jeffhester.net

The good folks at Wordpress have officially released WordPress 2.5. It comes with a long list of nice enhancements, including a completely redesigned administration console that looks and feels great. I upgraded this blog in exactly five minutes, including the time required to upload the new files and upgrade the database. It worked like a charm.

One of the things I like best so far is the ability to auto-update plug-ins via FTP. It worked perfectly, and simplifies the process tremendously.

So far, the only plug-in that I’m not able to get running with 2.5 is also unfortunately one of my favorites: Ankur Kathari’s Gregarious social bookmarking plug-in. Everything else has worked like a charm!

Already running an older version of WordPress? Here are the famous three-step upgrade instructions.

I did some housekeeping here at jeffhester.net today, cleaning up some problems caused by legacy files being mixed in with the latest WordPress 2.3.2 stuff. In the process, I made a number of changes. One change that I particularly like is the inclusion of ContentRobot’s very cool iWPhone plug-in (see the screenshot for an example of how this blog looks on my iPhone).

I’ve also updated the theme using N.Design Studio’s Mac-inspired Glossy Blue. I’m very happy with the shades of blue and green, though I’ll probably end up creating my own version with similar colors and a wider layout eventually.

I’m currently using the following plug-ins (in alphabetical order):

Akismet does such a great job of filtering out spam comments that I don’t even bother checking for false positives anymore. It’s a must for anyone running WordPress.

Feedsmith is also an essential — if you are already using Feedburner. And if you’re not, why not? It’s free and offers great stats on who has subscribed to your content.

Donncha’s Flickr Widget makes it easy to add a badge to your site. I’m using it for now, but I’m keeping my eyes open for something with greater configurability. I took a look at Erik Rasmussen’s Flash Flickr Badge Widget, which offers the configurability I want, but it caused problems (the WP Plugin page turned blank upon activating). So the search continues. If you know of anything better, please let me know.

Gregarious is an awesome social tagging plug-in that I also consider a must-have for WordPress bloggers. It is clean, simple, highly configurable and pretty fucking cool. That says a lot. Dont’ think; just get it and use it.

The MyBlogLog Widget is really just a custom text widget. You still have to cut-and-paste their javascript code to get it to display, but it is a nice way to see recent visitors.

The Scrobbles Widget shows your recently played music. You’ve got to have an account on last.fm, but works like a charm and also highly configurable.

Alex King’s Twitter Tools are indispensible for Twitter users. It will show your most recent tweets, auto-notify your Twitter followers of your new blog posts, and give you the option of posting new tweets directly from your blog.

Viper’s Video QuickTags make it super easy to embed video content from YouTube and a slew of other popular video sites. No, it’s not particularly difficult to do it yourself, but hey, I’m lazy!

The relatively new WordPress.com Stats plug-in is also very nice. I’ve now got it installed on two blogs, and it seems to do a great job of providing all sorts of great data without any perceptible performance penalty. Nice.

And last, but not least, the venerable scalability powerhouse: wp-cache. If there was one thing I took away from this year’s WordCamp, it was that you mustuse wp-cache; it’s that good. I have it installed and activated, but not turned on. Next time I get dugg or slashdotted, I’ll quickly flip it on and let the server smoothly handle the extra load.

So there is the update for Sunday. I still have a long list of projects to write about, but I’ll get to that after dinner.