I do intend to write a few posts soon, including info about some of the really cool wordpress plugins I’ve recently stumbled across.

Thanks for hanging in there with me!

As a reminder, I always advise readers to wait just a few days before upgrading, as sometimes WP has a habit of releasing an update that breaks things and requires you to install yet another update shortly after that to fix everything…in other words, sometimes some big bugs slip through (not always, though). So just waiting a few extra days before upgrading and finding out whether this is, in fact, a stable release is usually a good idea. I will keep you posted on word from the wordpress community and when I think it’s safe to do the upgrade. If you’re using WordPress 2.7.1, the fantastic news is that you can actually upgrade WP from your dashboard automatically when you’re ready — just don’t forget to backup your database beforehand

While I did say to wait a few days, once it’s clear WordPress 2.8 is stable then, like other updates, it is crucial that you upgrade all of your WordPress installations (but first check to make sure that any of your “MUST HAVE” plugins are compatible with the new version and then weigh the pros and cons. These updates are critical – they generally not only FIX existing bugs (this release fixes 790 bugs!), but they almost always include security enhancements — these are something you need as it is never okay to go around with an old version of WordPress that it turns out can be hacked. Major updates often have new features that you will want, as well.

Here’s a rundown of what you get with WordPress 2.8 (the new stuff, that is):

• 2.8 is way faster to use
• You can now browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard
• If you make edits or tweaks to themes or plugins from your dashboard, you’ll appreciate the new CodePress editor which gives syntax highlighting to the previously-plain editor.
• completely redesigned the widgets interface to allow you to do things like edit widgets on the fly, have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, and save inactive widgets so you don’t lose all their settings.
• new Screen Options on every page. It’s the tab in the top right. Now, for example, if you have a wide monitor you could set up your dashboard to have four columns of widgets instead of the two it has by default. On other pages you can change how many items show per page.
• Check out the full list of over 180 new features, changes, upgrades, and improvements on the Codex

Good stuff. I’m going to upgrade to WordPress 2.8 on a test blog I have and let you know how that goes. I’ll also let you know when I’ve decided to upgrade How to Blog

I already posted the first Reader Question regarding a problem after a WordPress upgrade.. I hope that you guys are able to help out on that one b/c I’m clueless.

What do you guys think of this new addition to the blog – the occasional posting of Reader Questions or even any articles or opinion pieces? I’m all ears!

I have recently upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1 from 2.6.

I was creating pages with wp 2.6. Underneath the post title was displayed the “url” or permalink, and I could edit and customize it any way I liked.

Now with wp 2.7.1, no matter what I enter in the page slug box, my new pages’ permalinks are always in the default format, ie the ugly permalinks with the numeric ids (despite that my permalink settings are set to ‘custom’). The old pages created with wp 2.6 are unaffected.

I have been struggling and researching for the past 5 hours and still can’t get it to work. I’ve read that there are some problems with ‘category slugs’ meant for posts, but so far I have not found any feedback about page slug or page permalinks.

Please help me.

Unfortunately, I’ve no suggestions for Steven with today’s Reader Question (RQ) — can YOU help him?

Please provide any and all suggestions in the comments section! Thanks from both myself and Steven for any assistance you can provide.

What gives? I have no problem creating new posts. But the one post I need to edit the most frequently won’t let me update it!

Update: I found numerous posts about this problem in the wordpress support forums, but no real solutions. Of course, wordpress.org is currently taking another lunch break so I can’t link to them for ya at the moment. HOWEVER, on the plus side, I did finally get wordpress to allow me to update my theme list (made a few slight mods to the html for the page — really shouldn’t have made a difference and frankly I don’t know why it didn’t work and why it does now…I’m just glad its working finally!)

This is not the first time that a WordPress upgrade has been released only to have it introduce new bugs and require another update shortly thereafter to fix the first upgrade’s bugs. See here, here, and here for examples of history repeating.

Given this history of WordPress upgrades sometimes introducing new bugs and headaches, I’d recommend waiting at least a week after an upgrade comes out before installing it. This allows some extra time for the developers and the community to discover any bugs that crop up and provide you with more information as to whether upgrading will be simple and smooth — or a pain in the rear that makes that interferes with your otherwise blissful WordPress experience.

Lorelle (a brilliant woman who provides spectacular WordPress advice) shared her thought process in deciding when to install a WordPress upgrade She writes:

The first thing I always ask myself when considering an upgrade on anything, not just WordPress, is “Are you sure?” I think about the changes, improvements, and new features, and consider if it is worth it. I always upgrade in the end, but I give myself time to debate about it.

This debate time spent on answering the “are you sure” question benefits me in several ways.

1. Waiting helps me decide if the upgrade is worth the trouble by taking time to learn more about it.
2. Waiting to upgrade allows me to schedule the upgrade when it’s convenient to me, and not upgrade in panic mode.
3. Waiting to upgrade forces me to check with the various WordPress Plugins and tools I use to produce my blog to see how this upgrade will impact them. Usually, it doesn’t, but sometimes it does. I’d rather check first than have things bork during the upgrade because a Plugin isn’t working with the new version.
4. Waiting to upgrade usually gives the developers time to fix the upgrade and clean up bugs and problems found in the upgrade before I get to it, as today’s example proves.

I think Lorelle has come up with a wise and well thought out plan that should be adopted by all when deciding when to upgrade WordPress.

Now, having worked as a software quality assurance engineer for Borland International for some years in the past, I know how ridiculously hard it can be to ensure that your release is genuinely stable before it goes out to the public. It is even harder for the wordpress team as I don’t think they have any specific QA team or test plans (like regression testing to make sure that everything that used to work still works once the latest bugs and enhancements have been added in). And let’s not forget that WordPress is free and that the developers are donating their time to make this awesome software available to you. Not only that, but I can tell you with certainty that retail software, no matter how expensive, always ships with known bugs — there is no such thing as bug-free software.

That said, while the developers are likely more frustrated about the bugs in WordPress 2.0.3 than any of us are, I think it is irresponsible to continue to offer WordPress 2.0.3 for download given the known bugs. Furthermore, I cannot fathom why the 2.0.3 upgrade is still presented in every WordPress dashboard and that the official post for 2.0.3 release has not been updated at all to reflect that users should hold off on installing the upgrade as some bugs slipped through and they are working on fixes at the moment. The bugs in 2.0.3 have been officially announced on Planet WordPress, yet most users wouldn’t know to check there — they see the WordPress 2.0.3 upgrade link in their dashboard and upon clicking it they are taken to the official WordPress development blog and told that the upgrade is, “The latest in the stable 2.0 series” — with no mention of the bugs or that it actually turned out not to be so stable after all. I know the developers are busy working round the clock trying to fix the bugs so that they can release an upgrade that resolves these new issues, but come on, can’t someone take the time to update the dev blog to let users know to hold off on upgrading??

