I’ve had some people ask me over the past month how to start a “photo”-blog.  I’ve told them to hack the hell out of CMS packages like WordPress and TextPattern…or you could try PixelPost, who just released version 1.5.  This software is written totally around the photoblog concept.  Give it a try.

I moved my site over to WordPress.com. They are doing some amazing things over here with WordPress in general and I’ve found that they have incorporated some changes, even before SVN get’s them. As well, I’m beginning to screw around with my hosting service at TextDrive and I found that WP.com is a bit quicker, and requires less maintenance. Point being…it’s just easier over here for now. More to come soon.

Seeing websites that still use “www” as a prefix is annoying.  It’s unnecessary (most of the time).  It was useful during the early days of the ‘net but now with handy utilities like .htaccess files, it’s not necessary.  Open your .htaccess file and add these lines of code to redirect users away from “www.example.com” to just “example.com”:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

One more thing.  If you are using a CMS (WordPress, TextPattern, etc.), make sure you change your settings to point to “example.com” NOT “www.example.com” or you’ll have a heck of a time getting into your administration backend.

In trying to remember what in the hell this was called, I finally found it again on Matt’s site.  Shuttle is a total and complete redesign of the WordPress administration backend, which is probably the least liked piece of WordPress (IMO).  It looks amazing…as if it was written by a huge software design house.  Matt says they are going to start implementing it into WordPress.com first.  Awesome.

745+ WordPress themes.  Yes, that’s a lot…and the list keeps getting bigger.  Link.

Hmmm…read this article over at BloggingPro that talks about WP 2.5 being slimmed down to allow for a faster-blogging engine. It seems some of the stuff I use will be removed, as well as other crap that I don’t care about (like the user manager). All of these features will be able to be added back, in the form of a “feature manager” type add-on, thing. We’ll see.

Okay people, this was an April fools joke, that I kinda screwed up due to writing this post late at night.  So it appears it’s from April 2nd…yeah, I could change the date, but that’s no fun.  Anyway…APRIL FOOLS!

The next update to WordPress (not due out for a little while), 2.1, will finally include a spellcheck button.  It has been incorporated already into WordPress.com, so if you have an account there, check it out.  As of this writing, 2.1 is only 28% done but once things really gear up, it should move along rather quickly…maybe.

This video makes me want to learn PHP more.  Excellent tutorial by Mark on making your first WordPress plugin in under 5 mins.  Link.

An updated version of WordPress has been released.  the .2 release has several bug fixes as well as security fixes that were never made public.  It’s highly recommended that you update.  Here is the download area.

This is pretty cool…although I can’t really see where I’d use it.  Maybe you would?!     Anyway, it’s a neat way to load WordPress on a USB drive, using Webserver On a Stick (WOS).  The server on a stick thing seems kind of cool actually.  Here are the instructions.