Dezignus.com has released a slick looking set of glossy blue vector icons. These icons have a set transparency between 70-80% which means you can use them on a white shape or white background layer. Using them on a dark background may show some white edges. The size of the icon pack is 1.2 mb and comes in the following formats: eps + png with transparent bg.
Thanks to Utahcon who sort of started the train, I’ve decided to create a forum for WordPress based group projects. As you can see from the image above, we have already started working on developing a way for the Codex to be printer friendly or at least provide a PRINT link on Codex articles. We have also begun to work on creating a Recent Posts hack that displays posts that are not on the front page. For example, my recent posts plugin shows the last 5 posts I’ve published on this blog. However, this is a moot point as those 5 blog posts can be seen by scrolling down the front page. The plugin hack we are working on would display posts that were on the second page of WordPress, not the first. So far, we are making progress, but we are still short of having a working solution.
I thought this would be an awesome idea. Instead of one person putting together a plugin or coming up with a solution, we can have multiple people participate until the project is completed. I consider a project completed as being one that has a working, tested solution.
I do have a few guidelines setup in the forum which describe how I want the group projects section to be managed:
The Group Projects Section of the forums will house all of the various group projects that are created by you and myself. If you are going to start a group project, please use a very descriptive thread title so that we can understand at a glance what the group project is.
Each forum thread within this section of the forums will be a single group project. Anyone and everyone is encouraged to participate in the project until that project has been completed.
Do not post anything in this forum that will not be a group project, if you do, the thread will either be moved or deleted.
Please register an account on the forums and participate in the various projects and also, let me know what you think of the idea.
The WordPress.org team has released an official update to WordPress dubbed 2.3.3. This update fixes a serious security flaw that was discovered within the XML-RPC implementation. By using this flaw, a specially crafted request would allow any valid user to edit posts of any other user on that blog.
The team also managed to place three bug fixes into the patch which can be viewed here. These types of releases for WordPress.org are serious. No, the world will not end if you do not upgrade. However, you are putting your site at an increased risk of being exploited. As was reported by me on WeblogToolsCollection.com, malicious users are in fact taking advantage of the flaws found within the WP-Forum plugin. If you are using WP-Forum, you are encouraged to disable the plugin until a security patch has been released.
Visit WordPress.org to see the complete details regarding this release.
For those of you who do not have access to the Coast To Coast AM Streamlink service already, or for those who can not catch the program when it airs live, your in luck. Coast To Coast AM is doing a free streamlink week. Usually these promotions only last a weekend, but this time its seven days. For those of you who don’t know, Coast To Coast AM is a live talk show radio program that airs every night between the hours of 1 A.M. EST to 5 A.M. EST that is broadcast across the world. Topics that the show covers include: aliens, ufos, abductions, dreams, alternative medicine, bigfoot, cryptozoology, lochness, astronomy, time travel, physics, ect. If it’s interesting and requires intelligence, these guys talk about it. You won’t find anything mainstream here. Sure, the guests and their theories can be nutty at times, even down right hilarious. But the information that is presented on this show is generally not covered or discussed anywhere else within the magnitude of Coast To Coast.
To Mike, Mark, and anyone else interested in this sort of thing, I highly encourage you to take full advantage of the free streamlink service this week. I would be very interested in knowing what you guys think!
We’re happy to announce an upcoming Free Streamlink ‘Week’ running from Wed. Feb. 6th through Sun. Feb. 10th. Participants will have a chance to test drive our subscriber package, including podcasting current shows, and downloading recent favorites. Join us here at 7pm PT on Wed. to start experiencing the excitement and convenience that Streamlink offers!
According to Ryan Boren, one of the lead developers behind WordPress has announced that the Automattic Dev team is considering a change to the WordPress.org development cycle.
We are considering building this extra time over the holidays into our roadmap. This would mean one less release per year. We’d release in Spring, Summer, and Fall, and then again in Spring of the following year. With six months of development time, the Spring release would contain the bigger features that don’t fit into the shorter Summer and Fall release windows.
