You may not be familiar with the company Tronical but you will know their work because they are responsible for Gibson’s Robot Guitar tuning systems. Well judging by this video it appears that Tronical are about to launch some standalone systems that can be retrofit to pretty much any guitar be it a Les Paul [...]
Category: Wordpress
WordPress Goes Real-time With RSS Cloud Support
Ever wish your RSS reader worked more like a Twitter client? Or even FriendFeed, where updates just appear in real-time? Well, that idea has been gaining ground for some time, and it just got a whole lot more appealing now that WordPress has announced support for RSS Cloud.
RSS Cloud takes advantage of the cloud element in the RSS 2.0 specification. Actually cloud has been there since RSS 0.92, but no one paid much attention to it until Twitter and others ushered in the idea of a real-time web. The cloud element is used to deliver push notifications to your feed reader.
That’s essentially the reverse of how RSS readers work right now. At the moment, most popular RSS readers poll sites to see when they have new content. Another, slightly better method is to wait for a ping from your blog to let the RSS reader know when new content is available. But as WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg notes in the announcement, ‘getting every ping in the world is a lot of work… RSS Cloud effectively allows any client to register to get pings for only the stuff they’re interested in.’
The result is that new posts from your favorite blogs arrive much faster using the RSS Cloud method. As Marshall Kirkpatrick writes over at ReadWriteWeb, the difference in wait times is like ‘the difference between checking your e-mail every once in awhile and using a Blackberry to get new e-mails pushed to you as soon as they arrive.’
Sounds good, no? More news, delivered faster. Well, the bad news is that there’s really only one feed reader that currently supports RSS Cloud — Dave Winer’s River2. However, with WordPress now implementing the cloud element in its feeds, some 50 million posts a week are potentially accessible to cloud-enabled feed readers, which should be more than enough to tip the balance in RSS Cloud’s favor.
Of course there are some competing specifications, like pubsubhubbub or FriendFeed’s SUP proposal, which both do something similar to enable push updates.
WordPress has already said that its working on other ways of pushing notifications to news reader, including pubsubhubbub, so while you may have to wait a while before your favorite reader enables support for RSS Cloud and others, the WordPress announcement has certainly added incentive. And, hopefully, it will give RSS readers a much needed kick in butt — let’s face it, RSS readers aren’t exactly hotbeds of innovation right now.
Indeed Dave Winer is trying to get popular Twitter clients to support RSS Cloud. If they do, they could well end up supplanting RSS readers as the way most people get their news.
We’ll just have to stop calling them Twitter clients and start calling them what they should be referred to as: news clients.
(Via Webmonkey.)
WP.me: WordPress.com Launches Short URLs
If you’ve got a WordPress.com blog, you’ll be pleased to know you can now share an itsy-bitsy-Wordpress-linky to each of your posts.
That’s right: WordPress has launched the WP.me short URL, designed for linking to your blog posts from space-limited sites like Twitter. It isn’t a general purpose URL shortener or rival to Bit.ly: it’s just for those on WordPress.com.
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg writes of the launch:
-WP.me is the only two-letter .me domain in the world.
-Every blog and post on WordPress.com has a WP.me URL now.
-These are all exposed in the
-It doesn’t work for any URL in the world, just WP.com-hosted ones.
-The links are permanent, they will work as long as WordPress.com is around.
-WP.me is spam-free, because we are constantly monitoring and removing spam from WP.com.
(Via Mashable!.)
Why Designers Should Learn How to Code
More often than not, designers have rightfully been accused of retreating into their cocoons of ignorance as soon as their work of creating a web design is finished, leaving the dirty and more hands-on work of putting it up on the web to developers. This apathy is prevalent not only in the web-building industry, but also in software and game engineering.
The hard truth is that the buck of development should stop with designers. For optimum efficiency, designers should not only be concerned with painting the bigger picture but also building it! In this article, I’d like to share with you some reasons why designers should learn how to code.
WordPress 2.8 Now Available for Download
WordPress has just released the newest version of their installable blog software: WordPress 2.8 – Baker.
The most notable addition would seem to be the ability to browse themes from within the WordPress Dashboard. With the Theme Browser, you can specify the color you want, how many columns there should be, and fixed or flexible width. You can then select and install themes match those criteria on-the-fly, without leaving the Dashboard.
WordPress 2.8 also offers a re-designed widgets interface, improved speed, and has fixed a reported 790 bugs. The download is available here, and the WordPress team demos the new features in the video below:
(Via Mashable!.)
WordPress 2.7 – 20 Must See Features
WordPress is quickly becoming the standard software for the majority of blogs. This fact makes every major release of the software seem like a huge event, but the thing is that this time it is. WordPress 2.7 comes with a huge number of changes, a good chunk of them making some older plugins redundant. This will be a huge upgrade for all blog owners.
The following lists 20 of the biggest changes coming, but all together there have been over 400 changes to the program this time around. Any way you slice it, there is a little bit of something for everyone in this release. Take a look through and you’re sure to find something that appeals to you.
Unfortunately this is only available for the blogs on WordPress.com for now, but it will be released for self-hosted blogs on December 10th.
