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This site, like many others, is powered by Wordpress. Today Wordpress 2.1 was finally released.

New features include:

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
• Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
• The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
• Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.
• New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn�t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
• You can set any �page� to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.
• Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.
• Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.
• More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.
• Pages can now be drafts, or private.
• Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
• The dashboard now instantly and brings RSS feeds asynchronously in the background.
• Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
• Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages.
• The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.
• A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.

Unfortunately, I will not be upgrading to 2.1 anytime soon as my host is still running on MySQL 3.23 and has yet to upgrade to version 4.0 which is required. I’ve been happy with my host but I may look for a more high profile web-host that supports wordpress in the future so I can avoid stuff like this. So for the time being it looks like I’ll be stuck with 2.0.x.

[10 Things You should Know About WordPress 2.1]
[Download Wordpress 2.1]

What are you doing? Probably the first question most us ask anyone when we talk to them. Enter Twitter.

Twitter is a web service that allows you type in what your doing at that exact moment and have it uploaded into an RSS like feed. You can see what your friends are doing and they can see what your doing. You get get friend notifications by either the web, have an IM sent, or SMS their cell.

You can send you updates via web, IM and SMS or if you like, you can use a standalone app like TwitterPost or a Dashboard Widget like Twidget. I prefer a combination of IM and the dashboard widget. One problem I have getting Twitter to work on my Blackberry Pearl. AIM uses SMS messages so I don’t want to use that. GTalk would be an option as I have it installed but Twitter only allows one IM protocol to be active at one time. I’m just waiting for a mobile Twitter site or a Java app. They even have a Wordpress Plugin that will post when making blog entries. i got pretty tired of it after a day or so tho. It was buggy and didn’t work well with ecto so I uninstalled it.

I found Twitter while trying to get my Lifestream working (which it still isn’t and cant seem to figure out why) and now al ot of people are starting to use it including Nick Starr, Thomas Hawk, Robert Scoble and Kristin Pishdadi.

Please feel free to add me, I’m at http://twitter.com/jadedhalo, and I’ll add you back.

If you visit the site you may notice something different and if you read via RSS stop by and pay a visit this month. Whats going on you may ask? Well…October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month and to help raise awareness the8thsign.com is going Pink for October.

Help spread the word by stopping over at pinkforoctober.org and better yet, go Pink for October on your sites also.

Ok, I admit it, I’m a statistics whore. I use Google Analytics since I’m Google’s bitch and Measure Map is closed for new accounts. For as little traffic I get, I still check my metrics everyday. It usually involves logging into my Wordpress Admin page and checking my reports page that Tantans plugin provides. Enter Dashalytics, a Dashboard Widget that provides Google Analytics data from the comfort of your own Desktop.

Download Here

Microsoft released their new blogging software called Windows Live Writer yesterday. Big deal you say, who uses Live Spaces anyways. Well, in an unexpected move, Microsoft added support for other blogging systems like Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress. I’m not going to get into a review here as Paul Stamatiou did an great review already. I did install it in Parallels and gave it a whirl(my last post was posted with Live Writer actually). Its decent as a freeware blog editor on Windows but I still prefer ecto and Flock’s built in blogging tool.

Technorati Tags: beta, blogging, flock, microsoft, review, windowslive

In case you haven’t noticed, i switched layouts. I loved my old one but it had a lot of bugs and i wanted to test out new Wordpress Widgets which my old layout didn’t support. I may switch back at some point if a new version is released tho. You may see some weirdness when visiting as I’ve been playing around with alot of new plugins and widgets lately.

Finally got around to installing Wordpress 2.0.2. Nothing big, mostly a security release with a few bug-fixes mixed it. One exciting thing I’ve been watching over at wordpress.org is Widgets. Basically is a plugin engine that allows drag and drop reordering of your sidebar. If testing goes well, it may be included with the next release of WP. Only downside is that themes need to be updated in order to work with it.

Last week I got an invitation code for Google Analytics after what seemed like months of waiting. I’ve been using Performancing Metrics for a few weeks already and have decided to use both for a bit to see which reporting I prefer. Honestly, I’ve been liking Performancing Metrics better. Google Analytics seems to be more geared towards goals and marketing. I’ve got them both running on the site now and will continue to evaluate them.