Pardon me for the off-topic discussion here, but I had to share my excitement over these amazing new stylish laptop cases that are just for women!! I’m not what you’d call a total fashionista by any means – but it sure has been a pain that all of the options for laptop carrying cases were rather masculine, boring and definately not trendy or stylish.

Those days are over!

A company called Mobile Edge has created a line of “designer elegant computer carrying cases that address a woman’s needs. Designed by women for women, these fashionable bags will protect and carry your computer in style.” And they’re not kidding – take a look at some of these beauties:

Mobile Edge The Milano – Large

Mobile Edge Suede Computer Tote

“Superior SafetyCell™ computer protection compartment , dedicated cell phone pocket and zippered interior pocket , detachable cosmetics/accessory pouch, stylish fittings and self-healing zippers, and EZ-Access ticket pocket. Holds notebooks with up to 15″ screens”

Mobile Edge Komen Paris Backpack

“This is a truly beautiful and comfortable backpack with computer protection, multiple pockets for organization and it supports a great cause!” 10% of sale is donated to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. It’s got dedicated safety cell computer protection, a seperate section for files, books, and magazines, AND a removable accessories/cosmetics pouch.

Mobile Edge Madison Tote

“This stylish design will never be mistaken for a “computer case”! The Mobile Edge designers have outdone themselves by creating an exterior that is a true classic while creating an interior that is pure funtion.” Detachable cosmetics/accessory pouch, zippered interior pocket, stylish fittings and self-healing zippers, durable metal feet, and of course a Dedicated Superior SafetyCell™ computer protection compartment make this tote unbeatable.

You can find Mobile Edge Women’s Laptop Bags at discounted prices over at eBags.com (where they even have user reviews for some of the bags, all of which have been rated very highly). On top of that, right now they’re having some sales – choose the promotion that provides the better all around deal for you

• $20 OFF $75 Handbag Purchases at eBags.com
• 10% OFF Plus Free Shipping on all Orders at eBags.com

I’m so psyched – and all of these wonderful bags have lifetime warranties, and ship for free (with a 60 day return policy and FREE return shipping costs, too if you order from eBags – talk about awesome customer service)!!

I’m ordering one of each so I can figure out which one I like the best, looks the most ‘me’ when I see it in person, and is the most comfortable, and then I’m returning the rest. Oh, who am I kidding – I’ll probably keep at least two. Like many other women, I’ve a bit of a purse fetish. A woman’s gotta have options after all (some days I might want to use a gorgeous backpack, others days a stylish over the shoulder tote). OK, so I’ll keep 2 and return the other. Gotta love shopping from home!!

Consider this an official request — I want to hear from WordPress 2.0 users about what your experiences have been (positive and/or negative), whether you’re glad you made the switch from 1.5 (or another blogging platform), if you are having problems then what kind, etc

BTW – I’ve heard reports of people having problems with permalinks and trackbacks, but haven’t experienced them myself on a new (i.e., not upgraded) install of WordPress 2.0 (and I’m using custom permalinks w/o problems). Could someone who IS having problems with these areas please clarify what the issue is?

Either email me at howtoblog (at) gmail.com or, preferedly, comment on this post. Thanks in advance, faithful readers. I appreciate your input!

In preparation for doing my first upgrade of an existing WP 1.5 site, I did some research first to try to ensure the process went as smoothly as possible (when I begin it – which I still haven’t gotten to yet). I almost cringe in writing this, because I truly love WordPress and everything the team has done to provide such a wonderful free blogging tool for all of us. But the truth is that I came across a number of posts hi-lighting problems people have already discovered in 2.0 and/or reasons why they don’t feel upgrading to 2.0 is worth bothering, and I’d be remiss in not reporting that.

I know that those of us who want to be on the bleeding edge will disregard all of this and upgrade to 2.0 because it’s cool and simply to have the latest (if not the greatest – although that remains to be seen) version. But for those fence-sitters, here’s some added info you might want to have in making your decision as to whether or not to upgrade your working version of WordPress 1.5.2 that you’ve been happily using to the new WordPress 2.0.

