I just upgraded to WordPress 2.5 using WordPress Automatic Upgrade. It worked perfectly. I had been using Fantastico in the past, but this plugin works much better. Externally, you won’t see any change. The major changes were under the hood. Watch a short video showing some of the features.
I am now trying K2, the successor to Kubrick. It is still in beta but works quite well. I can’t wait until AJAX commenting is natively implemented in the theme.
I’ve updated the header. It was created in Gimp. (The image used the Old Photo Decor script; the text used the Basic II Alpha to Logo script).
Update: Changed header again to match my Smugmug site.
This is an example of a “mini” post, a new feature of the Blix theme.
Many thanks to Sebastian Schmieg for developing the Blix Wordpress theme.
It looks great. Clean and simple but also asthetically pleasing.
Google is to create a search tool specifically for weblogs, most likely giving material generated by the self-publishing tools its own tab.
CEO Eric Schmidt made the announcement on Monday, at the JP Morgan Technology and Telecom conference. ‘Soon the company will also offer a service for searching Web logs, known as “blogs,”‘ reported Reuters.
It isn’t clear if weblogs will be removed from the main search results, but precedent suggests they will be. After Google acquired Usenet groups from Deja.com, it developed a unique user interface and a refined search engine, and removed the groups from the main index. After a sticky start, Usenet veterans welcomed the new interface. Google recently acquired Blogger, and sources suggest this is the most likely option.
Bloggers too are likely to welcome their very own tab as a legitimization of the publishing format. But many others will breathe a sigh of relief as blogs disappear from the main index. (continued on link below)
I still think this is a great idea! Google was and is definitely getting clogged up with numerous weblogs linking to the same main article. Removing the weblogs from the main search index would allow the truly authoritative articles to be shown first. Then, should the searcher want commentary about an article he could go to Google’s Blog tab and find it. I wonder if they are thinking of developing their own blog search or if they will buy and intergrate Technorati. Either way I’m still looking forward to it.
—-Dear How Not To Blog,
Thanks for pointing out how old this article was. I didn’t even look at the article’s original publication date when I posted this. It was new news to me as of this morning. Regardless, I still think that this is an excellent idea. Why do you say that it is a “stupid idea?” Anyway, thanks for linking to my site. From such a “high quality site as yours” , I’m sure that I’ll move up quite a few places on Google (note sarcasm). By the way, your site is aptly named: Who runs a blog where comments are disabled??
Like the new titles? It is the result of a sweet plugin made over at Coldforged. I’m having some problems with the anti-aliased soft shadows, but that seems to be more of a problem with my hosting than the plugin. Integration with Wordpress 1.5 is outstanding. Should I want to switch fonts I would just upload the new font, select it in the headline admin menu, and, voila, the titles are now displayed with the new font.
The owner of Coldforged actually helped me set it up and was very nice. The support that he provided was top-notch.
This is the page with the comments for the Image Headline Plugin
Download and Setup Instructions
Even though the new Wordpress 1.5 has excellent builtin spam protection I was starting to see some some spam getting past. The problem was that the current spam moderation relies on keywords in the comment body and some recent spammers were getting through by putting random text in the body but then putting their name has the url to their site (mostly poker sites).
So, I’ve installed Spam Karma to stop the spam. The setup was extremely easy and I’m hopeful that any spam will be stopped.
I just upgraded to Wordpress 1.5. One of the most outstanding upgrades, IMO, is the new theme manager. With the click of a button I can switch between themes. The default theme is now Kubrick…the theme that I’m using can be found at the bottom of the page. I still have some tweaking to do (such has making the javascript menu on the left work correctly), but all-in-all I really like the look of this theme. It does seem a little washed out to me so I might enlarge the fonts a little bit and bolden the colors…
Back to biomolecular chemistry studying. 
I’ve successfully switched over from Blogger (which I still use for my photo blog through flickr) to WordPress. I initially had some trouble getting the permalinks to work right but I think it’s all good now. As soon as I get some more time I’ll update the template to something a bit more flashy. But now, back to bacteriology studying.