Furthermore, for new users, why hasn’t the WordPress download page been updated (or rolled back) to list 2.0.2 as being the current stable release until the issues with 2.0.3 are worked out? Why are new users being told that the latest stable release of WordPress is 2.0.3 when its not, and that 2.0.3 is the version they should download and install? Why not give new users WordPress 2.0.2 (a truly stable release) to download given that it is now known that 2.0.3 is problematic?

For those who already upgraded, Mark Jaquith has released what’s being called a “WordPress 2.0.3 Tuneup Plug-In” which should help with some of the more annoying bugs…

Also annoying is that the WordPress.org website is currently “taking a lunch break” — making the support forums completely inaccessible for the moment.

“For the curious, this release includes:

• Small performance enhancements
• Movable Type / Typepad importer fix
• Enclosure (podcasting) fix
• The aforementioned security enhancements (nonces)

Upgrading is fairly simple, just overwrite your old files with the latest from the download. When you go to your admin it will give you a link to update your database.”

Here’s the link to download the newest WordPress.

I’ll report more once I’ve upgraded myself

Firstly, I’ve been in migraine hell again — its been really bad. I feel like a human guinea pig with all of the different medications that neurologist has given me and am extremely frustrated with how poorly they all work. There are two different kinds of medications that migraine sufferers take: a) a daily preventative medication and b) a medication to treat a migraine when you’re actually having it. The biggest zinger is that the preventative medications all have possible side effects of actually triggering more migraines (which has been my experience in 3 of the 4 preventative medications I’ve tried thus far, making things WORSE rather than better for the time being). To add insult to injury, the migraine medications that you take when you have a migraine are VERY expensive. $20-$25 a pill!!! And as if that weren’t frustrating enough, they don’t work. Every time I find something that works (Migranal, Axert, Maxalt, etc) it starts decreasing in its effectiveness so by the time I am on dose 5 or 6 it no longer works. I’m losing my mind a little bit here because when you have a migraine you can’t do anything – in addition to the pain you have sensitive to light, inability to concentrate or focus at all, you can’t even do anything to distract yourself from the pain like watch tv or read because that makes your head hurt worse – it is hell. And forget about trying to get any work done, never mind any blogging.

Which brings me to reason number two as to why I haven’t posted in forever: I’ve been busy on a contract job for the last two months, and every spare moment where I’ve been fortunate enough to not have a migraine and be able to think and use the computer I’ve had to devote to the contract job. While I’ll still have some contract work through June, it won’t be as much as over the past two months so I hope to have some more free time to devote to How to Blog. I have so many articles that I want to write and so much news that I want to report, but it is very time consuming and I need to earn a living so I can pay my mortgage, etc, so until blogging can help pay the bills it has to play second fiddle to my contract work (bummer).

On the plus side, I actually don’t have a headache today (which is VERY exciting!) and I have an appointment tomorrow to go to an acupuncturist to try an alternative method for preventing my migraines — I’ve had at least 4 different people suggest that I try acupuncture for my migraines b/c they know someone who was helped tremendously by it, and I found some studies on the internet that actually claim acupuncture is more effective than medication for preventing migraines, so keep your fingers crossed for me that this will finally be the thing that helps me with my migraines so I can get my life back again!!!! Wish me luck – I need it!!!!!

I know everyone is anxious to see the new designs, and they’ll be available in two weeks for download after the judging panel has reviewed all the entries. A screenshot of each design will be available later this week for a sneak preview of the designs that have been entered. I’ll also complile a list of all the new partcipants and come up with a final number of theme entries within the next couple of days

As of April 17th, there were 34 Theme Participants listed and I’m sure that list has grown as the competition deadline drew nearer. A big thanks to everyone who participated, and best of luck to all of you in winning some of the great prizes being offered up!

Personally, I’m uber excited to see all the new WordPress 2.0 themes that have been created! I hope that some designers really went to town with incorporating WordPress 2.0′s new Theme Options, which allow wordpress bloggers to customize the theme without touching (or knowing) a single piece of code.

I also can’t wait to see how much larger my comprehensive wordpress theme list will grow once all of the themes that were submitted to the contest are made available to the public. We’ve recently crossed the 800 themes mark — think there’s a chance we can make it to 900??

Please read the following and sign the petition to preserve Network Neutrality

Do you blog, buy books online, use Google, or download to an iPod? Everything we do online will be hurt if Congress passes a radical law next week that gives giant corporations more control over what we do and see on the Internet.

Internet providers like AT&T are lobbying Congress hard to gut Network Neutrality—the Internet’s First Amendment and the key to Internet freedom. Net Neutrality prevents AT&T from choosing which websites open most easily for you based on which site pays AT&T more. BarnesandNoble.com doesn’t have to outbid Amazon for the right to work properly on your computer. What they’re talking about here is having website owners pay ISPs for the “right” for their sites to load as quickly as their competitors. If you don’t pay a fee to AT&T and other internet providers, they could make your website or blog load slower for all of their customers.

If Net Neutrality is gutted, almost every popular site—from Google to eBay to iTunes—must either pay protection money to Internet companies like AT&T or risk having their websites process slowly. That why these high-tech pioneers and others are opposing Congress’ effort to gut Internet freedom. But ringing even closer to home, individual bloggers and small businesses will likely not have the funds to pay to ensure that their sites load as quickly as other sites. Why should anyone have to pay to have their site load properly???? Its like having to pay a dirty cop to do their job and protect your business. How dare these ISPs think they should be entitled to charge companies and people for the right to have their site load as fast as their own webserver is capable of serving up the page?? What are they, Mob 2.0?

And what about the users of these internet providers? Should they all of a sudden have certain websites load slowly for them because that website didn’t pay a ‘protection fee’?? Every single person’s internet experience could be drastically negatively affected by this, whether they have their own website or simply enjoy surfing the net.

You can do your part today—can you sign this petition telling your member of Congress to preserve Internet freedom? Click here:

http://www.civic.moveon.org/save_the_internet/

I signed this petition, along with 250,000 others so far. This petiton will be delivered to Congress before the House of Representatives votes next week. When you sign, you’ll be kept informed of the next steps we can take to keep the heat on Congress.

Snopes.com, which monitors various causes that circulate on the Internet, explained:

Simply put, network neutrality means that no web site’s traffic has precedence over any other’s…Whether a user searches for recipes using Google, reads an article on snopes.com, or looks at a friend’s MySpace profile, all of that data is treated equally and delivered from the originating web site to the user’s web browser with the same priority. In recent months, however, some of the telephone and cable companies that control the telecommunications networks over which Internet data flows have floated the idea of creating the electronic equivalent of a paid carpool lane.

If companies like AT&T have their way, Web sites ranging from Google to eBay to iTunes to your blog either pay protection money to get into the “fast lane” or risk opening slowly on your computer. We can’t let the Internet—this incredible medium which has been such a revolutionary force for democratic participation, economic innovation, and free speech—become captive to large corporations.

