Shunya is my second blog and is primarily going to be a reflection of my experiences as a webmaster at the Stamford International University as well as some of the choicest picks on numerics & computing.

Here I am… loving every bit of it Some minor hitches here and there and plenty of room for improvement – all taken into consideration there’s just one word for it – Terrific!

Here’s a quick rundown of the latest features…

• Post revisions – WordPress 2.6 features Wiki-like tracking of edits, in effect acting like a version control system. This comes in real handy in case you want to nullify any mistakes and go back to a prior version of the post.
• Press This! bookmarklet – Inspired by the quick-bookmarking buttons that are a part and parcel of almost all social media / network sites, this new bookmarklet lets you embed blog posts, YouTube videos, Flickr images etc. into your blog post at the click of a button.
• Google Gears Support – WordPress 2.6 now takes advantage of the Google Gears pack to give you that ounce of extra juice that really speeds up your copy of WordPress while using the admin interface (by caching all CSS and JavaScript files locally). More on this to come in future versions…
• Live Theme Previews – Earlier on you were required to activate a theme before you could see it in action on your site. Not so anymore. You can preview the theme live, without activating it and letting the world see it concurrently.

Among the lesser (smaller) improvements are…

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for ‘clean’ SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with ’shift-click.’
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.

Here’s a brief video on the same…

Whew! That’s quite a list. I’m headed for the download page rightaway. I need to try it out, NOW! How about you?

Ever wondered who reads your blog or how easy (or complicated) is it for your visitors to understand your blog’s content? The Blog Readability Test, is one of those odd-but-fun-and-cool tools that analyses your content and based on the topics & linguistics (types of words used, terminology etc.), names the minimum level of readers who are able to decipher the content. I’m not really sure about the parameters used to come up with the readability score, but I’m simply making a wild guess on the most logical choices.

Using the tool is outright simple. You enter your blog’s URL and hit the Check Readability Now button. On an average it takes about 2-5 seconds to analyse the content (depending on your home-page size) and spits out a badge stating the readership level. My blog got tagged as College (Postgrad).

Although I can’t vouch for the accuracy level of their algorithms, it may give you a decent idea on how much you need to perk your content up to get to the desired level.

What’s the Readability Level of your blog?

WobZIP is a cool new (and free) solution to bypass any sort of installation restrictions that your sysadmin may have placed on your school computers thereby limiting your ability to unzip certain types of archives. WobZIP lets you upload and uncompress files on-the-fly.

The service is very easy to use and can come in handy not only in the situation mentioned above but wherever you’re in need of quick decompression and a desktop based decompression utility is not ready at hand. It could be your friend’s computer, at a cybercafe – virtually anywhere. Just select the file you wish to decompress and hit wobzip.

The decompression procedure is pretty fast and you’re presented with the list of files which you’ve to individually click to download. This can prove to be a pain specially in case of large archives with a whole bunch of files – but then again, one can’t grumble given the scenario in which you are forced to use WobZIP. Password protected archives are also supported and there’s a virus scanner running behind the scenes that ensures that you don’t accidentally download and execute infected files.

The service supports a wide variety of file formats like, 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZHCHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS – though there’s a file-size limit of 100MB (for the archives).

Another rocking feature of WobZIP is the ability to unzip remote URLs – which in other words means instead of uploading a zip file, you can make WobZIP read it off another webpage directly. This can prove to be a very powerful tool for previewing the contents of a zip file prior to download, selectively downloading a couple of files (that you require) from an archive… the list of possibilities is quite large.

Try WobZIP and see for yourself.

Found via: TheySay