MickMel SEO

WordPress 2.6 has just been released, and comes with a handful of very nice features.  They include:

• Word count display below Save and Publish buttons
• Theme pagination and a hot live preview feature
• The number of plugin updates available is now shown in the Plugins tab
• Ability to change the location of the wp-config.php file
• Multiple plugin activate/deactivate; improved sorting
• Admin page caching for faster speeds
• Improved galleries
• “Press This” bookmarklet for quick posting from anywhere on the web via your toolbar
• Post revisioning
• Drag-and-drop gallery sorting
• Multiple checkbox selection (on Manage pages) using shift+click

I’m out of town right now, but I’ll update in a few days and let you know what I think.  If you load it on your blog, leave a comment and let us know what you think.

I always thought there were two options for adding an image to a WordPress post:

1. Upload it through the image manager.
2. Enter a URL and “hotlink” it from there.

It turns out there’s a third, as described by wp-fun — upload and crunch directly from the net.  When you click on “choose files to upload”, just paste a URL in that box.  WordPress will pull the image from that URL, crunch it, and upload it to your server!

As an example, take this image from the Digital Earth Blog.  Rather than save it to my hard drive and then upload it to my blog, I can do it in one step.  Voila!

Between that trick and the excellent Fancy Zoom plug-in, you can add a pretty nice image to your post in just a few seconds.

Please note that this trick apparently doesn’t work on Macs, because they don’t have a filepath box.  For the rest of you, enjoy it!

Mickey

I’m not brave enough to try it, but Wordpress 2.6 Beta 1 is now available for those wanting to give it a try.  The new features, according to boren.nu:

• Post Revisioning
• A “Press This” bookmarklet for tumblelog style quick posting
• Caching of static files with Gears for faster Admin page loads
• A new and improved image editing dialog that offers lots of control over the images in your posts
• Theme previewing as seen on WordPress.com
• Built-in word counting in the post editor
• The ability to disable remote publishing for the security conscious
• XML-RPC API for changing blog options
• Better SSL support for the Admin
• Hierarchy-aware paging in the Manage Pages and Manage Categories admin pages.
• The ability to relocate your content directory
• The ability to move wp-config.php out of your web root
• Drag-and-drop sortable galleries
• Customizable default avatars
• Bulk delete, activate, and deactivate for plugins
• Check box range selection with shift-click
• TinyMCE 3.1.0.1 with lots of bug fixes
• jQuery 1.2.6 with some nice performance improvements
• jQuery UI 1.5
• Lots of bug fixes and performance improvements

If you decide to give it a try, leave a comment and let us know what you think of it!

This isn’t a new plug-in, but it’s new to me and I love it!

I recently converted one of my sites from a custom CMS to WordPress mu.  I manually 301 redirected some of the popular pages, but decided to let the rest of them die off.  However, I just installed the Redirection plug-in and I’m cleaning it up like magic!

It automatically logs 404 errors on the site, then lets you turn that 404 into a 301 redirect with a single click.  I point the 404 to the comparable page on the new blog, and things are quickly falling into place.  I should see much less of a traffic drop-off now that I’m using this.

It won’t be a terribly useful plug-in for most blogs, but if you’re converting any site to use WordPress, this is a great way to get things tidied up.

WordPress Expert points out a site running an alpha version of WordPress 2.6.  They also have a short list of new features appearing in WP 2.6, which include:

• Google Gears Support
• Identicons (default Gravatars)
• Wiki-style post revisions
• “Press This”, a meta bookmarklet.  An example is if you’re watching a YouTube video, you can click the bookmarklet have have a new blog post set up with the video already embedded.  Could be pretty cool!

Like most blog software, WordPress will ping a list of services each time you write a post.  I’ve spent the last hour or two refining my list and I think it’s pretty solid. Feel free to use this on your own blog if you’d like.  in WordPress, just go to [settings] and then [writing], and there is a box near the bottom that says “Update Services”.  Just copy and paste this list into there and you’re done!

If you have any other additions that you feel deserve to be on the list (or if you think some should be removed), please leave a comment and let me know.

The list:

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.feedsky.com/ping
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

If you’re like me and you’ve been using WordPress since before 2.5 came out, your wp-config file is probably missing a “SECRET_KEY”.  This is a new, one-line entry to the config file that generates a unique cookie for your site.  Some of the recent WordPress attacks have involved cookie spoofing, and this will help prevent that kind of thing.

As far as I can understand, WordPress 2.5.1 is completely secure even without a secret key.  I think this is just a pre-emptive move to prevent cookie-based attacks in the future.  Extra security is always a good thing.

Adding a key is very simple.  Just open up your wp-config.php file and add something like this:

define(’SECRET_KEY’, ‘8675309 abc 123 secret key dont hack me’);

You don’t need to remember the phrase, so make it as long and complex as you can.  If you want, you can visit this WordPress page which will generate a unique key every time you load the page.

WordPress 2.5.1 has just been released, and it’s strongly suggested that you upgrade as soon as possible, due to some security concerns.

Other fixes include:

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

Go download it now, or read about the full list of fixes (over 70 of them) here.

John Lamansky, the “WordPress Expert” has noticed a little snippet of text from WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg that implies we may see WordPress in the next iPhone.  The quote John used:

Mobile is really important. Blackberries, iPhones… and other things… are coming. And I’d like that to be in a core cell phone. They were hoping to do it in time for WordCamp and announce it here, but there is a device maker who is working on actually building WordPress into the device, so it’ll come bundled with it — which will be pretty interesting. I can’t say who it is yet, but there’s only a few out there so you can probably guess.

It sure sounds like the iPhone, doesn’t it?  As John said, even if it’s not bundled with the 2.0 firmware, it’s quite likely we’ll see a third party app that handles it.

We’ll find out soon - probably around June 9.

There are a handful of plug-ins that I use on almost every site of mine, most of which are listed here. Two of them, both written by Joost de Valk, have been updated today.

Robots Meta is now on version 2.9.5. There’s nothing on his site to show what the changes are, so I’ll assume it’s simply some bug fixes.

Sociable is up to version 2.6.2. Again, no changelog information was provided by Joost. However, I noticed that LinkArena was added to the list of sites. There may have been some other bug fixes as well, but I can’t say for sure.

After a major update like WordPress 2.5, I think it’s very important to stay very current on updates, as there are certainly some bugs being squashed.  I don’t imagine that either of these updates are crucial, but it can’t hurt to stay current.