Just a quick note to let you know that Wordpress 2.5 has been released. I haven’t upgraded just yet, but it’s high on my list of things to do.  

Have you upgraded? If so, how was your experience? Any plugin issues?

Update: I’ve upgraded two blog so far with no issues.  Many more are scheduled.

Social media optimization is a big right now. There are a lot of sites that want to be featured on Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook or one of the many other social networks. However, getting there isn’t always that easy. The first steps though is ensuring you have social media links on your blog to make sharing that content easy. My favorite tool of the moment for this is ShareThis.

ShareThis use to be a plugin for Wordpres that injected social media icons, and an email this, link into your posts. It worked very well but was Wordpress only until recently. It’s since been re-launched as a service that’ll work across any blogging platform or website.

Signing up for a ShareThis account is really easy. They just ask for your email address and a password. This information is then used to track the ShareThis button performance on your site. It’ll keep track of who’s clicking which options, your most popular content and other visitor information. However, the reports are not yet available for the public but should be by the end of the year.

Well it’s out, Wordpress 2.3 has hit the internet and it packs a few great new features along with internal code cleanup and bug squashing. Here are a few of the highlights to the release.

1) Advanced Editor
The WYSIWYG editor evolves and now includes eleven new ‘advanced’ functions. Just hit the little colored squares icon on the right of the main toolbar and you’ll get the additional buttons.

Included are:
Format dropdown for header tags.
Underline
Align Full
Text Color
Paste as plain text.
Paste from Word. Fixing my previous complaint.
Clear Formatting.
Clean Up Code. OMG I think I’m in love.
Special characters.
Undo and Redo.

2) Tagging
Ultimate Tag Warrior is no longer needed now that Wordpress will do tagging. Actually, Ultimate Tag Warrior had many more features so I guess it can’t be ruled out all together. But the new tagging functionality is nice. I can see people getting confused with tags and categories now as they are very similar.

A nice touch is the ability for Wordpess’ tagging system to import tags from other plugins. The Wordpress team was really thinking on this one.

Have you ever had to install Google Analytics on each page of a website manually and wondered if you got every page? Or wondered if a new client’s site already had Google Analytics running? If you are a developer, than you know a quick peek at the source and you’ll know in no time. But for those that don’t know what to look for, you can install the GA? bookmarklet and it’ll do the checking for you and report back.

The GA? bookmarklet code is a small piece of JavaScript that simply checks to see if Google Analytics is installed on the page you have loaded in your browser. If it is, it’ll return “Yes, Google Analytics is installed on this page” if not, it’ll say “No, Google Analytics is not installed on this page.”

Install GA? by dragging the link below to you bookmarks bar or right click on it and adding it to your bookmarks.

GA?

Now, I had plans of making this a Firefox extension that automatically checked, or a Greasemonkey script, but both didn’t work out. There is more research to be done in those areas. If you already know how to make it work, please do tell me.

The Sphinn Dashboard Widget has been updated!

New in this version include the ability to choose between ‘Hot Sphinns’ and ‘New Sphinns’. You can also open two widgets and have each one showing different content so you never miss a thing.

The Mac widget can be downloaded on the Sphinn Dashboard Widget page.

[tags]sphinn, mac, dashboard, apple, widget[/tags]

Sphinn is showing up everywhere and, if you have a Mac, why not put it on your Dashboard with the Sphinn Dashboard Widget!?

The Sphinn Dashboard Widget pulls the ‘Hot Today’ and ‘New’ lists from the RSS feeds and displays them in the widget. This will help you keep up to date on the most popular or newest Sphinn topics without leaving your desktop.

A big thanks goes out to Fernando-Graphicos.com for putting up the basic feed reader tutorial.

Post any issues or feature requests in the comments and I’ll see what I can do.

Download the Sphinn Dashboard Widget. - Mac Only.

[tags]sphinn,mac,dashboard,apple,widget[/tags]

You can now add a Sphinn button to your site to let visitors quickly submit your post to Sphinn, the SEO Digg clone from Search Engine Land.

Here is the button:

Feel free to download it and host it yourself. It also does measure up to Danny Sullivan’s button standards.

Wordpress Code:
<a href="http://sphinn.com/submit?url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>"><img src="http://bloggerdesign.com/downloads/sphinn.png" border="0" alt="Sphinn" title="Add to Sphinn"></a>

JavaScript Code:
<script type="text/javascript">
var URL = window.location.href;
document.write("<a href='http://sphinn.com/submit?url="+URL+"'><img src='http://bloggerdesign.com/downloads/sphinn.png' border='0' alt='Sphinn' title='Add to Sphinn'></a>")
</script>

I’ll be working on getting the Sphinn button into the social bookmark tool too in the upcoming week or so.

[tags]sphinn,search-engine-land,social-bookmark,digg[/tags]

If you missed the announcement just before the Fourth of July holiday weekend, FeedBurner Pro is now free. That’s one of those good things about a Google acquisition; things become free. All users now get Pro stats and MyBrand for feeds.

Honestly, I never quite saw why the Pro features were so great. MyBrand is a cool thing, but I prefer to promote and use my own feed URL that has been redirected to the FeedBurner version.  I do this with the FeedSmith Wordpress plugin from FeedBurner.

The two additional stats items do sound nice though. Reach estimates the number of users that interact with our feed (including feed search engine or news filter sites) and we get better click though stats.

Now everyone is a Pro at FeedBurner thanks to Google.

[tags]FeedBurner,Google[/tags]

It’s been about one year since BloggerDesign launched and today we are celebrating with a brand new design & logo.

The new design is aimed at showcasing the content and cleaning up the interface a bit. This is especially noticeable on individual post pages. Overall we’ve gone from a three column to a two column design and have added more options in the same, if not less, space.

Design is always fun in the fact that getting all browsers to show the same thing isn’t that easy. However, the only area I’m seeing minor issues in is IE6 which only about 15% of the visitors use. I’ll continue to dig into IE6’s issues, but since it wasn’t a big one, I wasn’t going to hold up the launch.

As you browse around BloggerDesign, keep your eyes open for any problem areas. If you find one, post it below and I’ll take a look into a fix. Of course, you can post feedback in general, it doesn’t have to be bugs.

Safari 3, now for Mac and PC, recently came out in beta form. Included in this release was the ability for users to use visual editors also know as WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors. No longer do Safari users have to know code to make basic formatting in blog posts.

Safari 3.0.1 Beta on Windows XP

I’ve tested it in Wordpress 2.2 and it works great.* As far as I understand, previous versions of Wordpress don’t support Safari’s rich text editing. Testing it out under 2.0.10 confirms this.

I also tested out Blogger and had no issues. They seem to be on board with the Safari 3 crowd too.

TypePad however didn’t seem to support rich text editing with Safari yet.

With Safari 3 being so new, and brand new to the Windows world, blog software creators are working in Safari support as they feel the need.

If you use TypePad, or other software that doesn’t support Safari’s rich text editing yet, drop and email to their support so they know your interested.