For champions of the open source blogging platform, the latest installment of Wordpress has just been released. Aiming more for polish and bug fixing, it’s surprising the number of features crammed into this release.

Nicknamed “Baker”, most of the changes to Wordpress 2.8 are behind the scenes. The overall back-end system being easier to use for the person in charge of the site, as well as having more customisation features on the Dashboard and post listing pages.

There are also improvements to the Theme selection page – with the ability to search online, according to tickboxes relating to style and colour, for hundred’s of available to download themes. Simply click on the Add New Themes item in the Appearance tab and you’ll be searching in seconds. The Themes also have the ability to install into your blog without you having to upload them manually. The widget management has also been polished up to make things a little clearer and straightforward.

The code editor, if you really like to get your hands dirty with Wordpress, now features syntax highlighting, making it easier to navigate and edit your php & css files. Something programmers have been crying out for!

There are also many bug fixes (790 in all) and an overall speed improvement. If you use Wordpress on your site, I suggest you upgrade immediately! Techsnake.com had no problems and was upgraded within minutes.

For the uninitiated, Flock is an open-source social network browser based on the same codebase as Firefox (Mozilla/Gecko). Because of this it has the same speed and security of it’s better known cousin. I had used Flock for a short period about six months ago so I thought it was time I revisited the project, and do a mini review of the current features.

After visiting flock.com and downloading the latest version, you find during the setup (not surprisingly) that if you’re used to Firefox, there are going to be no great surprises here. After the install has finished you are given the option of importing bookmarks from the other browsers on your system (and has support for the current front runners – IE, Firefox and Opera). Once finished you’ll be surprised at the clean and interesting look to the browser which does set it apart from Firefox – that, and of course, all of the extra goodies.

Read all of this article…

Rather than sort out their own house, Microsoft in typical and historical style, have decided to explain why their take on "Web Standards" is correct and everyone else should listen and understand their point of view..

Written by Molly Holzschlag using Microsoft’s new apparently open source (with bitter after taste) Oxite, Microsoft’s new blogging platform explains to poor old honest Joe why they’ve misunderstood what web standards actually represent. Rather than being a system of continuity between browsers, apparently it’s all about a "tax" that business people have to pay..

No, open source software is free – if people are informed correctly about how things are rather than swallowing the regurgitated corporate Microsoft BS, they would be aware that if they moved away from the MS .net and IE ideal, things would be quicker, easier and SHOCK, maybe even FREE! Read what Microsoft think you’re thinking here… I guess if they’re trying to flog their blogging software, this article is a good example of comment, rather than fact.

The micro-blogging app, Jaiku, has moved from it’s previous hosted servers to a Google data centre, following problems with the system.

Jaiku, who had been acquired by Google in October of last year, had always planned to migrate their systems to Google’s servers, in readiness for integration with Google Apps. However due to some problems they had last weekend, they decided to make the leap a little earlier than planned. Jaiku is still in a closed Beta, but now allows current users to give out unlimited invitations. If anyone wants an invite from me, drop a comment on this post.

In a move that is surely showing the flailing business model of Twitter, the free micro-blogging site has axed the use of text message updates to most of it’s UK users, in a bid to cut costs.

An estimated $1,000 per year is the cost to Twitter for every UK user. And they’re not prepared to find a way to make money from these users – it seems easier to just cut everyone off.

As most of us know, Twitter has been suffering huge infrastructure problems with what seems like daily outages of some form another, with many users finding the service increasing frustrating. If it’s not the IM features, it’s the text or website blogging features that are down – every user of Twitter knows all too well the classic whale picture when things aren’t working as they should. With this recent cost-cutting exercise, is it too little too late? Or is it the sign of a system desperately trying to find a way out of a badly scaling web app?

During the writing of this article, twitter is displaying for UK users a box stating “important changes to our SMS service” on the left, above the twitter comments – which is a little ridiculous, as the infamous “We’re working to restore IM services to all users. Thanks for your patience!” message is showing the underlying problems of the site to the right of the page. Patience is getting very thin now guys – I know lots of people that have already gone elsewhere purely due to the frustration these problems are causing.

The micro-blogging site that’s big in America, has been used to good effect in the current US election race. Of course, it’s main users are the geek types, who like to check up on what other geek types are up to (check the links on the left!)

Well now 10 Downing Street have jumped on the bandwagon and started their own twitter feed. If you want to know the latest political developments as they happen, then head on over to twitter, create an account and start following. It will make you a more efficient person at slating the government in real-time!

I’m not sure if this is brilliance, or desperation, but I do know that I, and lots of other bloggers, get a free 1 year membership to Britannica online – which can’t be a bad thing for us. So how?

Surprisingly registering myself on the website for access was very straightforward. You simply provide the address of your website, your name & email address and away you go. And literally within the space of 10 hours or so I received an email with my promotional code – which makes me think the process is semi-automated – unless they have a huge team of people verifying websites. Once you have the email, click the link, register properly and you will be given access to Encyclopaedia Britannica for free (for a year.) So how useful is it?

Well my initial look is very positive. You can link to articles from your website and anyone will be able to read them without a subscription – which, otherwise, would pretty much make the idea useless. So, if I wanted to reference an article about IBM it’s as easy as clicking the link.

It makes more sense, as a blogger, to get balanced sources of information – and to always question a single source until it’s verified elsewhere. The amount of verification depends on the person. The facility to use Britannica online is a good one, but I think generally bloggers will use it for verification and so won’t link to the article directly. If this was the case with most people, they obviously won’t draw people to the website which is the whole reason for this promotion in the first place.

At last! Wordpress 2.5 has been released to an expectant blogging community. For those that use the blogging software (and skymonkey.org is powered by wordpress) then you’ll be glad to know the following features come with the latest version: Multiple file upload, WYSIWYG that doesn’t “helpfully” change your html code, plugin upgrades are simpler & a search system that looks at pages as well as posts. There are lots of other changes too, so if you’re a wordpress fan or are thinking of using the software, go here.

A quick post – while searching for a good “related posts” plugin for Wordpress, I stumbled upon this website that lists some very good and useful plugins resource for Wordpress users. And I found the plugin I was looking for too..[SHOW ME]

Obviously written because I’m a big wordpress fan – this very blog uses it, and I can’t sing the wordpress group’s efforts in creating an awesome piece of software. However, there is always room for improvement and it always amazes me how the users in the community can take the software and adapt it for their needs. Normally writing plug-ins for wordpress is enough, but sometimes they’ll shoe-horn the software to do something the developers never thought of. Have a look at this tutorial of usable tips and tricks, which includes the source code, to transform your wordpress blog into something a little different. I think I’ll have a little look myself… [SHOW ME]