I’m actually hoping that they go through with this decision. I’m thinking that the extra development time will help to decrease the amount of bugs in the Trac. You know, those pesky things that are more of a nuisance than an actual bug. This dev period would also give individuals more time to CATCH UP. You shouldn’t be far behind as far as versions go anyways, but the extra time could be beneficial.
I’ve been giving the forum idea some second thoughts and have decided to bring them back online, right were we left off. With my new interest in WordPress, I have created an entire section in the forums dedicated to various aspects of the open source project hoping that this will help build an awesome community of WordPress users. I’ve since replaced the link to the forum to the top navigation bar of the blog. If you don’t feel like moving your mouse that much, you can check out the forums here.
I’ve also created a child forum for WordPress weekly so be sure to check out the forums again and lets see if we can’t make this forum rock the house.
Just wanted to remind you that there will indeed be an episode three of WordPress Weekly this Friday evening at 9PM EST on Talkshoe.com In between episodes 2 and 3, Talkshoe has launched a redesigned website along with a web based client. The web based client loads in a new window within your browser and gives you access to the Talkcast chatroom along with being able to listen to the show live. What does this all mean? Now you don’t need to install anything if you want to listen or participate on the show. I’ve checked out the web app and it seems to perform better than the actual client. The text now scrolls from the top to the bottom which is the conventional means of chatting. The show information is displayed on the bottom where it is easily located. The only thing I don’t like about this web app version of Talkshoe is the lack of a reply link next to everyone’s message. It’s hard to maintain and keep up with conversations with individual people.
At any rate, be sure to tune into WordPress Weekly this Friday evening. If you are interested in WordPress and keep up with the news and also want to be on the show, send me an email via the contact form which can be found by clicking the contact link at the top of the blog. If you are usually a guest host on WW please send me an email asap letting me know if you’ll be able to make it.
Using the visual editor in WordPress when writing a blog post is great. However, don’t you sometimes wish that you could add custom buttons to the editor to perform specific functions that are either lacking or hard to navigate to? There is great news in that, you can add custom buttons to your visual text editor by editing the quicktags.js file. (back this file up before you actually edit anything).
WPCandy has an awesome tutorial online which takes you through the motions of creating and then adding your own custom button to the text editor. For instance, when I want to use the H2 tag, I have to click on the button which brings down the advanced options and then select H2 Heading from the drop down box. Using this tutorial, I have created a button specifically for H2 so I no longer need to browse through the advanced buttons area.
The tutorial is not at all difficult so give it a try. Let me know what sort of options you end up adding to your existing toolbar.
Well, Christmas may be done and over with but Matt Mullenweg and company are apparently still in a giving mood. Starting today, every registered user of WordPress.com will see their upload space go from 50mb to 3,000mb. This is 60 times more storage than what was offered previously. According to Matt, if you were to get half that amount over at Typepad, you would have to pay at least $300.00 per year. The great thing about this change is that it’s free. No charge to current or future users of WordPress.com
Thanks to the hard work and behind the scenes efforts put forth by the Automattic team, you’ll no longer need to worry about how many kilobytes of data you have left on your storage limit. Also, for those who purchased a storage upgrade in the past to 1GB, that 1GB will be increased to 5GB at no extra charge.
Hows that for a late present?
Thanks to an SQL injection, the RIAA website took a beating from hackers earlier today. According to TorrentFreak, a slow processing SQL query was posted on Reddit. Reddit user’s responded by trying to kill the RIAA server but as they were doing so, someone ended up wiping the entire site’s database.
Since the article was published, the RIAA has restored their website but they apparently have yet to fix the issue. Check out that TorrentFreak article for pictures of what the website looked like earlier in the day. My favorite is the error messages RIAA SUCKS … XSS ftw?
Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff 