News

Telligent Lacks Intelligents

Telligent.com Logo

Charles Stricklin has published an article today that shows off Grafiti essentially slamming WordPress. According to Charles, Telligent has purchased the keyword WordPressPodcast from Google Adwords. Upon clicking on the promotional landing page, you discover that the Grafiti CMS is THE alternative for WordPress. Telligent claims that Grafiti has a 2 minute install time when compared with the 5 minute install time for WordPress. Some notable differences between the two: Grafiti is based on Microsoft.NET and IIS technology and costs $199.00 which by the way, is a limited time price, so who knows what the final price may end up being.

The final verdict? Grafiti seems to be taking some pretty sharp jabs towards WordPress which don’t even make sense. Although they have a pretty aggressive advertising campaign going on, what they are offering with Grafiti isn’t even close to what you receive with WordPress. I don’t know who they are trying to kid, but who in their right mind would pay at least $199.00 for this stuff?

As Charles mentions on his blog, the major downfall Grafiti has going against their software is that it’s proprietary. This means you have to lean on Telligents shoulders and hope to god they never go out of business. In retrospect, WordPress is an open-source project filed under the GPL. This means, even if the major developers stepped away from the project, nothing stops you from picking up where they left off.

Ever hear of the phrase, You Get What You Pay For? Generally, it’s true. In this case however, you get $199.00 worth of crap. Enjoy.

R.I.P. Netscape Navigator

RIP Netscape Navigator

Looks like it’s the end of the line for the Netscape web browser. Security patches for the latest version will continue to be released until February 1, 2008. After that, there will be no more product support for Navigator 9 or any previous version. What’s interesting to note is that, the Netscape engineering team even tried to create a skinned version of FireFox with a few extensions installed, and even that didn’t help them gain any market share. It’s been a very long time since I used Netscape Navigator but for the longest time, it was the preferred browser of choice for my mom, mostly because of Composer.

Honestly, I think what Netscape is doing makes complete sense. Stop wasting time with Navigator and invest those engineering dollars into the Mozilla foundation. Now Netscape can focus on other things such as Propeller.

At any rate, R.I.P. Netscape Navigator.

AOL’s focus on transitioning to an ad-supported web business leaves little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be. Given AOL’s current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically-acclaimed products, we feel it’s the right time to end development of Netscape branded browsers, hand the reins fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox.

Click here to read Netscape’s death certificate. Also read the comments that go along with the article, for once, there is an interesting conversation that takes place.

First Episode Of WordPress Weekly

Talkcast Logo

The time has finally arrived where I will pop my podcasting cherry and produce the first episode of WordPress Weekly. WordPress Weekly will TRY to be a weekly oriented podcast that takes place every Friday evening at 9PM EST on Talkshoe.com. The easiest way I can explain the format of the show is by looking into the TwIT podcast by Leo Laporte. Twit otherwise known as This Week In Tech is a weekly podcast where Leo gathers other tech pundits from around the country to discuss technology news topics of the week.

WordPress Weekly however will be a show where I gather various bloggers who use WordPress as their cornerstone and discuss WordPress related news that took place during the week. Sometimes, the show may stray from the norm and we may cover a particular topic. Other times, we may open the mic and generally talk about anything blogging related. At the end of every show, every guest including the host (ME) gives out a blogging tip for the week. This tip can be a theme, a plugin, a hack, a blog you’ve come across, anything that would be of value to a WordPress user..

I am aiming for a relaxing atmosphere where WordPress Users can gather around for 1 hour every Friday evening and discuss the latest happenings with everything WordPress.

The first episode of WordPress weekly will cover why I and the guest hosts use WordPress. Why we chose WordPress over competing solutions. The floor will be opened on this show which means, we’re liable to discuss just about anything as it relates to WordPress or blogging.

These are the guests that are scheduled or tentatively scheduled to be on the show Friday. Ronald from the Readers Appreciation Project and Brad from Strangework.com. Steven Hodson of WinExtra.com might be able to make it but so far, he is still not 100% sure.

Listener Participation:

So how can you be a part of the show? Well, there are a number of ways. The easiest way is to create an account on Talkshoe.com. Then, download and install their client software. The Talkshoe software serves as a bridge of communication between the host, and his/her listeners. The software contains a chat room as well as phone number information to call into the show.

However, you do not need to install the software in order to listen to the show live. This Friday at 9PM EST, look on the front page of Talkshoe.com or click on the LIVE NOW button and look for the WordPress Weekly show. Instead of clicking on the JOIN IN button, click underneath where it says LISTEN ONLY. This will tune you into the live stream.