Politicians don’t think we are paying attention to this issue. Together, we do care about preserving the free and open Internet.

Please sign this petition letting your member of Congress know you support preserving Internet freedom. Click here:

http://www.civic.moveon.org/save_the_internet/

Please feel free to forward this on to everyone you know that loves or relies on the internet!

Much thanks,
Emily

What is the best webhosting company for WordPress bloggers?

I would personally love to hear all of your experiences, positive and negative, so please comment away!!

WordPattern was being billed as “is an entirely new application based on both Textpattern and WordPress.” One of it’s supposed new features was a “CMS-management system”, meaning that you can managel multiple Content Management Systems (CMS’s) from within the same interface — a feature which is sorely lacking in WordPress.

I find it really unprofessional that this supposed “Press Release” was not only on the wordpress development blog but continued to display in every WordPress user’s dashboard as if it were fact up until mid-day April 3rd. On top of that, when I tried to go to wordpress support to confirm that it is indeed an april fool’s joke, you’ll get the equally unprofessional error message of, “WordPress.org is taking a lunch break.” (the entire site is down).

I’ll admit it – they got me (doh! Always read through the site thoroughly before reporting something as news!) Nonetheless, does anyone else find this to be in rather poor taste? While those of us who are higher level in their techie skills would immediately have recognized that references to such things as “Bjax” were clearly a joke, there ARE members of the WordPress community who likely would not have realized it was a joke and may have panicked with regards to what the implications of this supposed merger would be for their wordpress sites, specifically since the press release referred to wordpress.org being decommissioned.

I get emails regularly from people who are fed up with TypePad and looking to switch to WordPress but find it to be too intimidating. A prank such as this one is only going to alienate Average Joe bloggers who aren’t coders but still want to use the best blogging software out there. That said, as far as April Fool’s Pranks go, this one was certainly pulled off very well!

The hoax competition had a lot of juicy prizes associated with it (likely because none of them were ever actually going to be awarded to anyone seeing as how it was a hoax). Theme designers worked their butts off creating new WordPress 2.0 themes in an effort to win some of those excellent prizes. While the new WordPress Arena competition is offering an iPod shuffle to the overall winner, the runner up prizes of a year’s worth of hosting (which people aren’t necessarily likely to take advantage of, generous as it may be, as changing webhosts is quite a production) and a book on the Zen of CSS Design aren’t quite as tempting as the electronic and cash goodies these designers were originally promised as prizes.

So I ask the community: if you have the means, please help reward the designers for all of their hard work and sponsor the WordPress Arena 2.0 Theme Competition by donating some enticing prizes to be awarded. This would then allow for more categories for themes to be judged upon and more winners, as was promised in the original competiton that sadly turned out to be a scam.

These theme designers who submitted their hard work to the hoax competition must feel really scammed and taken advantage of. Let’s make them feel appreciated – honor them for their work. Surely there must be some companies or individuals who have the means to donate some more prizes (cash or otherwise) and be proud sponsors of the new WordPress 2.0 Theme Competition.

WordPress Arena has graciously extended the deadline for submission of themes to May 1st to a) allow for the time for more sponsors to get involved and then decide on judging criteria for the new prizes, and b) provide extra time for the many theme designers who got scammed to learn about the new theme competition so they can all get their submissions in and for the rest of us to spread the word about the new competition. Winners will be announced on May 15th, 2006.

TypePad currently does not support 301 permanent redirects, or any modifications at all to the .htaccess file.

This prevents visitors who have bookmarked your site from knowing that it has been moved to a new location, unless you manually update each and every post to provide the link for the current URL (which is what I have been doing).

The bigger problem, however, stems from the fact that the search engines have no idea where you went. Without a 301 permanent redirect, they do not know that they should no longer index the old URL, and that the previous content can now be found at your new URL. The same holds true for technorati being able to recognize that your new blog is actually your old blog — just with a new domain name.

TypePad’s customer support says that they don’t allow customers to modify the .htaccess file for security reasons because it contains account information. Now that’s reasonable, but what if I were to just provide them with a text file that contains all of the redirect codes (which they could clearly see was not a security threat) and then the customer support themselves could just add that code to the existing .htaccess file? It would take them two seconds to do the copy and paste. Obviously, there isn’t any technological reason why they could not do this. It’s a matter of will they choose to help me or not.

And remember, it’s not like TypePad is a free service — I paid $149 for my TypePad Pro membership, and had been planning on renewing it indefinitely as I have other blogs on TypePad that I had not been planning on moving (like my blog of Best Funny Pictures, which averages 3000+ visitors a day). But if they’re going to continue to hold my old URL hostage and refuse to allow me to set up 301 permanent redirects to this blog, I’m not going to be a happy customer — and probably won’t continue to be a customer at all as a result.

I’m still waiting to hear back from this customer support (we’ve been arguing back and forth about the 301 permanent redirects for quite a bit) and will obviously report the ultimate results here. Wish me luck.

Update: the official final response from TypePad customer support has come back

At this time, we do not provide the service you requested to our users.

Buggers!
Now do you see even more why it’s important to get your own domain name before you start blogging?

I also wish I hadn’t been intimidated by WordPress and had used that from the beginning… Oh well, at least I’m using it now!

We currently don’t allow Adsense or other JS ad code on the site, though we probably will in the future. However right now it is keeping sploggers (spam bloggers) from exploiting WP.com and only a few legit users have asked for it.

We’ll announce when you’ll be able to add Adsense or Yahoo or Chitika to your templates.

I look forward to the time when they do allow wordpress.com bloggers to earn a little money for their hard spent hours blogging through adsense, ypn, chitika, and what-have-you. I think that would be a great move for wordpress.com as right now that’s the number one reason I’m not recommending it to bloggers looking for a hosted solution (in which case I’d currently say go with TypePad). There are plenty of legitimate bloggers who would like to be compensated somewhat for their writing.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t think that wordpress.com should continue to take a hard stance against sploggers (spam bloggers) – by all means, nuke their butts! They could make it easier to identify splogs by adding a little button of ‘flag as spam’ in the dashboard for wordpress.com users who are logged in and surfing other wordpress.com blogs. Right now they’re asking users to use the Feedback button to send them a note when someone comes across a splog – but by installing a button on the dashboard that automatically sends that feedback they could make the process of reporting splogs that much easier…(my 2 cents)

Google said that “AdSense margins will be squeezed in 2006 and beyond.”

It’s not like Google isn’t already making a ton of money from AdSense – the leak also said that:

Google expected ad revenue to grow from “$6 billion this year to $9.5 billion next year.”

So why does Google need to reduce publisher’s earnings even more?? As it is, earnings paid on AdSense clicks are marginal compared to what the advertisers are paying for those clicks (and what’s going in Google’s pockets).

Looks like bloggers need to take a better look at the Yahoo! Publisher Network (which is still in Beta) because Google is apparently planning on screwing AdSense publishers in the upcoming future.

