New Media + IT

An early look at the new widget management in WordPress 2.5

Lars K Jensen — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 18:48:53 +0000

Since WordPress 2.4 has been canceled the developers now have a lot more time on their hands to redesign the admin section in the next release, which will be WordPress 2.5.

In the latest build of WordPress you can get a look at the new widget management in WordPress 2.5, view large version.

Instead of the current widget system, where you drag the widgets from a “pool” to your sidebar, you know add the widgets using the list of gray boxes in the left hand side of the page. The widget then appears under “current widgets” where you can use drag and drop to change the order of the widgets.

This means that you, apparently, can add as many copies of a certain type of widget as you please. I’m not sure how this works on themes with multiple sidebars, however…

WordPress 2.5 is currently set for release on March 24th.

Random album cover

Lars K Jensen — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 18:16:22 +0000

I usually don’t like to post these “chain posts”, but this one is quite funny:

The first article title on the Wikipedia Random Articles page is the name of your band.
The last four words of the very last quotation on the Random Quotations page is the title of your album.
The third picture in Flickr’s Interesting Photos From The Last 7 Days will be your album cover.
Use your graphics programme of choice to throw them together, and post the result.

My result:

Found via Jesper Laugesen (DK).

Why not block Facebook?

Lars K Jensen — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:12:47 +0000

Given the recent commotion regarding Facebook (Scott Gilbertson and Dave Winer has some wraps on this), Paul Buchheit asks an interesting question.

What Facebook wants to prohibit Plaxo Pulse from doing is, to some extent, what Facebook is doing when users import their address books from, say, Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail. So should Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail block Facebook?

Head on over to Paul’s post and have your say.

WordPress DK now finally at da.wordpress.org

Lars K Jensen — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 23:52:12 +0000

RenÃ©, the lead translator of WordPress DK, has an exiting post at wordpress.dk.

The Danish WordPress project has now been given a subsite at the official WordPress.org: da.wordpress.org.

I still think that most Danish users will end up on wordpress.dk (because of Google Rank and the forum which stays there) but none the less it’s great with an official site. This means a lot to the WordPress DK project and shows that it’s not just some guys who are translating for fun (and might stop doing it some day) but that WordPress DK is a serious project, that the Danish users can count on.

The official subsite also features a blog, meaning that there are two WordPress DK blogs. As I’ve written in a comment at WordPress DK I suggest the following:

The da.wordpress.org blog is about new releases with more in depth posts on what’s new, known issues and such
The wordpress.dk blog (where I contribute) will be for everything else: tips, hints, suggestions etc. The wordpress.dk blog will also feature shorter posts on new versions with links to the more thorough da.wordpress.org post.

This will, the way I see it, make it easier for both posters/contributors and end users to get a good overview on where to find what.

Anyways, congrats to RenÃ©!

Get 5 percent off with Firefox

Lars K Jensen — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 23:39:34 +0000

Tekfix, an Australian computer hardware and electronics retailer, has an interesting discount [press release]:

To get the 5% off, Firefox users have to enter coupon code firefoxed in the appropriate field during checkout.

Nice initiative.

However, I wonder why they haven’t chosen to let their shop do a browser check, instead of just telling people to enter a coupon code, which any person on any browser can do?

Found via Asa Dotzler

Mozilla turns 10 in March

Lars K Jensen — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:01:46 +0000

During my last round in Google Reader I noticed this post from David Boswell.

As you can see, the Mozilla [Wikipedia] has its 10 year birthday on March 31st. That means that it 10 years (yeah, well d’oh!) ago, that Netcape [Wikipedia] released the source code into the wild.

Just a tip for your calendar ;-)

WordPress 2.4 is cancelled, is now 2.5

Lars K Jensen — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 10:41:44 +0000

The lead translater of the Danish version of open source blogging software WordPress, RenÃ©, writes on the official WordPress DK blog, that WordPress 2.4 has been cancelled.

The reason is that there are too many corrections to be made, and therefore WP 2.4 could not be ready until March. The next WordPress release will be 2.5, which is set to be out on March 24th.

A Google blog search shows that WPAssist also has a post on this.

Denmark is an “extensive surveillance society”

Lars K Jensen — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:36:51 +0000

My friend Jeppe just showed me a report on “Leading surveillance societies in the EU and the World 2007”, where Denmark, where I live, is listed under “extensive surveillance societies”.

Read the report and judge for yourself. Quite a scary bit of reading, if you ask me…

Firefox 3 requires secure updates from extensions

Lars K Jensen — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:32:58 +0000

I’ve been using the latest trunk (nightly) version of the Firefox 3 browser for some time now. But it wasn’t until recently that I discovered, that it had disabled two of my extensions:

CoLT
TinyUrl Creator

The reason was that the extensions didn’t provide secure updates, probably to avoid fraud. I checked addons.mozilla.org and noticed, that the entire addons site has changed to a https:// protocol.

I Googled the two plugins and found that they are available from the addons site:

And now they work like a charm. So remember: If you are currently using any extensions for Firefox that uses a regular http:// connection for updating, and you plan on updating to Firefox 3, you should check to see if you can download/install them from a secure location, such as addons.mozilla.org.

Just a tip :-)

How readable is your blog?

Lars K Jensen — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 10:30:19 +0000

I just saw this rather funny thing at Social Media. Just paste your blog’s url into the text field and have it figure out, what level you blog is at. Have fun :-)