What I usually do is to change this default value to something like every 5 minutes. You can alter the autosave behaviour by adding this define to your wp-config.php (interval is in seconds, 300 = 5min):

define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 300);

Even a higher value of 10 or 15min might make sense if you write longer posts and don’t want to end up with so many “autosaves” of your current draft…

Another feature which is pretty new is post revisions. You find them as one of the boxes below your post editor on the write panel. If these post revisions go unmanaged, they might significantly increase the size of your database.

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 10);

This define is telling WP to only keep 3 revisions. If you save the 4th revision, the first one is purged off.

It is also possible to disabled post revisions altogether, by using the following define:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

Another way to solve this is to use a plugin, like:

Post Revision Control

By using this plugin you also get a very granular way to control the number of revision per post & page. Just in case if you think you need more / less revisions than your new default setting.

Hope this helps! Let us know what other useful defines you usually add to your configuration of Wordpress. Thanks!

Wordpress introduced a very simple way in the current version (v2.8) called auto-upgrade. See Upgrading Wordpress:

Recent versions of WordPress feature an Automatic Upgrade. You can launch the automatic upgrade by clicking the link in the new version banner (if it’s there) or by going to the Tools -> Upgrade menu. After that it should be straightforward.

Automatic Upgrades do fail sometimes, though, so remember to backup your database first, and deactivate your plugins before starting the upgrade.

Note that your files all need to be owned by the user under which your Apache server executes, or you will receive a dialog box asking for “connection information,” and you will find that no matter what you enter, it won’t work.

If this doesn’t work for you there is always the good old way of doing a manual update:

• downloading the latest zip archive, unzip it
• copy over all of your files (wp-content folder, wp-config, .htaccess, all other custom folder/files you added to wordpress)
• move the current installation to another folder
• move the new version + your files back to the web folder

But, there is another way to keep WP up-to-date:

SVN or Subversion

First you need to be able to login to your server via SSH / Shell. Next, you need to check if you have Subversion installed (just type “svn” in the shell of your server). If this is all working than you’re good to go, otherwise you need to look into how to install subversion on your server.

There is a detailed description of how to update WP on the codex. All you have to do is:

$ mkdir blog
$ cd blog
$ svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8.4 .

WPMU users (codex page):

$ svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-mu/tags/2.8.4a/ .

If you’ve already installed WP and want to switch to updating via SVN:

$ cd ../blog
$ cp -p wp-config.php .htaccess ../blog-new

$ cp -rpfu wp-content/* ../blog-new/wp-content

Make sure to copy over all other custom files/folders and you should have a directory with the latest version of wordpress, running on your configuration. You’re ready for SVN

All is left now is to switch this new directory with your old blog directory:

$ mv blog blog-old; mv blog-new blog

… and to test your new installation by browsing your blog. Don;t forget to update your blog, if you

Updating your blog is now as easy as (always remember to replace [blog dir] with the correct directory of your blog installtion):

$ svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8.4 [blog dir]

Enjoy!

This happened after the migration of Feedburner accounts to Google accounts and the recent redirects to feeds2.feedburner.com urls.

All attempts troubleshooting feedburner failed (incl. to resync the feed). In case you recently created a Feedburner feed which sources Yahoo Pipes -> check if it is working.

Update: DON’T move your Feedburner feeds to Google accounts if the original source is Yahoo Pipes:

If you use Yahoo! Pipes as the “Original Feed,” or content source, for one or more FeedBurner feeds, and you haven’t already moved over to a Google Account, please postpone moving it (for now).

We are working directly with Yahoo! to restore Google-hosted feeds’ access to Pipes as soon as possible, but until this fix is in place, FeedBurner feeds with Pipes sources moved to Google will stop working properly.

Update 2: As of today (Feb. 1, 2009 – Sun.) the feeds seem to have re-started to work as normal. No post/news yet on the official Feedburner Blog.

The folks at EQO used their IM network to investigate on the use of IM services by country, check out Global Instant Messaging Market Share – Open Data:

It seems almost unfathomable that there can be networks with active accounts numbering in the 100 MMs to billions and total accounts certainly in the billions for which there is no detailed public market share data.

Based on EQO’s IM interconnect capability we’ve been able to take a look inside the major IM networks to see the competitive landscape and broken down the stats by country – and like any good disruptive player we thought the data should be public.

Some results from the report: AIM: USA (36% market share); GTalk: India (35%), Japan (26%) and South Africa (26%); Yahoo!IM is faved by India, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia (>50%-70%);  ICQ is strong in Germany (44%) and Russia (56%).

Very, very interesting data if you need to do some research on IM services and worldwide usage. You will miss some networks in this report though, e.g. they don’t connect to Skype – so no numbers about this service.

Do you have further insights and information about the IM market? Let us know in the comments!

(Thanks to photopia for the RSS icon!)

Back to regularly scheduled programming

If you’ve heard of the movie Star Wreck, then you’re already familiar with Star Wreck Studio’s operating procedure: Take a community of thousands of online movie-making buffs, and have them collaborate on a feature-length film.

