I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.
I have installed yet another SPAM fighting plugin for WordPress – Spam Karma . I’ve read many good things about it, so I decided to try. Not that SPAM is a big problem for me, but it can be even smaller.
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For some of my recent new projects I have installed WordPress 2.0. I haven’t upgraded any of my WordPress 1.5.2 installations yet, because of all sorts of troubles that I keep hearing about. I am sure that developers are working to fix those, because, frankly speaking, using WordPress 1.5.2 after WordPress 2.0 is pretty close to painful.
And that I find really strange. I was always very happy with WordPress 1.5. It was almost as good as it gets for me. No annoyances, no bugs, clean design and interface. I wasn’t even thinking about anything better. There was no need.
But Admin area of WordPress 2.0 clearly showed me that there were some annoyances in WordPress 1.5. They just were so small that I wasn’t paying any attention to them. (if you are interested, the improvements that I care about are proper post preview, better editor, cleaner overall interface, file uploader and thumbnail builder with common sense this time) Still, it became clear that WordPress 1.5 wasn’t perfect. And who wants to use an imperfect thingy, when there is a perfect one.
I guess I’ll be upgrading this blog to WordPress 2.0 shortly. Very shortly. I just need to find a a goo time spot that would allow to do the update and iron out all incompatibilities and misbehaviours.
P.S.: While writing this entry the word “WordPress” was used 13 times.
While there are no updates on WordPress blog yet, the Download section already has WordPress 2.0. Things should be easier, faster, and nicer now.
I am planning to upgrade this site eventually, but I’ll need some feedback from other users, especially regarding themes and plugins. The upgrade won’t happen this year though. Holidays’ve filled my schedule already. And even if they haven’t, debugging weird PHP code is the last thing I want to do on New Year’s Eve.
I am also planning to release a couple of new sites and those will start off on WordPress 2.0 platform. You’ll hear more soon too. Really. I promise.
I’ve been doing a whole lot of Perl recently. Because of that, I spent a lot of time at CPAN. As a result, I came across a few excellent modules that I didn’t know about before. Here is a round-up for you:
Also I have to express my amazement with XML::RSS, which goes far beyond RSS documents and parses almost any XML document. Outstanding job!
As you might know, podcasts are like radio shows recorded and distributed digitally (read: mp3 and RSS). Since pretty much anyone can record a show and distribute it over the Internet – everyone and their brother do that.
The file sizes of some podcasts are huge. There are shows that last for more than an hour and include pieces of music and stereo special effects. I’ve seen this eat up more than 50 MBytes each.
Since I only have a 128 MByte memory card (and about 20 of those MBytes are eaten by software intallations and other data), I was looking at ways to minimize the file sizes of the podcasts that I wanted to listen to.
Continue reading castogg.sh – make podcasts smaller