Table of Contents:

Updating WordPress Tips and Techniques

WordPress website development mistakes

WordPress manual upgrading procedures

WordPress automatic updating or upgrading procedures

I remember me those days that seochat.com was a great resource for industrie news. :(

Thanks to advanced CSS properties, such as gradients and shadows, it's now quite easy to turn a dull web form into something beautiful - with minimal effort. I'll show you how in today's tutorial!

Great example on how-to create stylish forms with using a lot of images, just CSS-3, html and one background image

Working on a new theme for the next Digging into WordPress book update, I found myself really getting into the whole “widgetizing” thing. Widgets enable non-technical users to customize your theme according to their specific layout needs, and with so many different widgets available, the possibilities are endless. You may have thought about widgets as something you do in the sidebar, but there is no reason to stop there. You can widgetize just about every part of your theme. In this post, we’ll show you how to do widgetize your theme in two easy steps. Once we get the basics down, we’ll dig into some sweet tips and tricks.

Great information, next I like to know how to create widgets in Wordpress plugins

After viewing some recent rather interest experiments in CSS3, I decided to do some experimenting of my own. CSS3 brings a lot more variety to the table regarding what you can do with it when compared to CSS2.1. Rounded corners, scaling and rotations are all possible with just a basic knowledge of mathematics! It got me thinking, what could I create, using only CSS, that would normally require images? So, I decided to try and create some of the flags of the world.

Nice example on how-to use CSS to create stunning images

Closing this thread, it has long left productive uses and is annoying me so much I just want to quit the whole project.

These are clear words about what Matt is thinking!

As we all probably know by now, Google is about to kick Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 to the curbs. Following a whole bunch of other companies, Google’s explanation is simple: old browsers do not support advanced and current techniques for rich interactive web apps, including things like voice and video. Short after Google went public with this news, a Dutch webdesign firm started a website where developers protest against IE6 and support Google’s decision. And today, another group stood up to protest against Google’s decision.

Google gives a good sign: stop this thing what's called a browser. As a web developer it becomes impossible to find some old system with IE6 installed. Will say I can't test website for IE6 anymore. Please let us forget this Microsoft disaster...

Doing so is quite easy. First you have to use Gmail. As it is a free service, you can create a dedicated account for your monitoring alerts. Once finished, login to your account and click on the “Settings” link located on the top right side of the browser window.
Then, select “Forwarding and POP/IMAP”:

As shown in the previous screenshot, the only thing you have to do is to check “Forward a copy of incomming mail” and fill the field with your phone number @ your provider service.
For example, If your phone provider is AT&T, you’ll have to type 0000000000@mobile.att.net.

That would be great, a free forward via SMS, but sad enough most european providers doesn't provide this "free" service. You can't send this kind of SMS, but maybe you can use some cheap SMS provider instead of paying high prices for SMS bundles to monitoring services...

AWeber was recently the victim of an intentional attack to mine email addresses.

We’d like to take this opportunity to share what happened, what was (and was not) affected and what we’re doing as a result of this attack.

What Happened?

We use a variety of pieces of software to run different parts of our service and provide support to customers. Some of these are tools we have developed ourselves; others are third-party ones that we license from other companies.

By exploiting and combining vulnerabilities in two separate third-party software systems, the perpetrators managed to gain access to a part of our system where subscriber email addresses are stored.

We have received reports of some of those email addresses receiving spam messages. While the volume of these reports is low, we are treating this incident with the utmost seriousness and addressing it fully.

This is not nice for the owners of mailing lists, buidling a good mailing list is hard work and takes a lot of time (and money).
I hop that other provider like mailchimp raised the security to prevent there customers for this kind of data thieves.

Great and amusing information!

There are so many things that you can customize in WordPress, but one of the things that does not get a lot of attention is custom login page designs. WordPress is being used as a membership site, or site where user registration is allowed. In those cases it is wise for businesses to brand the login page with their logo and other aspects to give it a unique touch that it deserves. In this article we will be showing you how you can create a custom login page design in WordPress as well as showcasing some of the best WordPress login page designs.

Yeah the default login page is very ugly, I think the best would be a lightbox instead of a separate page

In this tutorial, we will be using WordPress and Feedburner with a few plugins to create a simple Email Newsletter Service for your WordPress blog. You can track the performance of your newsletter by checking how many subscribers you have, how many clicks each link gets and much more.

Great idea if your budget is very low (or equal zero) or if you like to publish the news on your own server. I will try this later for sure!

During the past couple months, the Knol team has been steadily adding improved tools to help you create better knols. Most notably, we've greatly expanded the number of embeddable objects to help you make your knols more graphical and interactive. We've been excited by the many uses we're seeing, and today we have one more to add to the list: PicApp.

