Marcus Hamaker is The Sleepy Geek

If you are a WordPress admin and you are subscribed to the newsletters then you got and email from Matt yesterday. WordPress 3.0 IS OUT!

You’ve probably already seen the notice in your dashboards, so I’ll keep this one short and sweet:

http://wordpress.org/development/2010/06/thelonious/

3.0 is faster, stabler, and more secure, so you can focus on what matters (your audience) and let the rest fade to the background.

Custom post types, MU merge, menu editor, Twenty Ten theme, over 1,200 bug fixes… there’s so much to enjoy in this new release, we’re really proud of it. It’s the best WordPress yet, and available for a limited time for only free ninety nine. ;)

Tell your friends, help them upgrade, write new themes that use the new features, spread the good word.

Love,
Matt Mullenweg
http://ma.tt | http://wordpress.org

Find and good. But every time that upgrade my WordPress installation I am a little weary that my site will take a hit and poof an error will cause it to be inaccessible. Tie that in with this being a major upgrade and I was quite cautious. First I was wondering why yesterday after receiving the email I didn’t see the update option in my dashboard. Some of you may have noticed the same issue and I believe that the option didn’t propagate as fast as his email did. I thought about that for a second and left it alone because that meant that a ton of other people would jump off that bridge ahead of me. Then I can look over and see if there are any dead souls at the bottom before I took the leap. Woke up this morning and didn’t hear any horror stories so I did a backup. DO THE BACKUP because you never know.

I have done many version upgrades using the auto-upgrade tool when it pops up in my dashboard and have been impressed with how fast and how easy it is. The upgrade has never given me an error but this is a major version upgrade. Once my backup was complete I was willing to give it a shot and like with the past 10 auto updates I have done it went off without a hitch. Even with all of my extensions enabled it didn’t even hiccup, but follow the experts advise and disable them before upgrading. This will make sure that you see the UI updates and allow you to choose that over your plug-in if you so desire.

So the blog is at 3.0 “yay!” and here is what we get:

I hope you enjoy your upgrade and it goes as well as mine did.

Geek on!

I have written about Foxmarks in the past because it’s a great tool for auto-syncing your bookmarks across multiple computers. It is really one of the only reasons that I still use Firefox and not Safari or Google Chrome.

To the credit of the team at Foxmarks, they have been working on support for IE and Safari lately and have released versions of Foxmarks for Safari on OSX and Foxmarks for IE on Windows. Now comes a release of their new product called Xmarks. This is obviously designed as a move away from a Firefox only addin and allows them to market their product for other platforms. I am excited about this move because it allows them to move towards support for even more browsers. I think I might use Chrome if they would support it, and I already use Safari sometimes when on OSX. The best thing they can do is support more browsers because most people use a specific browser for a reason. Many of us our stuck with IE at work and to have that support is already a huge leap.

But let’s get it straight, they didn’t only change the name :) This is a complete rebranding with a completely new site. I suggest you take a look as you will notice a totally refreshed look. In an email they sent to me as I was already using Foxmarks, they listed these as their primary updates:

1. Smarter Search
Xmarks will highlight the three sites in your Google results that have been bookmarked by the most people; this is a quick and easy way to tell which sites are most valued by real people like you.

2. Site Info
Xmarks adds a small blue information icon in your browser location bar. Click it to learn more about the site you are on and see recommendations for the top five similar sites. This is a great way to uncover the best of the web.

3. Xmarks.com
Visit Xmarks.com from any browser to write your own site reviews and to see even more similar site recommendations.

They were smart to have included us in an early step of their rebranding and it is great for their planning. They have taken the time to create a simple survey for existing users to guide them to prioritzing their updates. If you are a user you will receive an email with your link to the survey, if not I would head over to their forums to voice your opinion!

It looks like Canada’s Rogers Wireless wasn’t content with merely jacking up its BlackBerry prices as it has just gone and made and a decision that is sure to aggravate plenty of smartphone customers

via Rogers changes minimum HUP length from 12 to 24 months for smartphone users : Boy Genius Report.

How many hits will those two words get in a Google search? Probably only an amount that the Google computers can compute and that is the reason that the people over at TweetDeck have incorporated Facebook support into an already popular Twitter client.

I have installed the version that now has Facebook integration. It is not available as a standard upgrade through the automatic notification feature but can be downloaded here.

So far so good in my books. They have not over complicated their integration with Facebook, limiting it to just updates of your friend’s statuses. This is a good move in my books. In a review that I did over the weekend (submitted today, I know) about PeopleBrowsr.com I mentioned that it is great because it is the same on every computer but the extra features above TweetDeck were not really a benefit to me. This was largely because their integration of other features seem overly complicated for a program that needs to react and be used very quickly. TweetDeck has kept the Facebook integration simple and thus it is very fast and easy to navigate.

Now I have a conflict… PeopleBrowsr.com for reasons mentioned here, and TweetDeck for it’s continued simplicity.

Have fun with the new version Tweeps!

So you all know that I was updating to WordPress 2.7 because I touched on it last week. I am glad I made the switch because the admin interface is really nice. I liked the old 2.6.x interface as well but the charcoal on white is very easy to look at. The layout has also been cleaned up. Seems like less on the page but all the same information is there. Better organization makes it seem much cleaner to the eye.

The image above is loaded with the Ozh Admin Menu plugin installed which I love. But the menu is still good if you don’t use it (shown below).

As you can see the menu on the left side is quite nice. The only reason I use the Ozh plugin is to maximize the area which I write in when posting. That helps with layout and design.

The upgrade went pretty much as normal. Their process is quite manual which is annoying and most likely why I don’t upgrade with every sub version. Their guides are excellent in explaining the manual process and I have never had a problem upgrading my version, it’s more a matter of reward vs. effort. This version is definitely worth it. I use a theme from Chris Pirillo so my front end layout is already pretty customized and this version didn’t break that, which is nice. It also means that it didn’t change much on the front page.

I recommend that you stick with the ‘complex’ instructions. The simple ones leave out a couple of details about how to backup that I would have probably done wrong, don’t take the chance!

Happy blogging :)

This upgrade looks exciting. Can’t wait to try it out.

Although tentatively scheduled for November, WordPress 2.7 looks to be as big of a release since WordPress 2.5, perhaps even bigger.

First Look At WordPress 2.7 | Weblog Tools Collection.