On 16th July 2008 @ 01:45 pm by Arul N S
Yesterday, Matt officially announced the release of WordPress 2.6 codenamed “Tyner” to the blogging community. WordPress release codename’s are named after jazz musicians and continuing with the tradition, 2.6 has been named after McCoy Tyner. It contains many new features that makes WordPress a more powerful CMS (Content Management System).
One of the most important features of this release is Version Control System which enables Wiki-like tracking of edits similar to Wikipedia. This would be a very handy feature which enables the users to just undo and go back to a previous version of the post.
Another major feature introduced in this version is display of captions alongside the images. The example can be seen in the WordPress logo displayed in top of this post. [Looks like alignment of captions has an issue. I am not just able to get it aligned]
Theme previews would be loved by any serious WordPress user. It was a long awaited feature. It enables to preview the theme, tweak and correct your mistakes before the whole world sees it.
WordPress uses Gears (previously known as Google Gears), an open source browser extension project started by Google. It is primarily for developers to manage offline storage thus enabling you to get a little extra juice. It maintains a cache or keeps a copy of commonly-used Javascript and CSS files on your computer, which can speed up the loading of some pages by several seconds (they just pop right up!). You can install Gears for Firefox or Internet Explorer, with support for Safari and Opera pending. WP 2.6 only uses the cache concept and the future versions are promised with more features in collaboration with Gears.
Other notable features in this release of WordPress are
- Word Count are displayed in the side bar when writing or editing the posts.
- You can reorder the gallery just by drag and drop.
- Bulk management of plugins. Just enable or disable all plugins in a single click.
- “Press This” bookmarklet which enables you to blog from anywhere just by clicking a boomarklet in your browser.
- More advanced image control enabling easy insertion, resizing. Also shifting from Flash uploader to the classic uploader is easy.
- Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
- A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions. Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.
- Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
With all these new features, I decided to jump the bandwagon without having to wait for my Hosting company to update the Fantastico which will help me automatically upgrade my WordPress installation. Now bit Feed is powered by WordPress 2.6
On 13th July 2008 @ 02:17 pm by Arul N S
For those who are bored with their old wallpapers and looking for a hot spicy firefox wallpaper, there are more than 70 wallpaper links at Hongkiat.com. Get your desktop a new look and help to spread the Firefox 3 around.
Visit Hongkiat.com to download the wallpapers
On 17th June 2008 @ 07:30 am by Arul N S
I am yet to download the official release of Gran Paradiso, the Mozilla Foundation’s developers are already discussing about the next update to Firefox. Going with the tradition of naming Firefox projects with place names, the Firefox 3.1 project is named as Shiretoko after the Japenese National Park in the north eastern tip of the island of Hokkaido, Japan. The word in native tongue means “end of earth”.
Shiretoko is a minor update to the Gran Paradiso which would be running the Gecko 1.9.1 Engine and most of the features that didn’t make in time to the 3 release.
- One of the major feature would be visual Tab switching. For now Ctrl+Tab extension serves the purpose in Gran Paradiso. This feature would be integrated into the browser along with Tab searching and filtering.
- There are lot of features for Tagging which include bulk tagging, tag autocomplete, lightweight tagging UI, Advanced Search UI.
- In the add-ons divison there would be enhanced compatibility checking during upgrades which means we might have to really wait till the developer makes the extension compatible than we doing it ourselves
The entire feature list of this release can be obtained from the Mozilla’s planning center for Firefox 3.1. The nightly builds of alpha release 1 can be obtained from Mozilla’s FTP servers here. It will be installed under the name of Minefield, the codename for Mozilla’s testing builds.
Source : [Mozilla Wiki]
On 9th June 2008 @ 11:19 pm by Arul N S
One of the features that got attention was the bookmarks management in Firefox 3. Lately I have had the need to bookmark many of the links in my bookmarks toolbar. With the favicon displayed next to the side, it was pleasing and eye-catching. But the space was restricted and the links started to overflow the given width. So little googling to increase the height of my bookmarks toolbar brought me to MozillaZine (which I should have done before going to Google). This is how you go about it….
- Go to Firefox’s Profile directory ( Press [Win]+[R], and type “%APPDATA%” to go to your apps directory and you will find a directory called Mozilla and then navigate to your profile directory inside)
- In chrome folder, there might be a file called “userChrome.css“. If not you might have a example file and even if that is not there then create one using notepad.
- Inside type the following based on which version of Firefox you are running. Please change the height variable according to your needs. 54px worked out for me. Then save the file and restart Firefox to have as much bookmarks as you want in your toolbar.
For Firefox 2
/* Multi-row bookmarks toolbar */
#bookmarks-ptf {display:block !important;}
#bookmarks-ptf toolbarseparator {display:inline !important;}
and sometimes you might need to add this also
/* Sometimes you may need this */
#PersonalToolbar {max-height: none !important;}
For Firefox 3 (this worked out for me)
/* Multi-row bookmarks toolbar for Fx3b5pre*/
#bookmarksBarContent
{display:block !important;}
.places-toolbar-items
{display:block !important;
height: 54px !important;
overflow-y:auto !important;}
#bookmarksBarContent toolbarseparator
{display:inline !important;}
#bookmarksBarContent .bookmark-item
{visibility: visible !important;}
.chevron {height: 0px !important;}
On 7th June 2008 @ 03:58 pm by Arul N S
After I switched over to Firefox 3, I noticed that my Firefox used to freeze whenever I was downloading or to be more precise whenever a huge download finished. After few spending some time with the task manager and Google, I came to find that the culprit was the built-in feature of Firefox which scanned the downloads using the already installed anti-virus application in my system. Even though this feature is a good one, in my humble opinion its a drag for somebody who downloads in and out daily. It could be useful feature for a novice or my grandma if she ever wanted to use a computer but not certainly to me. I believe any person who spends more than an hour over the Internet daily would be sensible enough to have a anti-virus application running and update it frequently. Your own anti-virus application should be able to take care of it instead of the browser taking the load.
So after spending some time with Google, I got lead to gHacks who had a detailed article on it. So here is how you disable this feature, type “about:config” in your Firefox’s address bar and run a search filter for browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone and change the parameter value to false which will disable the automatic scanning.
via [gHacks]
On 7th June 2008 @ 03:12 pm by Arul N S
Yesterday Opera annonced that its upcoming Opera 9.5 version would have built-in malware protection in response to the built in feature of the much expected Mozilla’s Firefox 3. According to the press release, Opera is typing up with Haute Secure to protect its users from the next generation web based threats. Presently Firefox uses data from Google for its malware protection.
We have to watch how good is the Opera’s protection compared to Firefox 3 or IE 8 in the days to come. But for now, according to CNET it has to improve a lot to compete with Google.
Source: [Opera via CNET ]
On 6th June 2008 @ 03:42 am by Arul N S
For those who didn’t jump the bandwagon with RC1 release of Firefox 3, now is the time to check it out the all new faster, safer Fox… This is the final release candidate of the new broswer with latest Gecko 1.9 Engine and the public release can be expected any time in June. Watch out for the day since it is called as the “Download Day” and Mozilla Foundation is aiming for a record number of downloads within 24 hours of the release. You can help the cause by downloading FF3 at your home, work and help spread the word.
![[Valid RSS]](http://tech.arulns.com/wp-content/uploads/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")
