Upgraded to WordPress 2.5

I’ve upgraded Geekie.org to WordPress 2.5 (stable), and am very satisfied with the new look. Users won’t experience too many differences, but the admin backend and PHP code do differ from WordPress 2.3.

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(4 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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WordPress 2.5 is out!

The final stable version of WordPress 2.5 is finally out!

I will be upgrading first thing tomorrow morning. Excellent!

This time, just read the WordPress development blog for their information. I won’t even try covering what 165 other blogs have already posted about!

(3 votes, average: 3.33 out of 5)

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WordPress 2.5 Release Candidate 2

Recently, Matt Mullenweg (the founder of Automattic) created a screencast of the new WordPress 2.5 Release Candidate 2, yet another step to a stable release of the highly anticipated WordPress 2.5.

The screencast is embedded below for your convenience:
[flash http://s.wordpress.org/resources/2.5/dashboard-and-images.swf mode=2]

At the same time, WordPress.org has a new look resembling the WordPress 2.5 admin dashboard design.

(5 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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OpenID enabled again!

It’s been a long time since I last allowed OpenID on this site. In fact, I disabled the OpenID plugin on Christmas Eve 2007. At that time, my reasoning was that the plugin added a great deal of JavaScript and additional CSS to the page. (I had complained that the size of a web page including stylesheets and JavaScript had increased to more than 60 kilobytes.)

It doesn’t seem to be much of a concern now. According to Safari’s Network Timeline tool (under the Develop menu), the homepage is now over 600 kilobytes including stylesheets and JavaScript, and it isn’t slow, even on lesser connection speeds. I’m still trying to optimize the site, but I guess having plugins like WP-PostRatings just add to the size of the site. (I don’t really like Prototype, jquery, and that sort of JavaScript library because they are bulky and require the whole thing to be loaded. The Yahoo! UI is a much better library.) However, to be honest, the biggest file size component is the graphics (screenshots and such), because they go over 300 KB.

Let’s talk about OpenID:

Yahoo! recently embraced OpenID, and the new version of the plugin that I’ve installed now supports using your Flickr page as an OpenID. It’s a nice, simple way of logging in to thousands of sites on the Internet. I have liked this concept for a very long time, and am now re-opening up the OpenID log-in and registration and comment authentication system. I believe that users shouldn’t have to register for all the sites they browse.

Let’s talk more about the site’s size:

Only 5 users over the past month have visited this site on dial-up. Understandably, using the site will be a horrible experience for dial-up users, but 5 users are not significant enough for any concern. I will therefore not aim to optimize the site for dial-up; my goal is to make it an enjoyable experience for users on 256+ kbps connections. The size of the home page (XHTML only) is about 50 KB, and the size of the stylesheets is only 11 KB. What is weighing down this site is the inefficient ITK Ranks scripting system, which has about 10 different complex JavaScript files in an unoptimized format, and the inefficient JavaScript used for ads. OpenID and PostRatings aren’t actually that bad.

To help minimize any pains of surfing our site, I will be optimizing the ad system and showing less banners on the site, opting for PHP rather than JavaScript invocation, and also trying external ad management like Adroll. (I remember taking banners off for a few weeks sometime early in 2007. That worked extremely well.)

A final word: what is really adding to the size of our site is images. I like using graphics to illustrate what I am saying, as opposed to text-only content. Realize, however, that if it weren’t for the images (particularly the resized pictures from Flickr, which is bad at image compression), this site would be only 100 KB, compressed. That’s pretty good for a modern blog. I will try to reduce the amount of resized pictures from Flickr. (The original pictures that I create are a lot smaller than the resized versions.)

Keep browsing our site, subscribe to our feed, submit our articles to your favourite social bookmarking sites (using the links below each post), and rate the posts!

(4 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5)

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Facebook policy contradictions?

Continuing on with the anti-Facebook series, I’d like to point out some contradictory phrases in the Facebook Terms of Use and in the Content Code of Conduct.

This post will focus on the “right” of any Facebook user to add photos of someone else, or photos taken by someone else.

What the highlighted sections say is that one isn’t permitted to upload/post/transmit/share/store photographs or videos other than those which are personally relevant (ie. created by you or a friend). The contrapositive is that if a photograph or video was not created by you or a friend, you are not permitted to upload/post/transmit/share/store it.

What this allows one to do is upload works created by others. Others, being defined as “friends”. “Friends”, being defined as ???

I’m trying to point out that it includes works created by “your friends” in things you can upload, but doesn’t define what a friend is. Is a “friend” a Facebook friend who has been added to your list of relations? Or, is a “friend” anyone with whom you claim to have a relationship?

Does this also mean that any of the 5000 people Leo Laporte has on his Facebook Friends list are allowed to upload videos “of a personal nature” of Leo Laporte? That seems to be allowed under the highlighted section.

But I haven’t yet pointed out the contradiction.

Here it is: “you may not post, transmit, or share User Content on the Site or Service that you did not create or that you do not have permission to post.” If, according to the second screenshot in this post, you are allowed to upload photographs and videos created by your friends, while you are not allowed to upload items you did not create or do not have permission to post, which one takes precedence?

Does Facebook mean that you are allowed to upload things you did not create that were created by your friends? That seems the likeliest explanation. Yet, by that definition, if such photographs and videos are permitted, then the second clause must also be false: “that you do not have permission to post.”

In simpler terms, you are granting your friends the right to post your photographs and videos with the implicit understanding that anything you create, they have permission to post.

Stick around for the next post, where I point out parts where non-members can be harmed.

(5 votes, average: 3.4 out of 5)

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More noteworthy podcasts

On December 8, 2007, I posted “Some noteworthy podcasts“, which promoted the “Security Now!” and “Tech5″ podcasts.

I have more noteworthy podcasts; now, they include “net@night”, “LSAT Logic in Everyday Life”, “commandN”, and “Make It So!”. There are others, as well.

To read more about these noteworthy podcasts, go to my post on my personal blog.

(5 votes, average: 3.2 out of 5)

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