girtby.net

Hooray for WordPress 1.5!

It was a completely painless upgrade experience, aided by some consise, clear instructions and the pre-flight that I did on my local mirror.

The new version is a very nice piece of software, and I look forward to take advantage of some of it's new features in the coming weeks and months. Fellow Wordpressers, do yaself a favour.

One of these features is the ability to mix'n'match themes for the appearance. At present you're seeing the girtby.net classic theme in all it's glory. If I can tear myself away from Half-Life 2, I'll flex my puny web design muscles and come up with something less ugly.

I'm playing with various plugin thingys for WordPress. Only one of them will be visible to the great unwashed masses. And my esteemed regular readers.

• Using Markdown as the authoring syntax. So far I'm liking it; the syntax is a lot more user-friendly than HTML. The main benefit is that I'm hoping to get a better preview mode in MarsEdit (review forthcoming, really). We'll see.
• Comment Spam reduction using WP Hashcash. Approximately two minutes after installing a CAPTCHA-based solution, Matt piped up with: "so, what about blind users?". This, and the annoyance factor have prompted me to look for alternatives. The interestingly-named Hashcash solution is theoretically less foolproof (spammers with javascript in their toolkit could easily circumvent it) but in practice it has been 100% effective for the last month or so (except for trackback spam, sigh).
• New del.icio.us plugin. This one gives slighly different layout compared to the last plugin, and also you can see my extended description of the link if you hover your mouse over it. Oh yes, it is one-click installable using...
• Wordpress Plugin Manager. Manages installing/removing wordpress plugins. Also checks for upgrades. Nice.

Fellow WordPress users, feast on some of these goodies.