Here are some reports of problems with WordPress 2.0:

• Something Unpredictable has an article entitled, “What’s Already Broke in 2.0”
• Ryan Duff writes about how and why he downgraded from WordPress 2.0 back to WordPress 1.5
• 24fc wrote a detailed diatribe about why he’s “mightily disappointed” in WordPress 2.0 (including problems with trackbacks and permalinks) over in the support forums
• Brendan details problems he encountered in trying to upgrade to WordPress 2.0, (although he now seems to have made some progress in the upgrade, and is actually working on creating a WP 2.0 Theme) summarizing that:
  

  “If you use WordPress as standard, the upgrade should, more or less work. If you use cat2tag, ultimate tag warrior or deviate away even just a smidgen from the standard install (and lets face it, an increasingly large base of the WordPress community does) – then expect things to break.. badly.

  In my case the upgrade took a horrible toll on the database – the new WP db version is not backwards compatible – if you take the ‘upgrade’ path, perform a backup first or the results will be, well, unpleasant.”

And then there are others who have documented why they’re not upgrading:

• WordPress 2.0… Who Cares?, which provides an extremely detailed feature by feature list of why TheBisch hasn’t found a compelling enough reason to upgrade. In sum – he doesn’t think the new features are ‘all that’. He also points out that a lot of what’s new in WP2.0 pertains to code in the back-end which is designed to make things worlds easier for WP developers (those folks who create all the wonderful plug-ins we all can’t live without, as well as those who make the themes and templates which then personify our blogs). That’s great for developers, but for those who are blogging it doesn’t do them a spec of good JUST YET. First the developers need to use all those fabulous new hooks, etc to create plug-ins and themes which are compatible with v2.0, and that’s gonna take some time (even if it is easier for them to do than in v1.5). But it does mean that down the road we can expect newer and greater plug-ins with features we might never have even imagined possible – we just have to give the developers time to do their genius stuff. And in TheBisch’s mind, until that happens and bugs are hammered out, he doesn’t see a reason to bother with the upgrade.
• Phu Ly, an accomplished WP 1.5 Theme(Gentle Calm, Flex, Gespaa..) and Plug-in author writes Why If..Else has not been upgraded to WP 2.0
• Tamba2, who actually wrote one of the upgrade guides, is actually NOT upgrading himself and posts his reasoning here

If you’re not upgrading, Asymptomatic would like to know why not, and asks that you comment on his post to provide your own reasons for the choice not to upgrade (or upgrade problems that you’ve personally encountered) – to date, there are 106 responses to that post and many of them are rather informative — I’d highly recommend anyone considering upgrading give this post and it’s comments a good read.

In a response to a post by Phu Ly, Asymptomatic wrote the following giving his take on all the comments on his post regarding upgrading to 2.0

“It’s certainly not for everyone.

To generalize on most of the answers I’ve read so far, the response is one of:

1) I’m not upgrading because my favorite plugin/theme doesn’t work.

2) I’m not upgrading because there is no benefit to me over what I have

3) I’m not upgrading because of flaws in the development/testing/release process for which I’ll wait for patches.

Any of these could also factor heavily into one’s decision to upgrade some blogs and not others.”

All in all, there have been a lot of people saying there’s just too much work and too many chances of problems incurring, coupled with too little incentive for them to do the upgrade. However, many of these same folk have said that they would use WordPress 2.0 if they were doing a fresh install for new blog.

As for me, I feel I owe it to the WP team, as well as to all of my blog readers to perform an upgrade on at least one of my WP 1.5 blogs so that I can report back what my own experiences with it were and whether I’d choose to do it again on other blogs. And I *will* do this. However, given the reports of time consuming problems that could be encountered, and that I’m super short on time b/c I’m crazy behind in my work that pays the bills, it could be a few days or even longer before I can tackle this project.

Well, what started out as being an attempt to upgrade a WordPress 1.5 blog that I barely used (just in case things went horribly wrong) to WordPress 2.0 ended up having to become a test of a fresh install because, like an idiot when I was going to backup my wp-config.php file, I instead accidentally deleted it – leaving me with no access at all to that former blog. Good thing it wasn’t important….so that upgrade difficulty was a clear and blatant USER error (and I couldn’t feel more stupid about it).

So I still have no personal comments on the upgrade path… but I can tell you that doing a fresh install of WordPress 2.0 is exactly as easy as it was with 1.5 — taking literally seconds to complete once you’ve uploaded the files to your webhost and set up a mysql database for it (which your webhost can usually do for you).