I ask that all theme designers who applied to the scam competition now enter the new, legit one — and also would be extremely grateful if you would submit your themes to me, as well. While I’ve nothing to offer in the way of prizes (wish I could, but hopefully some fame and the knowledge that you’re helping the community will be inspiration enough), I am extremely eager to create a Comprehensive List of WordPress 2.0 specific themes (and have plans to create a blog specifically about themes to make it much easier for folks to find the theme of their dreams). Please email all theme info to howtoblog @ gmail.com with a subject of WP 2.0 theme — thanks!

On March 5th, the WordPress 2.0 Theme Design Competition that was being hosted by kcyap.com claimed that it got hacked (and that his entire database was erased):

“Very regret to announced that this competition blog website had been hacked. I have no backup for all this data and not sure if the server admin did have a backup on it or not. I am very sorry for this incident.

The prizes will still be the same and i will upload once again all the submitted themes on by one from now. This may takes quite some time, please be patient.

The result for this competition will still be announce don the 10th March 2006.”

This should be a reminder to everyone to BACKUP YOUR DATABASE ON A REGULAR BASIS (I’ll write a how-to post on this shortly).

And as many commenters pointed out, it was unacceptable for a site hosting a theme competition of this level to not have backups. Other commenters suggested the site owner use the Google cache to try to retrieve the old posts.

However, the big question that’s on my mind – and which was brought up by CountZero is how did this happen??

“But the really more important task than assigning any guilt to anyone on this case, I suppose, is to find out how the hacker could compromise the machine. Did he use some undiscovered WordPress vulnerability, did he make use of those being published just about a week ago, or did he make use of other security issues on your server? Is it sure that these loophole(s) are closed now, and can you make sure there is no backdoor/rootkit left on the machine now?”

I hope the WordPress team is taking a good look at this to ensure that it wasn’t the result of some previously unknown security vulnerability in WordPress. Was the kycap Theme Competition Blog running on WP 2.0 or WP 2.0.1? And if he was running the latest version (WP 2.0.1), did the hackers get in through a WordPress security flaw, or through some other method related to his specific hosting situation? Or perhaps he had spyware on his PC and they had a keylogger which gave them access to his password so they could just easily log into his account. (Which reminds me that everyone should have Microsoft’s free Anti-Spyware software installed on their Window’s PCs)

Additionally, there has also been speculation that the whole Theme Competition was a hoax (to gain google pagerank?). Many commenters have found it rather suspicious that even if the database was wiped that there still wouldn’t be backups of all of the themes that designers had submitted – after all, they sent them in through email. And what of all the ‘unnamed judges’ (which I always thought was a little shady..) – shouldn’t they have copies of the themes and their descriptions, as well?

IMHO, the Theme Competition site owner (Justin) owes it to the WP community to work with both his webhost and the WordPress team to discover just how that site got hacked, and then reveal that information to everyone – both to restore his credibility and so that we can all know whether we need to be worried about the same thing happening to us – and learn from his situation about how to protect ourselves. Specifically, we need to know whether the hack stemmed from a problem with WordPress security. I’ll rest easier once this information is known, especially since I’m still entrenched in hoards of hours in porting How to Blog over to WP from TypePad (it was easy to import the posts, but there’s all this minutiae that’s taking hoards of hours to deal with as part of the transition).

But apparently I didn’t get the setup quite right the first time (thanks to Robin for emailing me to let me know my RSS feed wasn’t working!) so I apologize to those of you who tried to subscribe and got error messages.

However, it is now fixed, so please do subscribe to my RSS feed using your preferred news aggregator!

Please update all of your bookmarks and feed subscriptions to reflect the new location!

I’m very excited to have the site powered by WordPress for a number of reasons:

• I can reopen trackbacks on all my old posts (which I’m still in the process of doing) and allow pings on all new posts because WordPress’s anti-spam plugins will delete all the crap (meaning I’m not stuck wading through hundreds of spam a day trying to find legitimate trackback pings) and you will soon be able to trackback to any and all of my posts, restoring full blogging functionality to How to Blog (since you all know I think trackbacks are essential to the blogging experience!) It may be a day or two before all of the posts have been updated to allow pings — in the port from typepad, WP used typepad’s settings and had pings turned off for all posts and unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a plugin that will allow a mass change to all posts to allow pings (developers – there’s an idea for ya!) so I’m sitting here manually going through each post and checking the ‘allow pings’ box, so bear with me
• I can have subcategories!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• I can finally have pagination controls (previous page, next page), making navigating the blog much easier (and something that TypePad was sorely missing).
• I can have an Archives page which displays Archives by month, by category, as well as an entire archive of every posting on How to Blog, essentially creating a sitemap so that you can more easily find what you’re looking for
• Speaking of sitemaps, I can use the Google Sitemap plugin to automatically generate a Google Sitemaps compliant sitemap of How to Blogand automatically ping Google everytime a create or update a post
• I can save time by using plugins like Jerome’s Keywords to automatically create my technorati tags for me based on the keywords I’ve entered
• I can save time by using the autolink plugin to automatically setup the hyperlinks for me on phrases that I often use, like WordPress
• I can allow people to subscribe to my blog by email using the Subscribe2 plugin, where you can choose how often you want to be notified by email when I create new posts, and you can even specify which categories of posts you want to be notified about
• I can get MUCH better stats, since I’m running wordpress on my dedicated server on my webhost (Prohosters.com) and I get really detailed stats through the use of Sawmill
• I have a seemingly endless number of wordpress themes to choose from (I haven’t had time to figure out what I want to go with for the long haul — I really like the look of Semiologic, but it’s very hard to customize because it requires serious PHP knowledge and whatever theme I choose will likely be heavily customized when I’m done with it — OR, I might just take the plunge and create my OWN theme )
• I can allow people to subscribe to comments on any particular post, and they will then receive subsequent replies to that post through email
• I’m sure there are a million other things I’m forgetting, and I’ll write about them in due time. The one thing I am gonna miss from TypePad is their excellent WYSIWYG editor — WordPress’s is rather disasterous and I recommend that all users disable it. If you still want a wysiwyg interface for blogging, there are several excellent tools available including the Performancing extension for Firefox, the windows client BlogJet, etc

For now, I’ve got to get back to the ultra mundane task of updating all of my old typepad posts one at a time to show the new URL of where the post can now be found and turn of commenting on those posts. Then I get to go through all of my posts in WordPress one at a time and check the box to allow pings. Then I get to email all the people who have linked to my old site and ask them to update their bookmarks. And I get to pray that I don’t lose all of my traffic and the great search engine rankings that I had on my typepad version of the blog.

