Matt Mullenweg’s address from WordCamp San Francisco.
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Mandela Ribbon for WordPress
Honour Nelson Mandela with a Website Ribbon
Honour Nelson Mandela with a remembrance ribbon on your WordPress blog. When I heard the sad news today I wanted to show my condolences on my WordPress sites, so knocked up a couple of plugins to put a ribbon in the top right corner of the sites.
Download Your Mandela Ribbon Plugin
There are 2 versions of the ribbon. One shows an English message, while the other is in Mandela’s home language – Xhosa (plugin code is in English)
Download from tech.graphicline.co.za
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GIMP Gone from Sourceforge
GIMP Download Moved from Sourceforge to Gimp.org
The GIMP Windows installer package download was removed from Sourceforge by the developers of the software. Citing the recent changes made by Sourceforge where their own so-called “installer” package is pushed in visitors faces, GIMP announced they could not expose GIMP users to this practice.
The GIMP is available directly from www.gimp.org and this is the only download anyone looking the application should use now.
Plugin Accepted by WordPress
First Plugin Accepted by WordPress.org
I had some good news today; my first plugin submitted to WordPress.org got accepted and is now in the repository.
It’s only a very simple plugin that adds rel=”nofollow” to tag cloud widgets, but it feels good to contribute something to the community. Of course, it also feels good to see my .org identity listed under the plugin 🙂
And here’s the link to the repository http://wordpress.org/plugins/gl-tag-cloud-nofollow/
South Africa’s Most Expensive Website
Provincial Government Website Costs Taxpayers R140M
Well, that’s one version of the story. The Free State Provincial government claims it spent only R40M – on 38 websites! Whichever version is true, the questions remain;
- why does a provincial government need to have 38 websites?
- hho in their right mind pays over R1M for any small website?
- if the R140M is correct, then surely the websites must be massive – with thousands of pages, highly functional, and completely custom designed from the ground up.
Expensive Free State Website
The website causing the controversy is the official website of the Free State Provincial Government (Province is similar to a US State) www.freestateonline.fs.gov.za
Read the rest of this entry
WordPress 3.6 Due
WordPress 3.6 Delayed but Still Due in April 2013
The release of WordPress 3.6 has been delayed for 2 weeks, but is still expected for public release by April 29th! The release was pushed back to allow beta testers more time to find and report bugs in WP 3.6 core. As far as new features go, no more new features or functions will get added after March 27. At this point the beta will be released for developer testing.
What to Expect in WP 3.6
These are some of the possible new features we may see in WP 3.6
Post formats UI:Â Post formats UI in WordPress 3.6 will change. The UI (User Interface) itself will be revised to help users better understand a particular post format.
Several sources of inspiration will be worked in, in particular CF Post Formats by Alex King, wordpress.com UI and the famous Tumblr interface. What we can expect from WordPress 3.6 (webdesignerdepot.com)
How will this affect us? If the changes to the media manager are anything to go by, the change will not be good for those of us using WordPress for a website CMS. We can probably expect another dumbed-down interface (which hopefully WYSIWYG editor developers will be on top of before this version is released).
Release Date and Preview of WordPress 3.5
What is Coming in WordPress 3.5
The release of WordPress version 3.5 is set for 29 December 2012. We take a look at what can be expected in the next WordPress update. Some of the proposed features look really interesting; better image handling and high res images.
Improvements can be expected to the user dashboard, as well as some improvements to WordPress Core. Mac users can expect high res (Retina) graphics, and news about the somewhat belated Twenty Twelve theme.
Read the full article at SME Technology (tech.graphicline.co.za
WordPress 3.4 Version Released
Update to WordPress 3.4
WordPress 3.4 was released to the public a few days ago. WP 3.4 has been in Beta testing for quite some time, so most bugs should have been discovered and fixed by now – and so they are. The list of known issues is short (Troubleshooting WordPress 3.4 – Master List). More issues have been reported with the latest default theme 
(TwentyEleven) version, and with the JetPack version update released at the same time than with WP 3.4 core.
Should we update our WordPress installations? Generally the answer is yes. It is always a good idea to keep WordPress up to date, however the update should be approached with a degree of caution. Some plugins may not work with the latest version of WP, some themes may also have problems. So before updating let’s consider a few things if the update causes problems, or even worse a broken site.
Trade Restriction Ends
Free to Trade After Three Years
Good News! The restriction of trade that formed part of the buy/sell agreement when I disposed of my share in a publishing business three years ago ended at 00h01 today…
Trade Restrictions Imposed by Agreement
During the three years the restriction applied, I agreed not to trade in competition with two products produced by the publishing house in which I had been a partner. The first of these is a business to business directory called “The Printers Contact Directory” also known as “Print Contacts” in the past. This directory took the form of a small A5 (later B5 or close to that size) booklet featuring advertisements for suppliers of equipment, machinery, inks, paper as well as other supplies and services to the South African printing industry. This niche market booklet was/is produced annually and distributed free. This niche market directory included a website.
Website Taxonomy Overhauled
Web Site Tags Examined and Updated
The past couple of weeks have seen the taxonomy used on graphicline.co.za completely revamped. Unused or redundant tags were deleted (except for a few that remain for planned articles), header images added along with a short description of the tagged content and a meta description and a list of tags added to the site.
Search Indexing for Tag Archives
Mostly, tag archive pages are “noindexed” for search engines to avoid duplication problems. During the overhaul I was able to weed out the ones that were still indexed – created before I set the system to automatically noindex new tags using the Drupal Meta Tags Quick module.
Some tag archives were selected for search engine indexing, being careful to avoid those with very similar results from being indexed as well. Indexing taxonomy (tags and categories) can create really big problems when it comes to content duplication and search engines.
