Web Talk

A new feature introduced by Wordpress 2.6 is the image caption which automatically adds under every picture in your blog a brief description of your choice. If you read well what I just wrote you should notice the term automatically. This mean that, by default, the aforementioned feature is always on and you don’t have any option to disable it. The code    [ caption ] and [ /caption ] which encloses the IMG, OBJECT or EMBED HTML elements will translate into <div> and </div> CSS attributes to position caption, accordingly. Continue reading »

I know, I know that I have already reviewed WPAU (Wordpress Automatic upgrade) in the past, but you know, I am almost compelled to write about this excellent plugin for Wordpress again. Above all since it is one of the few plugins I really like, care and use, without speaking about the fact that WPAU lets, really lets Web Talk live and survive in this tough Internet world made out of endless updates.  When last year I started looking for a good Content Management System, one of the biggest concerns of mine was to be able to find a software which came with a kind of automatic upgrade. After the bad, really bad upgrade experiences with Mambo and Joomla! I really craved for something easy to use. My only goal, here in the web, is write. I want to focalise myself on writing good reviews and guides. That’s it. That’s why in 2007 I started surfing all of the web looking for something easy to use which let me concentrate on my work. But, with my disbelief, I found out that what I was looking for didn’t exsit. At that point I made one last attempt in Google by typing “automatic upgrade” and after a few pages Wordpress Automatic Upgrade popped out, outstanding with all its wonderful features from the list of results Google gave me. And that’s how I ended up picking Wordpress as my blogging platform. (so, thanks Keith Dsouza, really thanks a lot for creating your wonderful plugin…come on, I know that you read this blog regularly!). Yesterday WPAU has reached its 1.2.0.2 version and a lot of improvements have been made concerning stability, security and bug fixes. But let’s see a brief list of its features.

• Upgrade your Wordpress blog  in a couple of easy steps! No special knowledge is required.
• WPAU is fully compatible with Wordpress 2.6 and up.
• WPAU only lets you upgrade if your WP is out-of-date.
• WPAU now uses Snoopy to download files rather than using regular PHP methods.
• WPAU alerts you when a new WP update is available.
• Automatic Upgrade option will only be visible to Administrators.

Keith Dsouza is also working hard on the next Wordpress Automatic Upgrade (version 1.3) and in his blog he anticipated some of its new thrilling features. Here is a list.

• Better user interface which will let see user see what is going on during the update in real time!
• Ability for users to choose the language of WordPress they want to download from.
• Internationalization support.
• Cleanup of code to make WPAU more faster.

If you want to download Wordpress Automatic Update, click here. If you want to visit the blog of Keith Dsouza, the author of this excellent plugin, here is the link.

3 months right after the birth of Wordpress 2.5 a new version of the famous Content Management System has been released in the wild! As a matter of fact Wordpress, with this new update, has reached version 2.6 increasing the number of its features and improvements. If you are a newbie you will be surprises by Wordpress user-friendly interface and the easiness with whom you will able to install it and start blogging. If you are a seasoned Wordpress’s user, you wouldn’t probability notice any big difference from the previous release but, believe me, there are a lot of improvements and fixes which out-stand for their importance and security value. Here is a quick list:

• Improved support for SSL access to the admin screens.
• Security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions
• When you select a theme, you will now be able to see it live with the changes you made (and with all the content you added) before putting it online.
• “Press This” bookmarklet feature. Thanks to this new feature you will be able to quickly post about the websites you visit while online. (It is just sufficient to drag the “Press This” link into your browser bookmark to activate the function.)
• Wiki tracking for edits. Now Wordpress lets you see who and what changes where made to your posts.
• More support for Avatars.
• Improved plugin management. New “bulk activate” or “bulk deactivate” plugin option.
• Updates to the new jQuery and jQuery UI libraries, updates to the latest TinyMCE editor, improvements to Page and Category management, and general performance enhancements.
• In this version where fixed about 194 bugs!!!

Here is a small video tour of the new Wordpress 2.6. Take  a couple of minutes to watch it. It is worth, believe me!

As you know I am always looking for nice widgets to add to my website which don’t require a lot of work to set them up. Yes I know, I am a bit lazy, but that’s the way I like things. Some days ago I started looking for a widget which could tell my visitors the best articles for the current day. After browsing for a while I found an excellent website offering freeware widgets easy to install. The website is called feedjit.com and with a simple copy-and-past procedure lets you add your website a full set of interesting infos. Here is a list of its widgets:

• Life Traffic Feed: this widget shows how many people are visiting your website, where they come from (thanks to a nice flag of the visitor’s country), which website they arrived from, if any, which page they visited on your website and which external link they clicked to leave your site, if any.
• Live Traffic Map: this widget reminds me of another good one which can be seen on this article of mine. It shows you the last 100 people who visited your website on a small map. If you move your mouse’s pointer on any red point on the map, you will be able to see where your visitors come from (country and city).
• Live Raccomending Reading: this widget suggests other pages on your website your readers may be interested in.
• Live Page Popularity: this widget shows you the most popular pages (usually the first 10 pages of the current day) on your website by analysing your recent traffic.

All widgets are fully customisable. In fact you can decide: text color, background color, border color, heading color and widget’s width.

I strongly recommend this website to those people who want and need simple but effective stat widgets but, at the same time, don’t want to spend too much time to tweak them or understand how they work. In fact with Feedjit.com, all you need to do is to copy a code and past it in your website or blog.