By the way, I do realize that blogging.typepad.com is certainly an easier URL to memorize than www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/ – however, I wanted to have it on my emilyrobbins.com domain – but not in the root of the domain as How to Blog is only one part of who I am. And, when I experimented with porting the typepad blog over to wordpress, google immediately started indexing the URLs (something I hadn’t anticipated to happen so quickly – especially since I hadn’t made a final decision as to what I wanted the URL to be – should I use a subdomain or a subdirectory, or should I give it it’s own domain) and rather than having to set up 301 permanent redirects I decided that this must be what fate wanted as the new How to Blog location – so here we are, and I look forward to being able to get back to posting (and I have many posts which need some updating including my theme list) when the drudgery involved with making the move is completed!

Don’t fall trap to the disaster that I landed myself in, where I started casually blogging and ended up regularly blogging and hating the platform I was using but can’t easily switch because I stupidly put my blog on a subdomain of typepad (http://blogging.typepad.com)

Now I’m at TypePad’s mercy. They own my ass because they own my address – even though I’m paying $150+ a year for their service. The same could happen to you whether it’s a subdomain on typepad.com, blogspot.com, or wordpress.com.

By not having your own domain name, if you ever decide to move to another blogging platform you run the risk of losing all (or a lot) of your traffic, your search engine rankings, all of your hard earned incoming links, etc because you cannot take your URL with you.

How are you going to redirect your traffic to your new blog when you have NO ability to, say, set up a 301 Permanent Redirect? Which, for those who are wondering, would both:

• automatically redirects human visitors to your new blog site
• tells the search engines that your blog has permanently moved and gives it the new location

(BTW – has any TypePad user whose blog address was a subdomain had a high traffic blog with a lot of backlinks into it that they then moved to a WordPress blog hosted on their own server? Please tell me what your experience was, whether you lost pagerank, traffic, search engine rankings, etc!!!)

Domain names are cheap – about $9 a year for a single one, as low as $6.75 a year if you own more than 50. There is NO excuse to not have your own domain name for your blog. You will regret if at some point down the road if you don’t start out with your own domain name.

www.GoDaddy.com is the site that I use to register my domain names, although there are numerous other options such as $5.99 Domain Names at 1&1, and, if you only need a single domain name the cheapiest option is domain names from Yahoo! for only $2.99.

The irony here is that I actually own a lot of domain names and I genuinely can’t fathom why I didn’t just use a domain of my own when I started this blog. Don’t make the same mistake as me or you could end up feeling trapped like I do right now. Consider yourselves warned.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, my point is that you need to own your own domain name so the URL for your blog points to a domain you own and control. It’s okay to use a subdomain off a domain that you own, but not one that belongs to someone else such as that of a hosted service like typepad.com.

And it’s okay to use a hosted solution – just make sure you pick one (like typepad.com or blogger.com) that allows you to use your own domain name (and always reference your blog’s URL w/your own domain) so that if you ever decide you want to go elsewhere, at least you’ll be able to take your traffic with you. And it’s also a good idea to check to see if whatever blogging platform you start with has the ability to export your posts (and comments/trackbacks) for easiest porting of your site to another platform…

Why is it that we are unable to ban trackbacks based on a specific IP address the same way we can with comments? Why is it that when viewing trackbacks through the TypePad Control Panel, we cannot even see the IP address of the offending spammer? I know TypePad has this information because every time it sends me an email letting me know about a new trackback that has been submitted, it includes the IP address that the TrackBack was sent from.

So what gives? Here I am manually deleting tons of spam from the same bunch of jerks, all because TypePad hasn’t implemented a simple ban trackbacks based on IP option?

(And all of you spammers – don’t bother. All you’re doing is aggravating the crap out of me, but your comment and trackback spam will never see the light of day on my blog. Everything is moderated – do you see any spam on here? No. SO LEAVE ME ALONE!!!)

What that means is that for any article linked to in a particular
post, wordpress should automatically be sending a ping to alert that
article that you’ve written about them, saving you the time of having
to manually paste their trackback URI into the Trackbacks section of
the Write Post screen.

On what was initially my WP 2.0 Test blog (and which is now my WP 2.0.1 Test Blog), I had reported that in WordPress 2.0, the only blogs that seemed to receive these automatic trackback pings were other WordPress 2.0 blogs.

I had hoped that these problems would be resolved in
WordPress 2.0.1, but instead they seem to have worsened, with even more
erratic results than before:

• again, no trackback pings to WordPress 1.5.x blogs or TypePad blogs got sent
• again, the only time WP properly sent a single ping to a referenced post was when it was pinging the same version of wordpress, this time from v2.0.1 to v2.0.1
• duplicate pings were sent to WordPress 2.0 blogs that were referenced in a wordpress 2.0.1 post, AND
• duplicate pings were also sent to wordpress.com blogs that were referenced in a wordpress 2.0.1 post – making you look like a spammer

What a bummer.

‘All in all we’ve closed 114 bugs in the 2.0.1 release, which you’re welcome to check out if you’re curious about every fix. To summarize:

• You can now specify an upload directory, and whether to use date-based storage or not.
• Caching has been fixed under certain PHP enviroments.
• Permalinks have been fixed for weird enviroments as well.
• XML-RPC uploading works.
• Compatibility with older versions of PHP.
• Several WYSIWYG fixes and cleanups.
• Imports now use much less memory.
• Now works with MySQL 5.0 in strict mode.’

Now, what’s ominously missing from this list of bug fixes is any mention of the problems with trackbacks, which is my main hesitation for upgrading all my wordpress blogs. Yet in reading through the complete list of fixes, it appears the trackback problems were fixed — see tickets 2197 and 2170 — I must say that I don’t know why the WordPress team didn’t emphasize that in their bulleted list of fixes. In any case, I’m thrilled to hear it’s been fixed — YAY! Hopefully this means I can seriously contemplate moving my blog from TypePad to WordPress. Unfortunately, TypePad doesn’t support functionality for 301 permanent redirects, which are what would be necessary to tell the search engines that my blog has moved (and word to the wise and newbie alike — don’t ever make the mistake that I did and use a subdomain off a typepad.com, wordpress.com, etc account if you think there’s ever the slightest chance you’d like to use your own domain name down the road, or heaven forbid switch to a different blogging system altogether — moving How to Blog is gonna be one hell of a nightmare, but the benefits that WordPress provides may make it worth it…still on the fence)

In any case, you can download WordPress 2.0.1 here.

Technorati Tags: wordpress 2.0.1, new wordpress, wordpress bug fixes, wordpress release

The main issue is how spam is handled. On TypePad, spam is a nightmare to deal with, whereas on WordPress spam is almost a non-issue (provided you are using the proper plug-ins like Spam Karma 2 for those running v1.5.x – or for those on WP 2.0, the included and revolutionary Akismet).

Then there are all the other easily customizable things. Like the look and feel of your site. Ok, so TypePad’s is easier to control without having to know any code — but really limited in comparison to WP. As my comprehensive wordpress theme list shows, there are now 615 free wordpress themes out there, and growing! OVER SIX HUNDRED. That’s a staggering amount of templates to choose from to give your blog it’s own unique flair. And they are all customizable as well (if you know some css) – and with WordPress 2.0, themes can be made customizable within the admin area by their authors such that bloggers can customize areas of the theme at will without ever touching any code!