What are the changes you are most excited about?
Comments
Close Comments On Old Posts – Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to continue letting comments come in on an old post, and it is a favorite trick of spammers anyway. WordPress 2.7 will allow you to close comments on older posts, eliminating the need for yet another plugin.
Comment Paging – Comments broken into pages instead of being a never ending bottom to your post.
Comment Replies From the Admin Section – A feature that has long been needed is the ability to reply to comments from your admin section without having to go to the front end of your blog.
Comment Threading – It’s not just admin comment replies that are getting love, but all comments will now be in a threaded format. Great for those long debates you get into about what ‘sux’ or why someone is a ‘newb,’ at last no one will be confused about to whom you are referring!
XMLRPC Comments API -Support for the XML-RPC protocol which is a simplified API that encodes your comments in XML and transports them via HTTP.
Keyboard Shortcuts For Comments -Once you’re in your comments, you can use the keys j and k to navigate through the comments. Once selected, some of the keys you can use will be ‘a’ to approve, ‘s’ to mark as spam and ‘d’ to delete.
Theme & Plugin Related
One-Click Plugin Installs – Another long time plugin favorite is going the way of the dinosaurs with the introduction of the ability to install plugins from the dashboard.
Plugin Browser – Browsing for plugins, one of the favorite pastimes of many bloggers, will be made easier by being able to do it without ever leaving your WordPress install.
Sticky Posts – There have been numerous WordPress plugins over the years to make a post ‘sticky’ so that it stays as the top post on your front page no matter how many posts you publish after it. The feature has now been built in to the core program.
Updating the Core WordPress – Yet another WordPress plugin finds its way into the core WordPress program. For those users who haven’t used something like Fantastico or Simple Scripts to install their blog, there will now be a more automated way for you to keep up with all of those pesky security updates.
Theme Update API Notices – You will receive updates when your installed themes are updated just like WordPress does now with plugins.
Greater Controls
Batch Editing for Posts – Ever needed to edit the tags for several posts, but couldn’t do it because of the work involved? Batch editing will now allow you to do mass edits of your posts so that you can make as many changes as you want to your blog no matter how old it is.
Column Control – On any management page that shows columns, you will now be able to choose which columns are shown and how.
Ping & Trackback Moderation – With the ever increasing wave of ‘splogs’ trackbacking your blog, there will finally be moderation of them in a more manageable, frame-like format.
QuickPress – Ever wanted to just do a quick post without having to load the entire write page? Now you can directly from the Dashboard page with QuickPress.
Recent Drafts – There will now be a module on your dashboard to get to your most recent drafts so you can quickly get access to your posts that are in progress.
Other Tweaks
Dashboard and Write Rearrangements – There have been significant redesigns to navigation and general layouts of the dashboard and write pages.
PHPXref – Ever go slightly loopy trying to make sense of PHP files? PHPXref will help you by making PHP into easy to digest documents that you can read through. All of this will be hosted on WordPress.org.
Image Size Tweaks – Thumbnail and Medium commands will stay the same, but Large will now be restricted to 1024 pixels, or the constraints of your theme. If you want no restrictions and post insane sized pictures, you will now be able to select ‘Full Size’ which will post your image at its original size. You will also now see the dimensions for each size next to the radio buttons.
Redundant Coding – Theme authors will be happy to see some changes to the wp_page_menu wrapper that will simplify their coding and add conveniences like making ‘Home’ part of the list.
Interested in more WordPress resources? Check these out:
WordPress Themes: ‘Top 12 Stunning WordPress Themes‘, ‘30+ WordPress 3 Column Themes,’ ‘20 WordPress 4-Column Themes,’ ‘30+ WordPress 1-Column Themes,’ ‘10 Unusual & Original WordPress Themes’
Plugins: ‘50+ WordPress Plugins for Multimedia,’ ‘30+ WordPress Plugins for Statistics,’ ‘30+ WordPress Plugins for Comments,’ ‘30+ WordPress Plugins to Get More Blog Readers.’
Miscellaneous: ‘WordPress God: 300+ Tools for Running Your WordPress Blog,’ ‘The 7 Weirdest and Wackiest Uses for WordPress‘
(Via Mashable!.)
Fancy Veho USB Microscope with 2GB storage
We have mentioned a few USB Microscopes before, but this new one takes the cake. This new microscope boasts a 1.3MP or 1600×1200 image resolution and up to 200x magnification.
Included is software allowing you access to store and share 2GB of your images online, and free to boot! You can even record video in AVI format. This would be great for looking at some of your damaged computer components or maybe just checking out what your Redbull looks like under the scope. Just don’t look at your co-workers nose hair, even if they ask you too. It’s probably not pretty.
The price is about $80 and is available from many places online.
(Via Ubergizmo.)
8 WordPress Plugins for Page Management
While the page feature in WordPress has been a mainstay of the blogging platform for years, it doesn’t get a whole lot of love from the programmers or plugin community. Here are 8 plugins that are compatible with at least WordPress 2.5 that will allow you to change their order, make sub-pages easier to navigate, add tags and more.
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