Word­Press 3.0 – code­name Thelo­nious – is now avail­able for down­load or auto­matic upgrade respec­tively. The 13th major release includes a new default theme called Twenty Ten, intro­duces new APIs, and merges MU and Word­Press. Even bet­ter, the devel­op­ers man­aged to cre­ate a lighter inter­face and stuff in 1,217 bug fixes and fea­ture enhance­ments. What I like most so far is the new bulk update for plu­g­ins. A com­pre­hen­sive list of the improve­ments is avail­able on 3.0′s Codex page. Go get it from the offi­cial site.

Over the last few days I spent a lit­tle time on Word­Press, inter­est­ing plug-​​ins, and some set­tings. First of all, I improved your abil­ity to com­ment on my ram­blings. Now you have the power to con­ve­niently for­mat your text. In addi­tion, there’s a new option to keep you up to speed, if you decide to pro­duce some text. This option is dis­abled by default but you can turn it on by acti­vat­ing the check­box titled “Notify me of fol­lowup com­ments via e-​​mail”, which is located right under the text editor.

Next, I finally cus­tomized my 404 error page. The default page may be nice but I didn’t like it all that much. This isn’t a final ver­sion but it’s def­i­nitely bet­ter than its pre­de­ces­sor. In addi­tion, I fixed a few things which were bro­ken in IE. Nat­u­rally, this site is opti­mized for Fire­fox but the lay­out should now be the same on IE as well. If the site looks really messed up you can always fall back on Firefox.

Of course, I installed a few addi­tional plug-​​ins and opti­mized a few lines of code, even though PHP isn’t a script­ing lan­guage I’m very famil­iar with. Let’s just say that I removed a few unnec­es­sary PHP/​MySQL calls by hard­cod­ing a few things as out­lined in this excel­lent arti­cle over at Dig­ging into Word­Press. Any­way, the site loads a tad faster and surely is a bit more con­ve­nient to use than it was before. Finally, thanks to Reg­is­ter Plus you can reg­is­ter more eas­ily now. Read more…

How to exclude an image from your gallery? That’s the ques­tion I’ve been ask­ing myself a few days ago. Obvi­ously, Word­Press doesn’t pro­vide a solu­tion for this action out of the box so I had to get some help. As usual, Google wasn’t shy and came up with a lot of sug­ges­tions. First, I tried to hack my functions.php accord­ing to this awe­some post from the devel­op­ment team at Code Greene. Yes, it worked out quite well but I didn’t like all the has­sle … and I kinda fried my functions.php because the pro­vided code was full of HTML enti­ties (you know, & instead of & and the like).

So, I had to look fur­ther and I stum­bled over a nice lit­tle plug-​​in called Cleaner Gallery. This plug-​​in mainly takes care of the invalid XHTML that Word­Press pro­duces when using the gallery short­code. Addi­tion­ally, it pro­vides the user with a few more fea­tures not the least of it the abil­ity to exclude or include any images from your gallery. Just install it, take a look at the pro­vided readme.html and there you go. Nice work!

… and I find myself doing what I should’ve done quite a while ago: updat­ing the blog. I recently upgraded to the lat­est Word­Press build and I took the time to change the theme as well. I’m not yet done cus­tomiz­ing the theme to its fullest extent, how­ever, it works and that’s what counts. There will be more posts in the future as I find myself hav­ing a lit­tle more spare time than usual. The header needs some work and I’m not yet sure about the side­bar. Well, let’s see how much time I’m will­ing to spend on that.

The ever obser­vant reader surely has noticed a few changes in this blog’s appear­ance. Indeed, I’ve been busy chang­ing a few things after upgrad­ing to Word­Press 2.3.3 (thanks, David). First, I’ve reduced the num­ber of cat­e­gories and I have added tags to every post. This will prove very use­ful once the tag cloud goes online. Sec­ond, I’ve changed the design in both big and small ways. Obvi­ously, the side­bar will now stick to the right side with­out you being able to change it with the press of a but­ton. Then there are a few small changes here and there which I think aren’t worth the effort of post­ing a detailed descrip­tion. Last but not least, this blog now always redi­rects to http://www.brainassassin.com/​, for instance, if you type brainassassin.com in your URL bar. This is to stop canon­i­cal­iza­tion.

That’s it for now. Through­out the days and quite pos­si­bly weeks ahead I’m going to change a few more things and do some fine-​​tuning. Com­ing up next will be a few minor mod­i­fi­ca­tions of my style sheet. I don’t really know what else is going to change so I can’t say. In any event, I’m try­ing to make this blog bet­ter than ever. If you have some sug­ges­tions don’t hes­i­tate and leave a comment.

Yes, I do. First, I promised to update my blog more reg­u­larly, almost on a daily basis, and then I fail to deliver. It’s not my fault, really. My new router – a Linksys WRT350N – almost made me go berserk. It just stopped work­ing after a few days of reli­able oper­a­tion. Noth­ing I did made my wire­less net­work work­ing again. After a hefty 30 min­utes call with a guy from the sup­port line it still didn’t work. They sent me a new firmware (v2.00.13(04)) and … still noth­ing. Hell, I down­loaded and installed the newest dri­ver for the NIC and … still noth­ing. I tried to install only the dri­ver … noth­ing. More out of fancy than rea­son­ing I installed the newest ver­sion of the Linksys Mon­i­tor­ing Tool and … noth­ing. Of course, some­how it didn’t install the nec­es­sary ser­vice. After fix­ing that … it worked! Even faster than before. Let’s hope it stays that way.

As far as my work is con­cerned: Last week we had to move our offices from one wing to the other, with only two days warn­ing. The move worked bet­ter than I antic­i­pated but there’s still some work to do. And then, there’s this blog I should work on (for instance, as Evil Spock sug­gested, there’s still no link sec­tion) before start­ing to blog for real. Well, I omit­ted my pri­vate life in which I was try­ing to buy and set up a HDD-​​Recorder for my girl­friend which turned out to be a rather nasty task. They sold us a device that doesn’t sup­port EPG although they told us so. Tomor­row we will hope­fully fin­ish this unpleas­ant busi­ness so that I can sleep well again.

What’s the mean­ing of this? Well, if every­thing goes accord­ing to the plan, this site should see some improve­ments next week and I will be able to keep my promise. Sadly, over the last three weeks noth­ing seemed to respect the fact that I laid out a plan …