Then there’s the issue of pagination. It’s quite simple – WordPress has it and TypePad doesn’t. By pagination, I mean those little links folks have grown accustomed to seeing on blogs that say “Next Page” and “Previous Page”. Don’t see them on this blog? That’s b/c TypePad doesn’t have that feature. TypePad bloggers get to choose the number of posts that will appear on their homepage, and after that – well, good luck navigating the blog b/c the only options are to do so through clicking on the categories or the monthly archives. TypePad doesn’t even have built-in search. And of course, WordPress does. (TypePad users should check out my article on how to make your typepad blog searchable).

And then there are the plugins. No small matter. WordPress has plugins that enhance it’s functionality for almost any thing you could want to do with it:

• Tagging plugins (such as Jerome’s Keywords or the Ultimate Tag Warrior) that provide an easy way to automatically tag posts with keywords for social bookmarking systems such as Technorati, del.icio.us, and Flickr. This means more traffic for your blog. Tags also provide a whole new way for readers to interact with a blog. For example, Jerome’s Keywords makes it so “readers can click on a post’s keyword/tag link to see other posts with the same tag. It’s a simple but effective way of letting users find content that interests them.”. You can even create a local tag cosmos.
• Post related plugins, such as the ability to display the top 10 most popular posts in your sidebar, or the ability to show a list of related posts when viewing an individual post
• Comment related plugins, such as giving users the ability to display gravatars in their comments and allowing blog readers to subscribe to a particular post’s comments
• There are just WAY too many ways in which plugins expand the functionality of WordPress way beyond the capabilities of TypePad to even discuss here. And from what I’ve been hearing about WP 2.0, which provides added hooks making it even easier for programmers to create even more fantastic plugins in the future, the possibilities seem limitless.

Customization of where you ping to notify the world that you’ve updated your blog — WordPress has it, and (you guessed it) TypePad doesn’t. The workaround with TypePad if you want to use a service like pingoat, is to paste the URL for pingoat’s RPC server into the Trackback area for each and every post, each and every time you update it.

And while this isn’t an issue for me in choosing a blogging platform, the issue of cost still needs to be brought up in any review. Again, it’s simple – WordPress is free, and TypePad isn’t. Of course, the full version of WP with all of it’s glory and customizable options (including access to all free themes and plugins) requires you to have a web hosting server with mysql support (which most do). Which means it really isn’t entirely free b/c now you’re paying for web-hosting. But if you do want entirely free, WordPress.com offers that — and while it’s a really dumbed down version of WP, it still offers some things that TypePad doesn’t, like sub-categories (however, it doesn’t allow you to run adsense ads on your site – you get what you pay for with wordpress.com).

Then there’s ease of use when posting. When it comes to blogging editors, WordPress 2.0 finally has a built in WYSIWYG editor (something TypePad has had all along, and which I think every blogging tool should offer). The only problem is that WordPress’s wysiwyg editor is kinda buggy. See this problem that I encountered on my WordPress 2.0 test blog. However, I generally use an external windows client (BlogJet) to post to my blogs, which has it’s own WYSIWYG editor that’s better than both of them. But you also need to take speed into account when you talk about ease of posting. WordPress is very speedy when creating or updating posts. TypePad is very sluggish, especially if you are sending trackbacks to a large number of sites.

Want stats for your blog? Well TypePad only shows you referrers from the past 24 hours. That’s it. And not only that, but it is slow as molasses

Now there are a few areas in which TypePad sort of shines in comparison to WordPress, with the main one being maintenance and upgrading. I say sort-of, because sometimes TypePad has outages and when that happens there ain’t a thing you can do about it. On the other hand, every time WordPress comes out with an upgrade, it can sometimes be a major pain in the rear to install it, wreaking all sorts of havoc over your blog (although sometimes the upgrade process is totally smooth). All of that customizability that WP offers through themes, plugins, etc, makes for more things that can get broken every time there’s an upgrade. And sometimes it seems like those upgrades come every few days (like after the release of WordPress 1.5 when there were numerous minor point releases that were required updates because they pertained to security flaws which seemed to come out every few days!) And when there’s an upgrade, you’re the one that has to install it (unless you’re using a free wordpress host like blogsome, but then you’re at the mercy of them deciding which themes and plugins are available to you, and when and if they’re going to do an upgrade – right now they’re still using WP 1.5). When TypePad does an upgrade, it’s behind the scenes and you find out about it in the TypePad news (unless the upgrade wreaks havoc on their servers, in which case you get the joy of TypePad outages, the inability to post to your blog for sometimes days on end, etc – but ultimately they fix it, and it’s up to them, not you, to fix it).

All of this makes me want to move this blog and all of it’s posts (and future posts to come) over to wordpress on my own server at emilyrobbins.com. Which brings me to my conundrum (and the possible state of limbo). Is it worth moving an existing site that gets over 1000 visitors a day and is ranked well in the search engines over to another server, URL, and blogging system entirely, possibly losing all of my backlinks and high pagerank that I spent so much time in generating? And if so, should I wait until WordPress 2.0 has ironed out some more of the kinks (there are currently problems with trackbacks, which I think is a rather major issue, among other things) before proceeding?

WordPress 1.5.2 works great and is a very stable release. But I know I’ll eventually want to move to WordPress 2.0.x — it’s new features are just too enticing. And I also know that I do not want to have to deal with doing the kind of major upgrade that going from 1.5 to 2.0 entails on a website that is this important to me (I just don’t have the time deal with it in case something goes wrong with the upgrade, and there have been far too many reports of people having trouble with the upgrade for me to risk it). But I’m getting so damn sick of TypePad’s limitations, and even more so of managing all the spam (I have to have all of my trackbacks and comments moderated because of the vulgar spam that people try to put through a zillion times a day – an issue that I wouldn’t have to deal with if I were using WordPress instead).

So what should I do? Should I hold off on doing any more posting until WordPress 2.0 comes out with a more stable version and then move the whole site over to WP 2? Should I just take the plunge now, and hope that the trackback issues don’t affect me too much until they are resolved? But what if I lose all of my traffic as a result?Should I just leave things as they are right now and stick with TypePad for ‘How to Blog’??

What to do? What to do??????

Update: I’ve taken the plunge now that WordPress 2.0.1 has come out and moved How to Blog over to http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/ so please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds!

Some of the themes have been tested on WordPress 2.0, and have been marked as such, and a few of the themes are actually specifically for WordPress 2.0 and won’t work with 1.5.x (also marked accordingly).

I’m super excited about the prospect of all the new themes to come down the pipeline now that WP 2.0 is out – and for all of the updates to current themes that theme authors might be lured into performing given the fabulous customization that wordpress 2 allows.

