Nov 22
Now there are two panes At Del.icio.us — recent bookmarks on the left, popular bookmarks on the right.
Here’s the home page when you’re logged out…
And here’s the appearance when you’re logged in….
Nov 22
Yesterday I was at Digg.com and there was buzz over Wordpress.com that is already out of beta and is now open for registration. Of course I look at the website and I saw that it is now open for registration. Without wasting any minute, I registered some subdomain and I looked inside its features.
At the Dashboard, the topmost options are: Write, Manage, Links, Presentation, Profile and Options. It seems like an early version of Wordpress 2.0.
Write includes Write Post and Write Page. Under this option you can write your entries and pages as usual. The way the options are presented are now different. There’s no more “Advanced Editing” feature because everything is already there at your own disposal. Even the upload image is now in the Write Post section which makes image upload a lot more convenient. After you have uploaded your image, the upload form will automatically create a thumbnail and when you drag it to your visual rich editor it will be added immediately in your post. If you click the thumbnail it will create “Link to Image” and “Use Full Image” that you can drag to visual rich editor too. “Link to Image” will create a link to your image while “Use Full Image” will use the full size image instead of the thumbnail. You can delete the image using “Delete”. Categories can be easily added on-the-fly in Write Post as well. Options like Trackbacks, Custom Field, Password-Protect, Post Slug, Post Status and Post Timestamp are also available here.
In Manage section, you can manage your posts, pages, categories, comments, referers and spam protection using Akismet.
Nothing has changed in Links. Here you can manage links, add links, organize links in categories and import links.
Presentation is very limited in Wordpress.com version of Wordpress because it only allows you to choose from pre-defined list of themes. Currently there are only 9 available themes. However the default Wordpress theme can be altered using “Current Theme Options”. Unfortunately, this is limited to header only. If they will add theme editor similar to Blogspot and Tabulas, that would be awesome. This is also the disadvatange of Wordpress.com because you cannot add plugins and advertisements in your account… for now. Perhaps in the future version of Wordpress.com, those options will be available.
Under Profile, (take note it is singular) you can only modify your account. It’s just a single user account. This is very disappointing because Wordpress is well known for its multi-user support while this version of Wordpress in Wordpress.com does not support multi-users. Well, that’s probably a way of enticing users to get a full version of Wordpress at Wordpress.org and host their own blogs.
Options allow you to customize your general settings, similar to previous versions of Wordpress. It irriates me that you cannot change the e-mail address used in administrative purposes. Once you registered your blog in Wordpress.com, there’s no way to edit the initial e-mail you used in registration! What if you are going to hand your blog over to someone else? Your e-mail is stuck in that blog. Although you can change your e-mail under Profile section, I think that users should be able to edit the e-mail used for admin too.
So in summary, the only thing I don’t like in Wordpress.com is its inability to edit templates, no multi-user and fixed admin e-mail. Adding plugins is not really necessary but I really thought this free blogging service supports multi-users and template editing because I was too familiar with Wordpress already and I thought it comes by default. Having no option to edit the admin e-mail is just annoying. These shortcomings are very disappointing for a seasoned Wordpress user but new bloggers will find Wordpress very attractive. And because it is very new you might be able to reserve your own subdomain. Take note however that once you have created your subdomain, there’s no way to delete them yet, and you can’t register another blog using an email more than once, so be careful on choosing your subdomain.
Wordpress.com is very new, so expect that it will have more improvements within several months. In the meantime, Wordpress 2.0 Beta is already out, so if you want to try it, download it from Wordpress.org and install a test blog now.
Link:
Wordpress.com: http://www.wordpress.com
Technorati Tags: Wordpress.com, Wordpress, blogs, blogging, free
Nov 21
Yesterday, (November 20) Microsoft celebrated its 20th birthday. Twenty years after the initial release of Windows® 1.0, we have witnessed how Windows transformed from one version to another.
My first encounter with Windows was Windows® 95. I was able to play with computers running Windows® 3.1 back in elementary school days and it was too dull to look at. Windows® 95 improved a lot of Windows® 3.1’s shortcomings. Even though it is slow, it was intuitive (take note it was considered fast during those time)! It has the best support for softwares and games, which I really liked. I installed a lot of kiddie games in my ancient Pentium 1 machine. MS-DOS was still widely used in applications during those days and internet was just on its way. I bought my second PC with Windows® 98 installed in it, and the GUI of Windows® 98 is a lot better compared to Windows® 95. It ships with so many bundled applications and default softwares like media player and internet browser. I was just building my interest in computing back then. I hated Windows® 98 because it gave my PC a lot of problems. I started using utilities to clean up my PC but it was useless. Apparently, using Windows® NT was not the best solution as I could not install my precious games in my PC, so I adopted Windows® ME. And so Windows® ME came…it was more like a curse than a blessing. It’s the most bugged Windows ever after all. I was introduced to Linux after several months; my very first distro was RedHat 6.0. Its functionality was still far from Windows but I gained some interest in alternative operating systems. Soon I realized that Windows is unparalleled not only in UI, but also in customer base (of course, it is supposed to be fool-proof OS). With my 3rd PC on its way, running in Pentium 4, I got Windows® XP soon. I guess I still can’t use a full-pledged Linux until this very moment. Windows® XP provided the biggest upgrade since Windows® 98 and became my prefered OS. It is very stable compared to Windows® 98 because it boasts new kernel derived from Windows® NT / 2000. I still think that Windows® is the best OS for normal day to day computer activities. I reserve Linux for specialized computing.
Windows became part of my life for at least 10 years already; Linux, only 4 years (obviously I have a lot of catching up to do with Linux) but my point here is — the ubiquitous Windows operating system managed to become the number one software I use everyday without me acknowledging it. I’m probably not in the IT industry today without Windows (well, perhaps Linux would but the chances are very slim).
Now, time for trivia! DownloadSquad has 20 interesting trivia about Windows® 1.0. It’s worth checking out.
Links:
20 things you didn’t know about Windows 1.0
Windows Desktop Products History
Nov 21
All the best PHP Editors reviewed; with voting.
(At the time of my posting, I seems that the site is down because it got hammered with a lot of users coming from Digg)
Nov 21
Sun Java Studio Creator 2 is so cool. I had the privilege to download it because I registered at Sun’s Early Access program. It seems that Sun is aiming at Visual Studio. Take note, this IDE is free! This Java IDE functions like Visual Studio with drag and drop feature and automated code generation. It supports a lot databases and features intellisense. It really behaves like and looks like Visual Studio IDE. Not only that, it is also meant for rapid deployment! It comes with different export containers so you can deploy your web archive file (WAR) or servlets without any code modifcation. That’s the good thing about Java — you are forced to code with standards.
Link:
http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/javatools/jscreator/index.jsp
Flash presentation of Java Studio Creator 2
Technorati Tags: Java, IDE, J2SE, J2EE
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