If you want to call in to the show via telephone, Skype, etc., use your phone to call 724-444-7444 and follow the audio instructions. *Note* In one of the recent updates to Talkshoe, anonymous calling is now supported. This means you can call in and participate without the need to create a Talkshoe account. However, if you have a Talkshoe account, your registered name will show up within the Talkshoe client letting others know who is speaking.

You can also use SIP clients such as ProjectGizmo or X-Lite. For example, when I use X-Lite to dial in, I type in 123@66.212.134.192 and then follow the audio directions.

Remember this information as it will be required when you want to dial into the show.

Talkcast Name: WordPress Weekly

Talkcast ID: 34224

Phone Number: 724-444-7444

Show Information:

I can not purchase a seperate domain for the show. So please look to this site for information regarding each and every episode. I’ll also be posting show notes on this blog after every show. Also, starting on Friday, I will be adding the TalkShoe Talkcast player widget to the sidebar of the blog. This allows you to listen to the show right from the front page of the blog. You can also keep tabs on the show and look through the archive if one is ever created by clicking here.

What To Expect:

I have no idea what to expect. I’ve never hosted my own show before so this might turn into a disaster. I’ve been a Talkshoe member for a very long time so it shouldn’t be too bad. I’ve seen other shows experience technical problems so I won’t be surprised if I go through some hardships through the first couple episodes. I’ve always wanted to tinker with this podcasting deal but I needed to find something I could talk about on a weekly basis and I wanted to do it with other people, not just by myself. The first show might be filled with a ton of bloopers, but hey, I’ll be there to have fun and to engage in some good conversations and I hope you’ll join us in one way or another.

New Poll For 2008

Thanks to the overwhelming response to last month’s poll which asked the question, “Do You Celebrate Christmas“? 31 of you said yes, 13 of you said no and for whatever reason, 3 people voted that Christmas offended them. I have a good idea as to who may have voted for that third option but I’m not going to give out any names. Wouldn’t want them to be stoned or anything.

At any rate, thank you for participating. With 2008 now underway, the question for this month is, “Was Your 2007 Resolution Successful?” As for myself, I promised I would drink more water and stop visiting fast food joints so much. Indeed, I was able to really trim down how many times I visit fast food joints but I was unable to drink more water this year. Instead, I think I drank even more Mountain Dew. I also promised myself that I would have a new job before the end of 2007 and that didn’t happen either. Well actually, if you consider writing for WeblogToolsCollection.com as a second job, then in fact, I was successful but at this point, I’m not going to count that as a second job.

So after voting, let me know if you think New Years is a good time to make empty promises.

Last Updates Of 2007

Year 2008

This will officially be the last post of 2007. What a year it’s been for this particular blog. Jeffro2pt0 started in May 2007 and since then, has continued to grow by leaps and bounds. I wanted to take a moment and thank each and every one of you for making 2007 a hell of a year for the blog. All of you who have subscribed to the RSS feed, commented on the blog, participated in the discussions and helped me out along the way have really helped to make this blog a success. I couldn’t of done it without you and I look forward to what 2008 may bring.

To illustrate the kind of year this blog had, I’ve taken the following screenshot of my AWStats page for the year 2007.

Blog Stats

There are currently 401 posts and 820 comments, contained within 15 categories and 1,872 tags.

Spam

Akismet has protected your site from 6,547 spam comments.

Stats In Total For 2007:

Stats Totals

New Year Means New Design:

As you may have noticed, the blog now sports a new design. It’s not really a major redesign, it’s more like a reshuffling/reorganization of content. I’ve removed one of the sidebars and have opted for one, large sidebar. I’ve also installed an Archive plugin and have turned the Archives into it’s own seperate page so that I could free up more space within the sidebar. I’ve made the shoutbox wider, moved the MyBlogLog reader widget to the bottom left part of the site, replaced the Recent Forum Posts module at the top left corner of the site with the Last 5 Blog Posts module and in 2008, I will add in a tag cloud. I will be condensing all of the categories into tags and from now on, blog posts will be organized by tags instead of seperate categories. Last but not least, I have widened the content area of the site by about 30 or 40 more pixels.

I also realize that the blog looks horrible in IE7, again. I will work on this during the month of January but until then, please browse my blog using FireFox.

On the backend of things, I have uninstalled numerous plugins. Most notable is the SideBlog plugin. I’ll stick to Twitter for those types of posts. You might also be surprised that I have removed the SezWho comment rating system as well as the Cliqin widget. It’s not that I don’t believe in these services, its that they weren’t being used to their fullest extent on the blog. So instead of keeping the blog polluted with stuff thats not being used, I opted to get rid of those features completely.

If you are one of the bloggers that joined Cliq or displays the Cliqin widget because of me, you now have the option to keep it published or take it off your own blog.

