WordPress 2.3

I have just upgraded to WordPress 2.3, and I am maily posting to check it out. I had to disable the feature that used to appear in my sidebar called “Most Popular Posts.” It was generated with a plugin called “Popularity Contest” that is broken for 2.3, and although the author has stated previously that it will no longer be supported, it looks like Alex plans to fix it, but it may be some time.

So far, I like some of the features. For instance, I receive notifications when plugins are updated right through my user interface, so I don’t have to check every once in a while to see if new versions are available. I also like the new implementation of tags. I am going to try to figure out how to import my SimpleTagsPlus tags so I don’t have to keep that plugin.

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Stalin?s Fingers Like Worms

For those of us old enough to remember World War II and the Cold War, seeing front page pictures of Stalin’s face marched today again on posters in Moscow demands a word of reminder. No modern description can possibly relay the sense of evil and dispair he floated across the planet. Linking through the internet here to a voice who spoke in 1934, are words from the horrid man’s purging fields:

We live, not feeling the country beneath us,
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Usability - KISS

I’ve been enjoying CBC Radio’s Spark program that looks at technology and culture. The host, Nora Young, is knowledgeable and runs a great show. I pick it up on air from time to time and have downloaded a podcast or two.

As I was listening today, I heard that there was a wiki for sharing information and ideas so I thought I’d give it a try. The site is built on SocialText, which is an enterprise class system, probably good to be able to scale up as needed. I registered and added my two cents worth on one of the wiki pages. I found the interface confusing and got frustrated a couple of times when menus would pop up that made no sense to me. Now, I’m a fair bit of a web geek and am usually comfortable poking around these systems. I wonder what the more mainstream Web surfers do when they try to add comments here?

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I Blog, Therefore?

I’m a geek, I know. But I just loved this post on “blogging restructures consciousness?” by Ben Vershbow at if:book. I mean really, really loved it for a lot of geeky reasons, not the least of which is that it models everything I love about blogging. It’s a topic that I have a deep affinity for and probably would never connect to in physical space or through traditional publishing. It’s a topic that resonates with my own search…does blogging literally change who we are? It’s a post that synthesizes a lot of different ideas from disparate sources, all linked of course. And it’s a post that challenges my brain; these ideas are just out of my reach without doing some mental stretching. Ben’s obviously crafted this essay with a great deal of thought from a bloggers’ perspective.

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