Monthly Archives: April 2007

WordPress 2.2 delayed

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WordPress 2.2 has been delayed probably until June, this news come not as a big surprise, even when just 4 months ago, the exact date of 23rd of April was announced.
I confess, that i have had some extremely high hopes, when WordPress 2.1 came out, but the truth is, the more functionality is to be implemented, the bigger the delay will be, that the reality of the software design and software programming.

Software development is a creative process, which is not easy, and there are always so many things beyond developer’s imagination, so it is really hard to predict an exact date for its end, every developer knows exactly what i am talking about. Every time we push ourself into creating something new, we basically are discovering the unknown, which may take quite a lot of time, even when the developer is very experienced and has a lot of knowledge, there is no guarantee, that he won’t face something, he is incapable to solve in the short period of time.

The new functionalities which are to be introduced in WordPress 2.2 these are those, which i consider to be the most important and the most interesting:

  1. PhpMailer – it will surely improve the performance, especially on those sites, where a lot of emails been sent (new comments, new users, polls, backups, as well as moderations in general)
  2. Permalink Redirection – goodbye my beloved redirection plugin ? this functionality is extremely important to me, as if i decide to alter the name of the post, all the links pointing to it, won’t vanish in vain, and no penalty will be cast by the search engines
  3. Multiple format comment feeds, including Atom 1.0 – a natural development and support of the current standards, which is important
  4. Improved comment editing – this is something interesting to look for, especially for those sites, which have a lot of comments
  5. MySQL 4.1 – this is not a new functionality, but those sites, whose providers are still using MySQL versions below 4.1 will face a big problem with upgrade to WordPress 2.2, but luckily even WordPress 2.0 will be supported for 2.5 more years.
  6. Tagging support – this is one more functionality which may obsolete some of the very popular plugins, but that’s life, and since a lot of people really using and needing this functionality, there is no surprise that it has found its way into the new version of WordPress
  7. Widgets – whole world is so crazy about them – OS X, Windows Vista, Yahoo have them already, the most of the programs are implementing, and now we will have a blogging software widgets. =O)

I think that WordPress developers has done what is right – delaying publishing online an unfinished software. This way people won’t scream about the bugs, won’t claim that what was promised was never delivered and so on. Take your time guys, do what is necessary, you as well as Apple with its OS X delay are well supported by your users. We have enough time to wait for a good, finalized software.

A List Apart 2007 Web Design Survey

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I took 2007 Web Design Survey

Spend 10 minutes of your precious time and take a web design survey at the “A List Apart” page, which is just 37 questions, and the most of them are multiple choice. After that, we will hopefully get to see, what kind of people are working all around the web. This might give a slightly idea, about the professionals working on and perfecting the same goal.

There are currently several prizes, all to be won by random participants: a ticket to “An Event Apart”, an IPod or a funky “A List Apart” T-shirt, for example. Thus survey will remain open until 22 May, 2007, so do not waste any time, participate and invite people you know.

Visual Studio 2007 beta

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Microsoft has officialy released a new beta of Visual Studio 2007 (codename Orcas) as a part of the Community Technology Preview (CTP). In the past years, Microsoft has finally started more open process with the community on their development tools like Visual Studio. Being a regular Microsoft development tools user since Visual Studio 97, i am really excited to try out this new version, which includes .NET version 3.5, as well as much improved data management (with each version of Visual Studio, Microsoft improves this area greatly, in my opinion. Visual Studio 2005 made some very good steps with a better data-presentation separation). Another important change is ASP.NET Ajax integration, and if someone managed to miss all the Ajax buzz, then this is your chance to check it out. Every web developer, working on Windows, should check out the new Visual Studio 2007 beta at least to see if there are any improvements for better web standards handling, as well some very important fixes(there are billions of developers all around the world, crying for finally fixing the visual developer part).

Interesting is that beta1 of Visual Studio is not “feature complete”, which means that there are still some features, not integrated into this version, which is unusual, since normally “alpha” is a version with not all features available, while “beta” is a feature complete version with some functionalities having problems. Anyway, it does not really matter how they name this version, but Microsoft has hinted, that the second beta of Visual Studio, this time with all features available, will appear on MSDN until the end of this year.

If you do not have MSDN access, then you can just experiment with an Express Edition of the Visual Studio 2007, which is freely available for everyone.

I am still busy with a lot of web projects to find time to test it, as well as with PHP for Delphi, but as soon as i can, i am going to publish some kind of a review on both of the tools.

Google Webmaster Tools

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Google has done quite a lot of changes to Google Webmaster Tools console recently. Just in a couple of days such things as a “Page Analise Link Keyword” and “Content Removal Tool” have appeared there.