Star Wreck, a $20,000 film, is said to be the most popular internet-created feature film of all time, with eight million downloads all around the world. At first the film was distributed free online, and eventually it was distributed by Universal Pictures as a premium DVD.

But the folks behind Star Wreck — Star Wreck Studios, based in Tampere, Finland — want to be more than just a one-hit wonder. They’ve now built up a permanent community site for their movie-making collaborators. The community’s called Wreck-a-Movie, and it’s already hard at work on two new film projects: A science fiction comedy about Nazis on the moon, Iron Sky, and a horror film called Sauna. On Wreck-a-Movie anybody interested in film can join the community and make plot and music proposals and comment on scenes.

This is the preview of the Star Wreck movie – Imperial Edition:

And the venture beat post goes on with:

Star Wreck Studios compares its film projects to social networking and internet copyright-modifying movements such as Creative Commons. The intent is to create productions that are “clean” from a copy right perspective. That’s why the crew behind Wreck-a-Movie considers Creative Commons (CC) licensing to be very important, and Star Wreck Studios has John Buckman, one of the thought leaders on the use of CC in business, as chairman of the board.

Star Wreck Studios isn’t just about collaborative movie making, it’s also about collaborative movie viewing. It expects to use mobile technology, not only to view the content, but to create interactive experiences for its audience. For example, if you’re watching a horror flick, as a part of the plot, your phone rings, and when you answer, the person on the other end of the line is the main character of the movie.
“Because of the connected nature of mobile phones there are a lot of opportunities to do things like that. AppleTV, PlayStation 3 and mobile phones are all connected,” says Peter Vesterbacka, a cofounder and board member. He is also a cofounder of the global networking event Mobile Monday and a serial entrepreneur.

Check out the project and films realized using collaborative film making and online community efforts to drive the production of films.

Here is the blog post explaining a little more about it “Just for You Personalizes Your WordPress Blog“:

Yet, none of these add-ons look at the stated interests of the individual reader, mostly because this data is closed off, hidden inside social networks and closed off to the open internet.

Just for You, released today as a WordPress plug-in, builds a list of headlines based on the expressed interests of the reader. The plug-in looks at each visitor to your blog and, if they are a cookied MyBlogLog member, looks up the tags attached to that user’s profile. Using these tags, Just for You looks into the blog’s archive for posts with matching tags or categories and shows a list of matching headlines in a sidebar widget.

A very interesting way of making suggestions for your blog visitors. In the comments you wil find some people complaining about some missing php extensions:

It seems your host is not supporting json data format. Please ask your hosting provider to enable json extension for php.

So, it remains to be seen if this plugin will work here on my blog or not. What do you think about this idea to provide recommendations to site visitors?

A different approach is the one from Gnip. They want to act as a data stream coverter, providing you with data from many services in the format most appropriate for your app. Below you find the services offered by them (or what they will offer soon):

This is an basic overview of their service (from Gnip’s site):

They support many well known services, in which data streams you can hook into as an application developer, among them are e.g. MyBlogLog, Flickr, Identi.ca, Twitter, etc.

Chem them out at gnipcentral. Do you have some experience with this service or are you thinking about using it? Let us know and leave a comment.

As of this morning they are still alowing new sign ups, but space is limited. Just go to the Amazon.com unbox page and on the upper, right hand side you’ll find the link (picture to the left) to sign up for the test.

I’ll be testing the service and will post an update on my findings.I am very curious to see how it will work on PC AND (!) Mac, as it was PC, Tivo, Xbox only before. You need the latest Flash version (v9) for your computer to be able to use the new watch now feature. The good news is that you also be able to continue to download movies (e.g. after buying them, not only renting them for a day…) and store them locally on your harddrive (this remains a PC & Tivo only feature).

Check out the new amazon unbox service and watch now!

Have you been using the Amazon unbox service before, in the incarnation of a video download service?

You always wonder what will happen with your device if you have to return it.

Even more so if the device is an iPhone with a lot of your personal data on it (contacts, documents, web browser data still left in its cache, etc.).

Just found an older post about what the owner of a refurbished iPhone discovered and the data he was able to reconstruct, on zdziarski.com titled

“May 16, 2008: Refurbished iPhone Reveals Customer Data“:

[Photo from Wikipedia. This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 License.]

A few days ago, I posted a discovery in that personal data remains intact (in deleted portions of the file system) following a full iPhone restore. As it turns out, Apple themselves may not have been aware of this. Thank goodness, otherwise identity theft might actually be, like, hard. A detective from the Oregon State Police, whom I’ve verified, notified me this afterrnoon that an out-of-the-box refurbished iPhone he purchased directly from Apple contained recoverable personal data. This included email, personal photos, and even financial information that he was able to recover using my forensic toolkit. Needless to say, the original owner was quite surprised. He informed me that the device had been returned to Apple under a warranty exchange only a few months ago, suggesting that Apple has been using an insecure refurbishing process for the past year.

This shows that you have to treat your iPhone like a desktop computer in case you sell or return it, as the mobile phone more and more gets part of your (digital) lifestyle and holds a lot of valuable data!