Are you a podcaster releasing tons of podcasts on your blog? If so you may be interested in this nice website letting you create a lot of free podcasts with a nice skin. Blogamp is a web-based application that lets you create your own podcast to put on your blog. Just upload your MP3 file ( which doesn’t have to be bigger than 25MB) on Blogamp’s server and you will get a code to put on your blog right away! Its features include: customise your podcast skin color, track your listenership, add e-commerce and video links, embed or Pop-up player on any site or social network, add your own RSS Feeds. If you want to know more, click on the link to get a full list of Blogamp ’s features.

Have you ever wished to get some business cards to show to your friends or people you come in contact with at work? No, I am not talking about real business cards but electronic cards which, apart from being for free, let you show who you are and other important infos. Retaggr.com lets you have your own private business cards with a few easy steps. The service Retaggr.com offers you goes beyond the simple creation of cards. As a matter of fact, once registered to the website, you will be able to leave your profile card whenever you leave a comment on the internet, show your recent twitter messages, display your online activity, link to your card from anywhere on the web etc. If you are a webmaster instead you can have your personal widget to stick on your Wordpress website, specify content from your site to be shown within Profile Cards, make your content more useful while keeping readers on your site etc. The service is totally  free and it just requires a quick registration.

In order to improve security in your Wordpress blog, the new version of this wonderful Content Management System has seen the birth of a new way of tightening your security by creating a unique and hard to find number when calculating hash value to encrypt password, especially on cookie authentication. This trick highly prevents hackers who use specific software to brute force your admin account. But, where can you find and use this new feature called “the secret key”? Simple, first of all open the Wordpress zipped file or, alternatively, gain access to your blog by using a FTP software. Look for wp-config-sample.php (if you just installed Wordpress) or wp-config.php (if you have a running blog), open it and look for the following piece of code:

// Change SECRET_KEY to a unique phrase. You won’t have to remember it later,
// so make it long and complicated. You can visit https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm
// to get a phrase generated for you, or just make something up.
define(’SECRET_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’); // Change this to a unique phrase.

Now, just change “define(’SECRET_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’)” by writing a long and hard to guess password. I would like you to remember that the longer and “mixed” it is the better your will be protected against malevolt people. But what do I mean when I say “mixed”? When creating a new password you should keep in your mind what specific software used by hackers are and do. They are huge databases trying to fill in your admin form with all kind of words to gain full access to your blog. They also try to combine words, use capital letters and special characters and such. It is evident that the more messed-up a password is, the better. To give you an example you SHOULD NOT USE a password like this: johnthebest198606. You SHOULD USE instead a password such: RiGhTPaSs$56*8@2Ok. This lessen the chance that some program may, even by change, guess your password. In case you are not creative enough, you can use this simple Web Tool, directly provided by Wordpress that makes the hard job for you, namely find out a very hard-to-guess password. Here is the link.

The beginning of this story started some weeks ago when I decided to hire a web designer in order to have my Wordpress theme restyled. Oh boy! It has never been so difficult for me to spend some of my money. As a matter of fact every time I asked for a quotation or I looked interesting in a web designer, I just got uninterested replies from the other side. Maybe, the turn off side was my limited budget which made my offert very unappealing. I am just a guy running a personal blog. I am not part of a big company which has bunch of money to spend without a second thought, so I can not afford to spend thousands of dollars. In the end it was just a matter of money, nothing more nothing less. Anyway, every time I got a quotation I was very crestfallen. If you think to have your Wordpress theme re-made, it is right for you to know that designers may ask you a lot of money, in the order of thousands of dollars. Usually prices start from 1.200 - 1.500 USD. You won’t get anything less. This is not a general rule. In fact I also got cheap quotations, but the web companies involved had a very low profile meaning that, if you looked at their portfolio, they didn’t perform very impressive artworks. At a certain point I was really in despair. I contacted more than 20 Wordpress designers, but the results were really frustrating. They asked too much money, they were not very good at what they did or they were not interested in my small budget. Luckily for me, just when I thought that I could not have any chance to have my theme reinvigorate, I got into communication with Rachel, web designer and owner of Cre8d-design.com. First of all, I have to say that before knowing her I got impressed by its company portfolio. If you want to know what I am talking about visit this page to have an idea. Rachel was very patience, calm and listening and understood my needs and what I was looking for, tailoring an offer just made for my blog and my limited budget. In the end I hired her. The first thing she did was to put me into communication with her excellent coworker Stephen Merriman who promptly fixed some incompatibility issues with my theme and the new Wordpress 2.5.1. After that, she started pouring some good ideas in my head and, after mixing everything up, she made me understood what kind of design I was looking for. The process was rather simple. Every time she modified my theme she sent me a snapshot of it. At that point I indicated what changes I wanted, she made them throughly and a new snapshot was sent. The whole process was performed in a special environment called Basecamp, an account where I could log in whenever I wanted to see the progress of the work and communicate with the team. It took just a couple of days to have my brand new Wordpress theme re-designed! The coding part instead was reserved to Stephen Merriman who, I have to say, did a very good job! A special thank to Rachel Cunliffe and Stephen Merriman who help me make this blog more gorgeous than ever! If you want to hire them, click here!

But, in which way this team of gorgeous geeks can help you? Here is a comprehensive list of what they can do. Continue reading »