Technology surfing

I’ve been very busy last weeks. Work? Oh no, “hobby projects” you know. I got to play with WordPress 1.5 thoroughly, and (a bit) unfortunately that kept me away from playing with other technologies. But hey, I fell in love with this software. It’s a really nice tool.

Some things to mention:

The Dashboard:

• The “dashboard” option is the place to start in your own weblog tool. In the latest activity box, you’ll get handy information on the latest posts, scheduled entries, comments and blog stats.
• A word on those blog stats. Here you get an overview of: the number of posts, comments and categories. The nicest things are the incoming links who are delivered by a Technorati search on your weblog.
• That dialog box is just a small thing. The space left can be filled up with… RSS feeds. On Gent.blogt we added two RSS feeds from our partnering newspaper. I’m thinking of filling up Smetty.be with some specific RSS feeds from Technorati, Pubsub and Feedster.

Left picture: dialog box on Gent.blogt, right picture: RSS feeds of our partner

Pages:

• It’s new in version 1.5 and I was really waiting for it: the ability to write external pages, while staying in the same weblog. I used it for a “Who is” on Smetty, and for profiles of our writers on Gent.blogt.

Multi-user:

• It’s Multi-user in a way that several people can write on the same blog.
• The User Level system (sometimes known as Permission Levels or User Permissions) is just perfect. You can choose between a minimum where users can’t even publish and only write, up to almost full administrator right. On the Gent.blogt weblog, we’re almost working with 20 users, and it’s still working smoothly. If you don’t agree with the standard user levels, than you can change them by modifying the code. We did that with the timestamp option, what gives all the writers the possibility to plan their posts or write in advance.

Comment moderation

• This software has a moderation functionality on the comments. It’s something you hope you’ll never have to use, but it’s handy when you’re in spam-attack

Of course there are some minor things as well. We’ve installed a picture plugin, but it is not really adapted to the multi-user level system because all the pictures are stored within the same folder.

It’s free software, but I’ll do a donation later on. I learned myself how important that is.

There’s playing with software, and there’s monkey work. I still didn’t finish updating my blogs, since I changed blogsoftware. Almost all the pictures need to be resized, there’s useless and disturbing HTML in some posts and I need to adapt all my old post titles. I just like new things more than adapting old stuff.