WordPress 2.6.1 was released today and contains various bug fixes. Although it isn’t necessarly required, I would recommend updating, especially since it fixes a bug that could cause the Admin pages to slow down quite a bit.
I run the latest bleeding edge version of WordPress (which is currently the development of WordPress 2.7, slated for a November release) on the blog, so I have no need to upgrade. However, if you’re experiencing any quirks with 2.6, you should upgrade to 2.6.1
Today, the WordPress app for the iPhone was released. I just installed this App, and it appears to work well. It’s defiantly useful if you’re away from your computer a lot, but still want to blog regularly (however, typing a long blog post on an iPhone might be a little tiresome). If you’re going to use the App, make sure that XML-RPC Publishing is enabled in your blog under Settings > Writing (the App will tell you if it isn’t). WordPress for iPhone is free from the iTunes App Store and requires iPhone firmware version 2.0 and works on the iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPod Touch. You need WordPress 2.5.1 or higher or a WordPress.com account. Here’s some screenshots of the WordPress iPhone App (click for larger view):
WordPress for iPhone | Download Now (opens in iTunes)
WordPress 2.6 has been released! Some of the new features include:
It is recommended that everybody using an older version of WordPress to upgrade as soon as possible.
If you’re a user of Twitter you know that uptime isn’t one of it’s features. Recently, I’ve become frustrated with this fact. Last month, I signed up for Twitter-competitor Plurk. Today, I started to actually use it, and I’ve grown to like it.
Plurk has quite a few advantages over Twitter. Such as almost always being up, a nicer timeline presentation and more features. Not to mention new features being added constantly, unlike the seemly stagnant Twitter feature-base. However, one thing Plurk currently lacks is a documented API, but I’m sure that’s in the works.
With more and more Twitter users starting to use Plurk, I think that Twitter should watch it’s back because Plurk’s going to be hot on it’s heels.
As many people who use WordPress to power their blog know, WordPress’ built-in search isn’t exactly as useful as you’d expect it to be. Recently, I’ve become quite frustrated with this fact.
So, a couple of days ago, I decided to setup Google Custom Search and see how I like it. It was fairly painless to setup, and I had it up and running in less than 5 minutes. I decided to host it on my domain, instead of directly on Google, so that I would be able to style it to look the same as my blog.
I’ve found Google Custom Search to work much better than WordPress’ built-in search. It returns more relevant results, and doesn’t provide you with tons of pages that are hardly relevant to your search terms. I’ve decided to completely replace WordPress’ search with Google Custom Search, and you can now use it in the sidebar of this blog, or from right here.
I’ve also made the meta descriptions of post pages to be relevant to what the post is about, and also blocked Google from indexing some pages (such as yearly/monthly archives and category pages) that contain duplicate content. So, in the next coming weeks, as Google reindexes pages in my blog, the search results should become even more useful (and not contain links to yearly/monthly archives and category pages, which aren’t really that useful if you’re searching for something).
What do you think about Google Custom Search, and do you think it works better than WordPress’ search?
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