First the Page Analise Link Keyword and Phrases functionality, it is showing now name variations of the links. First the functionality of the external links has been implemented at Google Webmasters Tools, but it has shown only the name of the external links, with no details of how those names are written or variations between the anchor text, but right now there is a new part at the same page of the Statistics Page analysis, but with much more information about the links text to your site, and as usually all this information is available for download in CSV format. Links text is one of the most important criterias for the search engines, and every webmaster like to know with what text other pages are referring their site, and Google Webmasters Console gives exact information about top 100 links to your page, so this is some information you won’t be wishing to miss.

Secondly, there is new “Content Removal Tool” which comes in line with a whole sequence of the changes related to the robots.txt file. Google Webmaster Console has added a new functionality to remove content without altering a line in robots.txt, with a help of new interface, you can remove indexing from selected files to whole directories on your site. I see that this is a very good improvement, but as the web is not equal to Google (there are still Yahoo, Altavista, Ask and MSN around), every reasonable webmaster will still need to remove manually in robots.txt all those files and directories. But if you don’t have access to your server and need to remove some file or directory from Google just go to your Google Webmaster Console, select URL Removals -> New Removal Request, and then just enter its name, and you are done.

Google Webmaster tools started very slowly with quite a few functionality available, but with no shade of doubts, Google has improved it quite a lot in the recent months (first of all with exact links to your site) and it is exciting to see where they are going to take it next. With Yahoo’s SiteExplorer appearing on the horizon this is quite a powerful move, and i know quite a number of people who has “switched” from SiteExplorer to Google Webmaster Tools console in the recent 3-4 months.

Google sitemaps final version

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A couple of days ago, without big announcements Sitemaps.org has released the final specification for sitemap protocol. A version 1.0 of the sitemap protocol now besides being supported by the big 3 search engines (Google,Yahoo and Microsoft) is also being supported by the Ask.com. I hope that the rest of the search world will join this effort in helping the search engines the website structure recognition.

The sitemaps.org site have also updated and published the information in 18 (eighteen) languages, which is quite a surprise for me. Portuguese language was not forgotten, so i am a kind of happy besides still complaining about Google Zeitgeist, but at the same time, the front page in all languages is still referring to the 0.9 version of the sitemap protocol, which is already an outdated specification =O)

Also a notable fact is that the search engine bots are supporting sitemaps reference from the world famous robots.txt file. The syntax is quite simple:
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

This is quite an interesting and very smart way of sitemap publishing – this way you don’t really have to submit your sitemap to each and every search engine, when they visiting your site, they will find about the sitemap from the robots.txt, so it is a great optimization of time. No more manual sitemap submission is the most important change done to the way, the sitemap protocol is handled.

Interconfor lda

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After 4 months of working and reworking and once again changing and altering, the Interconfor lda website is online. Interconfor is a private Portuguese firm, working in industry of furniture and construction components, which it provides for a very wide scope of different commercial firms. They help construction firms to develop custom furniture and equipment solutions for all types of apartments, and recently they have even started doing post-forming on the furniture components, which allow them to provide exclusive solutions in Portugal.

This Interconfor web site was created using XHTML 1.0 strict DTD and CSS 2.1 profile, the design has some nonlinear things, which i implemented, for example, while having a fixed width, it has a lot of things, which are “out of the box”, solved by the fluid design css properties. What it means, is that its not that square and fixed as a fixed design used to be.

The site while still unfinished was asked by the client to be put online today, so even though it has some glitches, and backoffice products are not really inserted by the client, and there are some XHTML validation errors, the site went online a couple of minutes ago. The compatibility and the rest of the standards are eventually going to catch up during the next 10 days, as it happens a lot of times with web sites, done for impatient clients.

Os X.5 Leopard in October

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Apple Inc has announced a few days ago that the newest OS X version, codenamed “Leopard” will not be shipped in June as it was announced earlier, but only in October, as they still need time to finalize and to perfect the software. They also cited the development of iPhone (integration with OS X ) as one of the reasons for delay, the other reason is the fact, that they do not wish to ship bugged software. This is fine for me, as i prefer to wait for a good software, instead of using something unfinished or completely crippled software.

The “near final” copy of the “Leopard” (or also known as a beta – features complete, but still with bugs) will be available in June at the Worldwide Developers Conference. Interesting fact, that Apple Inc has hinted a lot of times, that at the current available builds, a lot of functionalities are still missing, which will be shown only at the “right time”, so at the moment let us hope, that in June we will finally see, what is supposed to be a supreme operating system.

There is a one disappointing moment for me, since i was expecting to buy a MacBook Pro in time with a “Leopard” appearance, but since then i do not see any requirement in delaying this acquisition, i am thinking in advancing in the next 2-3 weeks.