The new UI looks VERY much like that over at WordPress.com, although it’s notably missing the ‘Feedback’ button for sending hugs & bugs. Not sure why you wouldn’t want to keep that in the hosted version of WP, especially since the user community at large doesn’t know how to enter bugs into WordPress’s tracking system.. The new user interface is very professional looking, and a little nicer on the eyes in this user’s opinion.

Anyhow, while others have complained about it, I like the new WYSIWYG interface (which is easily turned off for those who aren’t interested or don’t need it). Personally, while I can code HTML with the best of them, when I’m blogging I just want to write, and the easiest way to do that and have things be formatted the way I want them to is with a WYSIWYG editor. While WP 1.5 had wysiwyg plugins available, they seemed to slow down my server enormously and I resorted instead to using BlogJet’s window’s client to do all of my WP posts in a rich text environment. The one bummer was that when I clicked on the icon to insert a hyperlink, the window that popped up was too small to fit all of the hyperlink contents into it, and was not resizeable. Perhaps this is a browser specific problem (I’m using Firefox 1.5 on Windows), but that’s a rather big problem considering that links are half of what bring blogs alive. Any other Firefox users experiencing this?

I’ve also started playing around a little bit with themes, and thus far I’ve only tried a few wordpress 1.5 themes, but so far so good in that they’ve all worked in wordpress 2.0. Granted, I only tried 6 so far (Aesthetic 1.5, akhdian 1.1, Almost Spring 1.0, Amsterdam Nights 1.5, Anthurium Mix, and Batavia 1.5.1.1), but I’ll test more and report back later. Alas, one of my favorite themes, Semiologic, had many of its included plugins broken by WP 2.0, and while a new version (Semiologic v3.2) that works with WordPress 2.0 is purported to be available, I’ve yet to find a download link for it (and have emailed the author, the ever-brilliant Denis De Bernardy) to find out where the download link is (or when it will be available)

The much hyped uber-spam killing mechanism aka the plugin Akismet is built into the install, but needs to be activated by the user before it works – and that user must first create a wordpress.com account in order to get an API key that will be needed in order to use the Akismet plugin. Personally, if “included anti-spam plugins” are touted to be one of the features of the WordPress 2.0 release, one shouldn’t need to register anywhere in order to be able to utilize them – and they should be activated by default (just my 2 cents).

When I have more time to delve further into WP 2.0 (and to perform an actual upgrade to one of my existing blogs), I’ll post here as always.

What was previously ‘invite only’ is now available for everyone to blog on. That’s right, anyone who wants to can now get a free blog hosted at WordPress.com.

WordPress.com deserves it’s own review, although it’s currently still in beta form – albeit a very usable beta. When I’ve time do a detailed write-up of my WordPress.com experiences.

The bare bones explanation is that WordPress.com offers the a newer, beta version of WordPress that you don’t need to install on your own server. Instead, you just sign up and immediately get a subdomain on WordPress.com (like http://blogging.wordpress.com). You can login and start blogging right away – it’s ease of use is beautiful for the novice blogger. It supports categories (and subcategories), trackbacks, and all the other trappings that I view as being necessary for any blogging tool. It has a WYSIWYG interface with a rich text editor, as well as the ability to edit the HTML directly. It also allows you to upload pictures and then drag and drop them into your posts. In short, it’s super easy to use, and changing the presentation of your blog takes about two clicks (click on Presentation, and then choose the theme you want).

The shortcomings are that there are very few themes offered for use, and you cannot customize the themes yet (you can’t even specify the font color – supposedly changes to this are in the works, as mentioned above it is still in beta). You also cannot add additional themes or plugins as you can with the full version of WordPress (which requires installation on your on webhost w/a mysql database).

So what you get is a blogging platform that is VERY easy to use, and very slick, but rather limiting for expert bloggers.

Also of note for the many bloggers who hope to earn some money through their blogs, is that WordPress.com currently does not currently support adding Adsense code to your blog entries, so those looking to monitize their blogs should look elsewhere (at least as of this writing).

For newbie bloggers, WordPress.com could be the blogging tool you’ve been waiting for. And it’s FREE! If you don’t care about customizing your templates, it sure beats the pants off of Blogger, even in it’s beta form. More experienced bloggers should check it out, if only to be able to be part of the creation of the next version of WordPress – there is a Feedback button where you can submit ‘bugs and hugs’ as well as any suggestions of what you think WordPress.com needs to be a more fully functional and customizable blogging tool, and suggestions are often implemented at a rapid rate.