For those who don’t know, WordPress 2.0 has taken themes to the next level in a serious way, providing the ability for theme authors to actually allow theme users with options that can be easily customized through a panel in the adminstration area of WordPress. If a theme is customizable, there will be a tab under Presentation for “Current Theme Options”.

The Default theme that is packaged with WordPress 2.0 allows you to make changes to the theme’s header, including the font color and colors used for the background of the header.

But themes like Regulus 2.0 really take it up a knotch by providing checkboxes allowing the blog owner to change the header image, the color scheme, whether to show full posts or excerpts on the homepage, whether to display the post’s author on the homepage, as well as sidebar options such as ‘show calendar’, ‘show recent posts’, ‘show all archive months’, etc.

You can also see a running demo of a new WP 2.0 theme called BloxPress which actually allows the blog viewer to change the layout of the theme, dragging and dropping theme sections around to change their order in the sidebar at will and adding and removing content as it suits them (something which I wish was incorporated into the WordPress core for the blog owners, at least). Seriously cool stuff.

It’s a beautiful thing, this level of customization. I sincerely hope that more WordPress 2.0 theme authors create their themes with these sort of theme options (and more!) in mind!

WordPress 2.0 also allows theme designers to include a screenshot as part of their theme package which will then display on the Presentation|Themes tab so it’s much easier to select a theme that’s suited to your blogging style.

I’m going to need a better way of managing my theme list now that some themes are for v1.5.x and others just for 2.0, etc which isn’t something I can easily due from within the constrains of TypePad. Which leads me to my next post: feeling like I’m stuck in limbo and with a conundrum on my hands.

By pagination, I mean the and buttons that many bloggers and blog readers are accustomed to seeing at the bottom of a blog page (a feature that is built into WordPress, for example). TypePad gives you the option of customizing how many posts appear on a page, but no way to easily navigate to posts beyond those appearing on the front page. For example, the oldHow To Blog site is set to display 10 posts on the front page. But when users visit the site and read through those posts, and want to see the rest of what I’ve written, they have only 2 options, neither of which is optimal:

1. View each category one at a time
2. Go through the monthly archives

I had put it on my personal ‘to do’ list to figure out how to add Next and Previous links to the buttom of my TypePad pages, and when I finally decided to tackle the project and couldn’t figure it out on my own, I submitted a support ticket to Six Apart asking for help with it. I wrote:

WordPress has built in previous / next page links at the bottom of every page. This makes their blogs much more easy to navigate, especially for beginners. As each page only contains a certain number of posts, without having next and previous buttons it’s hard for people to easily navigate the blog.

In addition to making this a feature request, I’d also like to know what code I should use in my advanced templates in order to implement this on my blog on How to Blog.

Your prompt attention to this matter is greatly appreciated.

Thank you!
Emily Robbins

The response I got back from TypePad Customer Support was astounding (bold added by me):

Hi Emily,

Currently TypePad doesn’t offer pagination (Next Page and Previous Page links), so there isn’t any code that I can offer you to do this.

Thanks for the suggestion, though. We are always looking for ways to enhance TypePad for our users, so we will keep this in mind as a possible future feature for the system.

Please let us know if there is anything else we can do for you.

Thanks,
Kymberlie

Excuse me for the double-take, but NO CODE AVAILABLE TO DO THIS? How can this be when SixApart themselves acknowledged the importance of pagination features in their own article on Six Apart Pronet entitled “Building on Movable Type Part 3: Creating Pagination Controls”, wherein they say (again, bolding is from me):

Pagination controls are sufficiently ubiquitous that our own developers saw the value in creating a reusable mechanism for creating the links developers should all be too familiar with: “next page,” “previous page,” “last page,” “first page” and “you are viewing results X to Y out of Z.” This reusable framework is not only accessible within Movable Type, but by plugins as well.

So apparently Six Apart thinks that pagination controls are so ‘ubiquitous’ that we’d be ‘all to familiar’ with them, and they are not only built into the functionality of Movable Type but also accessible by MT plugins. GREAT. For Movable Type users.

So how come when SixApart created (and updated and updated) TypePad, this “ubiquitous” functionality was somehow forgotten?

Update: for those of you who click the link to my old blog at typepad to see the lack in pagination functionality, the template for the site has been changed to make it easier for folks to see the full URL for my new posts at the new site, making for a pretty ugly site. It didn’t use to look like that, but it’s okay that it’s ugly – none of you are supposed to be using that site anymore b/c I moved over here, remember

Lunacy Unleashed has a great article on dealing with the adsense problems in WordPress 2.0 dealing with the adsense problems in WordPress 2.0, as well as a few workarounds.

In sum, the problem stems from the fact that the live preview will try to fetch your google adsense ads, even if your post has not yet been published. This can be seriously problematic, as when google tries to determine appropriate contextually relevant ads for the page, it receives a 404 (page not found) error because the page does not yet exist. At a minimum, this could result in ads that aren’t relevant to the content on your page. At it’s worst, it could result in your adsense account being suspended, “since Google prohibits displaying ads on 404 pages”.

Not good.

Michael Hampton’s post provides details on how to get around this problem by modifying your template code (which beginning WP users are probably not so comfortable doing..) to put in a check to see if the what’s being displayed is a preview, and if so not display AdSense ads using the following code:

// Paste your AdSense code here //

Unfortunately, this workaround still results in multiple problems, the first one being that there is a known bug with the is_preview() function in WP 2.0. Furthermore, the abovementioned code only works ‘inside the loop’ (see Matt Read’s post for help in understanding “the loop”, as well as the information on The Loop in the wordpress codex)

Michael suggests yet another workaround for those who want to place their ads outside the loop (a common occurence) in the form of the following code:

is_preview): ?>
// Paste your AdSense code here //

HOWEVER, because of the problems with the is_preview function being quirky in WP 2.0, these workarounds don’t always work and in the words of EUGENIUS, “It looks like until is_preview is fixed, don’t put adsense on the WordPress (2.0) blog.”

To me, I find this unbelievably unacceptable -with the given propensity for the majority of bloggers these days to utilize Google AdSense ads on their blogs, I simply cannot understand how it is possible that this was not resolved prior to WordPress 2.0′s being released, and is reason alone not to use it (never mind upgrade your existing installations to WP 2!) And shouldn’t there be a simple checkbox to just turn live preview off for those of us who would rather have AdSense ads working on our site than see a live preview of our post?? How hard would that really be?

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!

When I tried the same thing on a different post, I had a similar experience where clicking ‘Post’ took me to the messed up screen where everything looked like crap and I had to enter in the image code, and this time after doing that it took me back to the original post and the comment DID show up in the comment list.

Some very bizarre behavior going on, only semi-reproducable, and what’s with the captcha after people click ‘Post’ and the messed up template???

Any other TypePad users experiencing this problem??