Nice feature, looks like the knol site becomes more and more a community site like "hub pages".
I'm wondering if you write a copy for Knol, using their images, if republishing an article including images is legal.

At the end knol needs some more visitors, for sure...

Google Toolbar 6.4 for IE and Firefox adds a feature that lets you share web pages using social networking sites, mail services, bookmarking services and other sites. You can select your favorite services from the settings page or repeatedly click on one of the options to bring it to the top of the menu.

If you share links using Twitter, you'll notice a new URL shortening service: goo.gl. "Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends. The core goals of this service are: stability, security and speed." The service is only used by Google Toolbar and FeedBurner, so there's no web interface or API for goo.gl.

Nice tool to share websites, after years Google has re-invented the wheel, hehe

I like to see more from the new URL shortener goo.gl, sad enough the service doesn't work from the toolbar right now

The web has been awash with rumors about Google Gears for the past week or two. It appears Google has quietly dropped development of the system.

I'm getting errors on my Ubuntu laptop since weeks!
The error is about that my Linux version is not compatible with current version of Gears. Firefox show a menu item called "Gears Settings", but nothing happens if you click that option.

Looks like it's over with Gears...

Google Chrome for Linux (Beta)
At Google, most engineers use Linux machines, so we certainly heard loud and clear how much they wanted Google Chrome for Linux. Just like Google Chrome for Windows and Mac, we focused on speed, stability and security, but we also wanted a high-performance browser that integrated well with the Linux ecosystem. This includes tight integration with native GTK themes, updates that are managed by the standard system package manager, and many other features that fit in natively with the operating system where possible.

Google Chrome for Linux in various GTK themes

WOW this new Chrome beta for Linux is so fast on my Ubuntu Laptop.
If some more extensions are available, its bye bye Firefox :D

Ecommerce just seems to continue growing and growing, and it is becoming almost a requirement that all merchants have an online presence of some kind.  We’ve already covered shopping carts that you host yourself, but sometimes it is nice to just walk in to some place that is ready to go and can take you only a few minutes to set up if you play your cards right.

This is where hosted shopping carts come in handy as they allow you to remove the headaches of maintaining your server, dealing with software issues and more.  These solutions may cost a little bit more, but you can almost view it as saving you money compared to hiring an IT person.

We’ve gathered up 10 of the best solutions that will let you get set up in no time flat, so take a look through and see which one best serves your needs.

Great resource if you don't like to host a shop by yourself.
I'm sure I will try a few of them!

Following are all the talks that were given at ZendCon 2009, links to slides (where they've been made available by speakers), and when I was able to find it, links to speaker's homepages. Any missing talks will be filled in as they are found.

For those (including me) who missed the PHP event of the year...

While at Blog World Expo recently I recorded this video interview with Abby Johnson from Web Pro News. We covered a variety of topics including why email marketing is not dead – internet marketing for smart people – the new FTC regulations and touched on a new project I’m working on with Brian Clark and Chris Brogan.

Of course email marketing is still alive, I know companies are making millions of sales while sending emails.
There is one thing different from the early years: Your campaign need to be much better and must be interesting for the subscriber, otherwise it's better to safe the money!

WebFaction has prepared a screencast to get you up and running with WordPress quickly.

Screencast Resources¶

In the screencast, we mentioned some useful resources. Here’s a handy list of hyperlinks from the screencast:

• [0:28] WordPress homepage
• [4:13] Pastebin
• [4:13] WebFaction User Guide > Databases
• [6:38] WordPress > Extend
• [6:43] Webfaction Forum

Webfaction is a great hosting partner for your Wordpress site. Check this video to get more information about how-to host and optimize your Wordpress site.

Just try webfaction.com the offer a 60 days money back guarantee.

One of the great things about working at Google is that we get to take advantage of an enormous amount of computing power to do some really cool things. One idea we tried out was to let webmasters know about their potentially hackable websites. The initial effort was successful enough that we thought we would take it one step further by expanding our efforts to cover other types of web applications—for example, more content management systems (CMSs), forum/bulletin-board applications, stat-trackers, and so on.

This time, however, our goal is not just to isolate vulnerable or hackable software packages, but to also notify webmasters about newer versions of the software packages or plugins they're running on their website. For example, there might be a Drupal module or Joomla extension update available but some folks might not have upgraded. There are a few reasons a webmaster might not upgrade to the newer version and one of the reasons could be that they just don't know a new version exists. This is where we think we can help. We hope to let webmasters know about new versions of their software by sending them a message via Webmaster Tools. This way they can make an informed decision about whether or not they would like to upgrade.

This will be a great feature: If you have many websites, you can't check them frequently if there are patches for all the plugins or modules.