Lost In Cyberspace

Archive for January, 2007

 The big release of WordPress 2.1 has arrived, nicknamed "Ella", and I think I have successfully survived, though to be honest I am never entirely certain if I have done the job quite right.

And this time I did it without any help from Mark Jaquith!

Understandably he decided to leave a major upgrade like this to WordPress.org, as he said on his blog:

No upgrade files for 2.0.x to 2.1.x Just a quick note to tell you that I will not be providing upgrade files for the 2.0.7 to 2.1 upgrade. Too much has changed . . . it'd be a waste of time. Just download the official zip file. I will, however, continue to provide these upgrade files for future 2.0.x releases, for those who are saying on that branch.

Hopefully he will be able to supply a similar service for the future smaller upgrades of 2.1, his service has definitely been a hit with a lot of WP users.

On the main site they also warned that a lot of the plugins may not work with the new install, so I expect a lot of developers will be busy this week upgrading their work to make it compliant with "Ella".

There is a list of working plugins being compiled over on WP.org, it may well be a good idea to keep an eye on this link.

I have only been using WordPress for a little while and already this is the second upgrade I have had to do, but as these are for security issues they must be addressed. A useful way to get these upgrades done can be found over at Mark Jaquith's blog where he provides a download that just contains the necessary files for each upgrade rather than the full .zip with the entire WP install that WordPress provide. Mark has been providing this service throughout the WP 2.0 series, let's hope he continue as we head into WP 2.1 in the near future. Thanks Mark.

One of the films I am most looking forward to this summer is Spidey 3, and I know that there are quite a lot of folks out there quite excited to find out about the villain Venom, but until now the studios have been keeping the look of this enemy pretty much under wraps. So take a look at this: It seems that the toy company with rights to the project, Medicom Toy Corporation, have released some shots of their Venom figure. I suspect there may be a few angry phone calls/e-mails over this one. Original source from EMPIREonline.

If any of you are returning to this site you may notice that once again I have changed themes, not that I didn't love using dark.cash but I felt happier with a right sidebar and I quite fancied a three column theme as well. I have settled on Zen for now, partly because I love the idea of the distinctive middle column. I feel that one of the disadvantages of a three column theme is that the eye can easily become confused unless everything is clearly delineated, and the layout of Zen avoids this nicely. Plus it's mighty pretty. It comes pre-packed with sweetTitles and iBox, two very nice plugins. I have had a few problems getting iBox to work properly, I think that there is probably a better way to implement it than the way I have at the moment but I will have to mess around with it some more. You can see the way iBox works with the image in my previous post: "Thank Fleck For That".

One of the tools that I have found useful lately is "Fleck", an on line application that allows you to make notes on just about any web page and save it to your account. You can then share these with others or just keep them to yourself for future reference. See screen shot: Fleck actually saves a copy of the page to your account to make the notes on, so it does not work on most password protected pages such as forums. I have found it very useful to keep track of various applications, widgets and items that I want to blog about at some point, or just to save a page that I want to read more fully at a future date.

• Watching: Ewan McGregor And Charley Boorman - Long Way Round [Special Edition]
• Listening: Robert Downey Jr "The Futurist"
• Reading: The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes (The Sandman) and EMPIRE movie magazine
• Buying: Nowt. I'm broke after paying the cats vet bill
• Most of the links will take you to amazon.co.uk if you want to purchase these items, they are affiliate links for my account. Any of the links taking you through to other sites where you can purchase the items are just provided for your convenience, not for any commercial gain.

At the moment I am trying out some of the widgets at widgetbox, there seem to be plenty of gizmos over there, some of which could be useful, or just plain fun! I came across them over at profy.com in an article on the growing use of widgets, there are also some other useful links over there that are worth checking out. As to the usability of the widgets, well at the moment I seem to be wrestling with them a little. They are probably idiot proof, which in my world is defined as being yet further proof that I am an idiot.