“Many people knew that it was terribly broken. Many people begged on the wp-hackers list, the wp-forums list, the wp-testers list, and at the last IRC meetup to get the release delayed The release candidates were severly broken for a number of people, the rate of bug reporting and committing over the past two weeks is staggering. With all the changes going in, nobody stopped to take the time to test for regressions caused by the changes. Its 1.5 all over again.”

One commenter, Olly, pointed out:

“To be fair to them they have the problems that most commercial developers of popular software find, and that’s that no matter how much beta testing they do, the program will inevitably get hundreds of hours more use on the day of release than they could possibly to in the whole of testing.”

To be clear, these are indeed problems that even commercial developers face. And having worked for several years as a Software Quality Assurance Engineer for a major software company, I can tell you for a fact that expensive commercial software ships with MANY known bugs. The sad truth is that there is no such thing as bug-free software. Introducing new features, and even performing bug fixes, often break existing features (which is why regression testing is so critical). However, in the commercial software world, even when the programmers and the testers are wanting to push back the release date, it’s often the marketing department that controls when the software ‘goes gold’ – unless you found what was known as a ‘stop ship bug’, which would only be a bug that would be easily encountered by a regular user AND would be bad enough to crash either the program or their entire system. Beyond that, it was do whatever it takes to get the product out the door on time (even if that means working yourself to death), and sorry ’bout the bugs that still remain.

Nonetheless, even with the idea of being ‘bug-free’ being thrown out as an impossibility, it still stands to reason that users can only tolerate a certain degree of bugginess in a product before the uproar starts. And if many of those bugs turn out to have been known for weeks or months before the release, it does beg the question as to WHY was this product released so early? Given that it is an open-source, community backed FREE piece of software, there is no monsterous marketing team breathing down your back to finish the software that they already SOLD to many customers (and promised them a ship date). There are no numbers that your sales team has to make for any particular quarter, and no shareholders to appease. So far as I can tell, there is no monetary reason to deliver the product before it is truly ready.

Also, I don’t know how open-source projects (and WordPress in particular) work when it comes to Quality Assurance – is there even a QA department, or is everyone associated with the project just expected to do continual bug testing and keep their eyes peeled for problems and anomilies? If it is the latter, that could explain somewhat why there are so many more bugs being found now that the release version has been delivered. There’s more to software testing than just looking for bugs. It involves creating test plans, regression testing, negative testing (wherein you do things with the software that you’re not supposed to and see if it handles the problem gracefully), etc. And different people need to be assigned to different areas of the software so that they are focused and really become experts in their area. It was hard enough to do with a team of well paid developers – I honestly don’t know how you get that done when it’s all volunteer effort (although I’m not saying that the WP team hasn’t incorporated all of these areas of testing as I’m not in a position to know).

But given that it is an opensource project, and apparently reliant on much of its userbase for unearthing the bugs, it would behoove both the WP community and the WordPress team to provide clear and easy to use directions on how to search for a bug in Trac and, if it’s not already listed there, enter it yourself. I’d venture to say that less than 5% of users know about Trac (WordPress’s bug tracking software), nevermind how to submit a bug they’ve found. (I just submitted my first bug: Ticket #2218: Pop-up window for inserting hyperlinks truncated on FireFox 1.5)

On wordpress.com, there is a handy little ‘Feedback’ button that appears on every admin screen designed for sending ‘bugs and hugs’, which I though was really great. I don’t know why that was omitted from WordPress 2.0 – it’s a great way for the WordPress team to interact with those WordPress users who don’t hang out in the support forums, etc.

In sum, any software project of this scope and with this large of a user base is extraordinary challenging to QA, even in the commercial world. I’d imagine it’s that much more difficult to do when everyone is working on a volunteer basis. That said, open source software has a luxury that commercial software doesn’t in that you don’t have to get the product out by a certain date in order to meet your numbers for a certain fiscal period. Any .0 release is a major release, and should have enough new features and bug fixes as well as improved existing functionality to entice existing users to upgrade. As TheBisch has mentioned, I’m not sure the features in 2.0 are compelling enough to get existing users to upgrade, especially when there are so many bugs and broken plugins, not to mention that it is likely that we’ll be seeing 2.0.1 and 2.0.2, if not 2.0.3 coming down the line shortly and have to upgrade again and ugain, all with potential upgrade fiascos (after all, that’s what we experienced with the 1.5 release, and that one seemed more stable than 2.0…) Which leaves me wondering – why was WordPress 2.0 released when there were people purportedly begging to push back the release date until more bugs were resolved??

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.

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.

If you’re experiencing upgrader’s remorse, you can use this script to get your WP install back down to 1.5

I haven’t personally had a chance yet to do either a clean install or an upgrade, but will definately report my first-hand experiences as time permits.

As for what’s new in WordPress 2.0, there has been a major overhaul to both the user interface and the back end. WYSIWYG editing is now built into WP. The handling of uploading of images/audio/video for inclusion in your posting is streamlined and much improved. Posting is supposedly faster, and you can even resize the rich text editor’s box on the fly. Post previews now show how your post will look with your current theme applied. MAJOR improvements to spam handling. And of course, lots of bug fixes (among other things).

Here are some guides to help make your upgrade smoother – make sure you backup your database and your wp-config.php file BEFORE you do anything else!!!:

• Tamba2′s upgrade guide
• The WordPress Codex’s upgrade guide

Dinner’s on the table, so I’ve got to run – more for you on WP 2.0 tomorrow! AND HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!!

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.

Normally I’d say that’s a good thing, but apparently they’ve been a little overzealous in their cleansing of the system and many individuals are reporting that their legitimate, hand crafted Blogger blogs that they spent much time on have been deleted without warning or explanation.

The English Guy has a post entitled Google/Blogger Deleting Real Blogs that I’d highly recommend reading if you’re a current Blogger user or considering using their free service.

A thread at the Blog Party forum suggests that Google is targeting bloggers that have multiple blogs which link to each other. This is a tactic which many legit bloggers do and is a major part of how the whole blogosphere works. It is also a tactic that is used by sploggers. But that in and of itself should not be a reason to go on a search and destroy mission for all bloggers who interlink their sites. The logic in that is faulty – just because a tactic is used by sploggers doesn’t mean that everyone who uses that tactic IS a splogger.

So if you’re using Blogger and you have multiple blogs which you like to link to each other, you might consider porting your posts over to another system, such as TypePad or WordPress.com, before you wake up one day to find your blogs gone and have to go through the nightmare of trying to reach support personel (which has been reported to be very difficult) and proving that your blogs are legitimate.

Consider yourselves warned..

I just spent the entire day working on updating my comprehensive wordpress theme list, and it’s now up to a whopping 463 wordpress themes!

When I first started the list, I never guessed it would grow to be so large! I thought we’d hit a huge milestone when we crossed the 200 mark. Now we’re at 463 and growing — way to go to the wordpress community and all the theme authors that so generously have shared their work with us!

Color me blown away!

Update: The theme list now contains 615+ WP themes and growing!