Firefox WordPress.com Sidebar Widget

Ruff has concocted a neat sidebar widget which allows you to post to your WP.com blog straight from the Firefox sidebar.

Filed under: FireFox, Wordpress.com

Phenomenal Speed

I don’t know what switches they pulled here at wordpress.com … but the lags of the past few weeks are gone.
I’ve got blistering speed now, and it feels awesome.

Filed under: Wordpress.com

Interview with Matt and Donncha

conducted by Tom Raftery. Podcast is here.
I’ll listen to it later, while preparing stuff for the barbie …

Filed under: Podcasting, WordPress, Wordpress.com

Title field now offers pop-down access to previous post titles

Just noticed this. How curious!
It’s rather like the browser address bar history of URLs.
But: Why would I want to repeat a post title I have already written? Only if I wanted to write a follow-up to the original post.
Is it cool and therefore useful – or useful and therefore cool?

Filed under: WordPress, Wordpress.com

The visual editor – TinyMCE

I found myself agreeing with this post: Visual Editing still needs work.

It really now begs the question as to whether TinyMCE is the right choice for a rich text editor. How on earth are they gonna fix this mess? It would probably take a lot of collaboration with the TinyMCE team – lots of time and work. Just wondering when is the right point to cut your losses …

I can only assume the WP team have looked into the other options out there.
FCKEditor seems to be almost overkill, for my personal taste; I have to say I like the look of XStandard – maybe I’ll find the time to give it a test run.

Filed under: WordPress, Wordpress.com

We now have Users/Roles

Cool – now we can add role-based users (admins, editors, authors, contributors, subscribers). Great stuff.
If you wanted, you could now use your WordPress.com blog as a group or community weblog.

Filed under: Wordpress.com

Flickr integration for WP

Here are all the gory details: WordPress Likes Flickr

As you can see here Browsing Flickr photostreams in WordPress we are building support for Flickr directly into WordPress. When it becomes available on WordPress.com, the feature is activated by entering your Flickr username in your profile. Then you can browse your entire photostream or use your tags to find what you want.

Filed under: WordPress, Wordpress.com

We All Love Donncha : a new Society

I herewith formally propose, and invite your vote of support for, the formation of the We All Love Donncha Society (WEALDS for short).

The reason should be pretty plain obvious – but I’ll give you yet another instance of the WP Knight who came to rescue a <cough>elderly damsel</cough> in distress.

Filed under: Wordpress.com

Switching between the Visual and standard editor

… is not recommended!

If like me you sometimes want the features offered by the visual editor, yet at other times prefer the plain old one – and chop and change – you’re likely to end up editing posts in one editor that were originally written with the aid of the other.

Cripes – what a mess.

The HTML added by the visual editor can end up looking like the worst tag soup from the old HTML3 days. There are nested and repeated strong and blockquote tags, and whatever else you were trying to add or delete. It all keeps piling up …

I had to go in and manually remove a load of them in one post, because they were preventing proper formatting. This WYSIWYG stuff has got some way to go yet.

Filed under: WordPress, Wordpress.com

Firefox 1.5 buggy: insert image dialog box is cut off

Using the insert/edit image tag, Firefox pops up a dialogue box that looks like this:

Pretty useless really …
BTW, the same ‘cut off’ thing also happens with the insert/edit link – it’s unusable. Is this a Firefox bug – or a problem with the visual editor?

Filed under: FireFox, Wordpress.com

The <!–more–> Quicktag is working! It’s working!

Shout it from the rooftops: Yippe-dee-doo-dah, the more tag is functioning!

Oh, man, am I a happy WP.com camper right now. I wish the person who fixed this bug would put his/her hand up, so I can kiss his/her feet! Just wondering whether my feedback of a couple of days ago (when I grizzled, politely of course, about the misbehaving more tag) had anything to do with this …? Whatever – the moral is clear : Use that Feedback box and good things will happen.

Update 2 November: Just noticed that there is now an icon for the More tag in the visual editor – yay! I’m sure that wasn’t there before … That was the one reason holding me back from using the Vis Editor, not having that More tag.

I seem to go on a lot about this More tag, don’t I?

Talking of tags/icons: Now I miss another one! The insert tag. Useful when you’re doing updates on posts – it inserts the date/time.  And off I send another Feedback report … hehe, they’ll be getting sick of me very soon.

Filed under: Wordpress.com

Update: SessionSaver for Firefox 1.5

New version: 0.2.1.030.2.5
For me, this link worked: sessionsaver-0.2.1.030.2.5
The latest discussion, tips etc. as always at the MozillaZine Forum.

Filed under: Wordpress.com