One other thing worth mentioning. A loyal RSS Feed Subscriber notified me today that the HeaderEntry plugin which adds copyright information to the beginning of a post when it’s being scraped or read through a FeedReader was actually keeping him from seeing what any of my posts were about. My guess is, he has his FeedReader setup to display this blog’s feed as a summary and that summary was nothing more than a copyright spiel. So, I have removed the plugin. Please let me know if the Feed returns to normal for you and thanks Lee also known as LGR for pointing this out to me.

The Forum Is No More:

The forum which is powered by Vbulletin and cost me $85.00 has been taken offline. The forum simply has not worked out as well as I thought it would. It’s actually had a negative effect on the blog. The forum has separated the forum users, from the blog users. I’m running out of time trying to update the forum to keep content fresh and there hasent’t been too many new members signing up as late. Therefor, I am going to go back to using the blog as a forum and not worry about having a seperate entity for the forum until I become uber popular. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. All of the forum posts and user data will be backed up and saved onto my hard drive so nothing will be lost. If I have a change of heart, we’ll start right back where we left off.

In Closing:

Thank you for your support throughout the year of 2007. I hope you and yours truly have a successful and happy New Year. Only four more to go until 2012!

WordPress Releases V 2.3.2

WordPress.org Logo

With just under a month to go before the expected release of WordPress version 2.3, Automattic has released WordPress version 2.3.2 which contains what else, security fixes. This release fixes a bug that would allow your draft posts to be exposed to the public. 2.3.2 also suppresses some error messages that would occur that could give away information related to your database structure. On top of all that, this fix stops information leaks in the XML-RPC and APP implementations.

As a little bonus, 2.3.2 allows you to define a custom DB error page. Place your custom template at wp-content/db-error.php. If WP has a problem connecting to your database, this page will displayed rather than the default error message.

For more detail on what’s new in 2.3.2, view the list of fixed bugs and see the changes between 2.3.1 and 2.3.2.

Special thanks to Alex Concha for his help on this release.

As with any new version, please upgrade as soon as you can, preferably after a fresh backup. As of this time, this blog has successfully been upgraded to 2.3.2.

Google Takes Feeds Out Of Search Results

Not sure how long this has been going on, but a post on the Google Webmaster Blog talks about the removal of feeds showing up in search results with the exception of podcast XML feeds. I for one am really happy that Google took this measure because it was becoming increasingly annoying, to browse search results, only to click on one XML feed after another without ever actually coming across the content.

As a webmaster, you may have been concerned about your RSS/Atom feeds crowding out their associated HTML pages in Google’s search results. By serving feeds, we could cause a poor user experience:

  1. Feeds increase the likelihood that users see duplicate search results.
  2. Users clicking on a feed may miss valuable content available only in the HTML page.

To address these concerns, we prevent feeds from being returned in Google’s search results, with the exception of podcasts (feeds with multimedia enclosures).

You can check out the entire blog post here.

Series Of Updates

No Shortage Of Birthdays

The Birthday Boy

I’d like to start off this post by saying thank you to each and every one of you who stopped by to wish me a happy 24th birthday. I truly do appreciate it. As you can see from the image above, there was no shortage of birthday wishes to go around. What’s funny though is that, I receive happy birthday emails all year around. I only configure the correct birth date on forums or websites that I take seriously or that I know I will be able to be apart of. So during the year, each website or forum that I signed up to for one reason or another generates a happy birthday message on some of the most unusual days of the year. How many of you guys are reminded by your inbox that it’s your birthday?

New PC Build

Speaking of birthdays, I happen to receive two gifts that will make there presence known in the new computer I will be building for myself. So far, here are my thoughts as to what I’ll be building:

On my birthday, my girlfriend purchased me a Creative X-FI Audigy Gamer card from BestBuy for about 100$. Then, I picked up a 700 Watt, RocketFish power supply via the giftcards I received. Now that those two items are out of the way, here is what I need.

Case – Thinking about getting the CM Stacker case. This thing is big, roomy, not meant for LAN parties and also has a bit of style. 2 Huge 120mm fans for cooling and plenty of bays for expansion.

Ram – I’ve made the choice to purchase DDR2 ram instead of DDR3. Apparently, DDR 3 gives you high clock speeds but with higher latency. DDR3 is also pretty expensive.

SATA Hard Drive – This one won’t be too hard to find. A low storage SATA drive on New Egg. Don’t care who makes it.

Video Card – Still undecided on this one. But it will be an Nvidia based GFX card and I will most likely not be going in the direction of SLI.

Motherboard and CPU – Not sure on this one either except that I’ll be going Intel instead of AMD. Going the AMD route would be like throwing money in the garbage.

