to be up to date.
For a while this blog wasn’t up to date, mostly because I had almost abandoned it due to some personal reasons combined with becoming incredibly busy on my other blogs, but that’s a whole other issue entirely. I would probably be very upset if Technorati quit indexing this blog, even if it wasn’t up to date.
But at the same time I also think that it is Technorati’s job to point you towards quality blogs, and if these blogs aren’t quality (not staying up to date may be a symptom of not being of quality) then I don’t want Technorati to point to them.
Overall I think that this is probably good but I still wonder about those who don’t really know how to upgrade WordPress because someone else installed it for them originially, is the installer going to contact them and tell them that they need to upgrade? Probably not, so I guess the solution to this whole problem is, If you know how to update WordPress, stay up to date, and if you don’t find someone who does and have them help you.
WordPress’s New Admin Theme
I recently updated to WordPress 2.5 on both of my blogs and although I love WordPress, I hate the new version 2.5 admin panel, not only does it seem extremely difficult to really get anything done, I have a hell of a time finding things that I’ve been using in WordPress for the past year.
This could just be me complaining for complaining sake but I hate the new “write new post” page. I really liked that all of the options for the post were along the right side of the page, but now there is about 1/4 of the page that is just white space and most of the options that used to be along the right side have moved below the text box, which might just be the worst place for them to be placed.
I hope the developers decide to get their act together and find somebody else to do the design of the admin panel because this just isn’t going to work.
Gravatar Acquired by Automattic
Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar) is an extremely popular service which allows its users to have an avatar to use on my websites (mostly just a picture next to your comment on blogs). Gravatar was hit by some scaling issues and had to shut down for a short time a while back, but Automattic, the creators of WordPress have decided to take over Gravatar.
Automattic has already shown their skill at scaling with WordPress and Akismet and have already started improving Gravatar.They have moved the Gravatar service to WordPress.com’s infrastructure and have sped up avatar serving by 3x.
I don’t currently use Gravatar but if Automattic improves it like I think they will I will have to reconsider it. I could actually see Gravatar integration into WordPress in the future, which would be pretty amazing (and extremely interesting at the same time).
WordPress 2.3 Finally Released
It was quite a few hours after I posted yesterday that WordPress finally released version 2.3 of its wonderful blogging software that I believe EVERYONE should be using.
I wanted to mention a few things that I didn’t in the last post about this update.
- Canonical URLs - “which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more.” (WordPress Blog) One of the more important features that I haven’t heard too much about, it seems that tagging has really dominated the conversations I’ve had with others about WordPress 2.3.
- Pending review - Allows writers on multi-author blogs to submit their post for review by an administrator or an editor.
- Advanced WYSIWYG - I may be the only one out there that isn’t using a desktop blog editor. I just feel that the WordPress admin panel is good enough for me, now WordPress is adding some enhancements to the editor which will make some things a lot easier to do while writing up posts.
There were 351 tickets in Trac closed with this release and over 100 people worked on the code. I think that WordPress is doing a wonderful job and continues to improve on an already amazing platform.
You can download the most recent version of WordPress here.