WordPress 2.6 was announced and below is a brief video tour of it.

One of the more exciting features is how WordPress now works with Google Gears.  I then followed these instructions to enable WordPress to use Google Gears after installing Google Gears.  Finally there is a further explanation of WordPress and Gears.

So far my experience has been that things are a bit faster, enough to dampen my urge to find a desktop client for writing my blog articles.

Tags: google,wordpress
Categories: Web
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For my wife’s WordPress blog I installed this plugin, Croissanga, so that her posts would automatically crosspost to her Xanga blog. It seems to work though some of the options don’t seem to have any effect.

I was also considering using this plugin, Xanga Crosspost, but in the end chose not to just because it doesn’t seem to have been used as much.

Tags: wordpress,xanga
Categories: Web
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One of the nicest things about WordPress are the themes.  On my business blog I am using the Connections theme.

On this blog I first tried the NewZen theme which has nice Web 2.0 features.  Then I tried others before settling on the vSlider 3.1 theme.

I like vSlider’s for many reasons but here are some reasons I settled on it.

1. clean and simple design
2. rotating customizable header images.   The two header images currently on this site are one of Sunday service at my old church, Highrock, (can you see me and my mother?) and the other is of Dylan playing.  Both were taken by friends, indiecowgirl and Jimmy Song, and I received permission to use their photos.
3. ability to display posts as open or closed (i.e. only the title showing) with a button that toggles between
4. easily customizable using web interface.  Some of the customizations I made include:
   1. changing sidebar width from 226 pixels to 186 pixels
   2. show all posts as open
   3. added credit for header images to footer

Tags: highrock,wordpress
Categories: Web
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Because of concerns about privacy I added a plugin, Angsuman’s Authenticated Plugin, which requires anyone who wants to view my site to be authenticated. I also now require people to be registered and authenticated to comment on a post.

Unfortunately Angsuman’s Authenticated Plugin seems to have a bug which I commented about on the plugin blog.

However this is not a perfect solution since people who I want to read my blog can no longer be updated using RSS feeds. Therefore I disabled it and added this plugin, Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter, which adds the following legalese to my RSS feeds.

Copyright © 2008 fkimplicity. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@kimplicity.com so we can take legal action immediately. Plugin by Taragana.

Tags: wordpress
Categories: Web
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Well I just wasted an hour trying to get the WordPress Theme Switcher plugin and widget to work. Maybe it’s because this plugin has not been updated since 2005.

I should have tried WordPress Theme Preview which was last updated in October 2007. But at this point I don’t want to waste anymore time on this. Users of this blog will just be stuck with the theme I choose.

Tags: wordpress
Categories: Web
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This blog article, How to: Configure WP-Cache to abate ‘the digg effect’, was great in helping me configure WordPress’s WP-Cache plugin.

Hopefully my site will be much speedier.

Tags: wordpress
Categories: Web
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