If you have any suggestions as to which route I should take as far as single graphics card solutions, motherboards, Ram, and Intel CPUs, I’d be willing to hear them.

Ongoing Forum Discussions

Not to be forgotten, we do have a forum attached to this blog for discussions YOU want to begin. I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you a few of the discussions that are currently ongoing:

What happens…? – Mark Lima, a brand new user to Forum2pt0 has brought up the question, “What Happens When Jeffro2pt0 Goes 2.1?

Got Some New Toys – This thread is for my PC Building project. Again, suggestions wanted.

True Life MMO Messes up family – I posted a link to a YouTube video where you can hear a child being scolded at by his parents for being obsessed with his computer. It was funny to me, but you have to wonder how many families are actually struggling with this issue of their children being obsessed with MMORPGS.

My Apologies

I have to take this time to apologize for leaving the blog go post less for a number of days. Apparently I, like so many others, have succumb to the holiday season. I’ve been busy spending time with family members as well as reading books and generally, just doing things other than blogging. I plan to get back on track before the new year. I’m also hoping that I can prepare a new years gift that I really look forward to hearing your feedback on.

Also, I’ve written two posts so far on WeblogToolsCollection which have bother garnered a good amount of positive feedback. I do have a few more posts in mind for WeblogToolsCollection that I hope produces the same amount of feedback, but we’ll have to see.

Conclusion

I’m reading, writing, and coming up with ideas behind the scenes. With the beginning of 2008 around the corner, I am trying to develop a timeline or series of goals that I would like to accomplish in the blogging world for the new year. I started this blog back in May and I can’t believe that at the end of 2007, I have the opportunity to write for one of the biggest blogs pertaining to WordPress.

I wanted to take this time to thank YOU, the people who have subscribed to the blog, the people who visit this site on a daily basis, those who contribute, either by sending me a link via my contact form or by leaving a message in the shoutbox, all the way to those who post messages on the forum. I really appreciate the sense of community you guys and gals provide at this particular blog. I love being around like minded individuals who contribute to conversations. Differences of opinion are welcomed here as well.

I hope each and every one of you had a happy holiday season. I hope you’ll be here with me as we progress through the year of 2008. What will happen to Jeffro2pt0 during 2008? I don’t know, but it sure will be interesting to find out.

Performancing Opens Up Nominations

Performancing Blog Awards

Performancing.com has opened up nominations for a number of categories to see who has the best blogs in the business. Each category will have one winner with two runners up and possibly a few that could be honorable mentions. The categories that are opened for nominations include:

  1. The Best Overall Blog
  2. The Most Influential Blogger
  3. The Best Blog Design
  4. The Best Blog Typography
  5. The Best Blog Name
  6. The Best New Blog
  7. The Best Blog Community
  8. The Most Improved Blog of 2007
  9. The Best Blogs You’ve Never Heard Of
  10. The Best Blog Podcast
  11. The Best Use of a Corporate Blog
  12. The Best Video Blog
  13. The Best Writing/Blogging Blog
  14. The Best Science/Technology Blog
  15. The Most Controversial Blog
  16. The Best SEO Blog
  17. The Best Celeb/Style Blog
  18. The Best Business/Money Blogs
  19. The Best Photo Blog
  20. The Best Sports Blog
  21. The Best Blog WebHost
  22. The Best Family and Parenting Blog
  23. The Best Political Blog
  24. The Best Food/Health Blog
  25. The Funniest Blog

Since I don’t have an account on the perfomancing website, I’ve deciding to post my nominations in the form of a blog post.

For Best Writing/Blogging Blog I nominate WinExtra.com. Out of the variety of blogs I read, Steves blog usually generates some sort of response out of me with each one of his posts. He tells it like it is and doesn’t attach any BS to what he has to say. It’s a good read and I keep going back which is why he gets my nomination for that category.

For Best Blog Podcast I nominate TheGlobalGeekPodcast. Dave Grey and his ASSORTMENT of co-hosts :) do a wonderful job producing a top notch, informative show each week. At least they try to do it every week, but sometimes you just can’t control certain situations. Whatever the case, TGGP is still near the top of my lists in terms of awesome podcasts that everyone should be listening to. This is why they get my nomination.

As for Best Blog Webhost, That one is pretty easy and I am nominating AnWebshoting. Not going to go into the details as to why I’m nominating them because I already did that in this post, Time To Pimp Your Webhost

As for the other categories, I don’t think I’ve been involved in the blogosphere long enough to provide other nominations for other categories.

If you have a performancing account, be sure to read this post or if you don’t have an account, you can do as I did and make a post containing your nominations while linking to the original story.