wordpress

Here's an oldie but a goodie. Confounded by trying to track down fancy-looking WordPress themes? Check out this Web-based theme editor that lets you tweak every nook and cranny of a theme then spit it back to your server to go live. You can add columns, change fonts and backgrounds, even throw in a customizable tag cloud--all with no coding experience required. All you need is a little creativity and some working knowledge of drop-down menus.

While some WordPress themes have excellent built-in support for doing this right from the WordPress dashboard, many more don't, and trying to … Read more

I am fascinated by Stephen Shankland's post concerning Udi Manber's speech to the Gilbane Conference.

No, of course I have no idea what the Gilbane Conference is, but Mr. Manber is apparently Google's Vice President of Engineering in charge of search.

In his view, while the 20th Century was about conquering nature, the 21st is about understanding people.

About time someone did, if you ask me.

The most interesting part of Mr. Manber's speech was when he described the difficulties in understanding even searches that seem abundantly clear, like "hairstyles for ears that stick out.&… Read more

It's tough to stay on top of Google, but I thought I'd draw some attention to some developments involving the search powerhouse.

• More Street View with more privacy: One year into Google's launch of the Google Maps feature to show a driver's-eye view of the world, Google added 37 new cities, including Atlanta, Buffalo, N.Y., Ann Arbor, Mich., Fresno, Calif., and Cincinnati. It effectively doubles the coverage of Street View, engineer Jiajun Zhu said in a Google LatLong blog posting.

In addition, Street View face-blurring technology that first was tried with Manhattan imagery now … Read more

You have to hand it to WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. At his talk at today's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, he managed to be the first conference speaker to put up a picture of a LOLcat while actually tying it into what his company is all about.

The LOLcat in question came from icanhazcheeseburger, a notoriously popular site that rakes in a whopping 1 million unique page views a day. It also runs on WordPress.com, Mullenwag and company's hosted blogging platform.

While the talk was classified as a "high-order bit," which usually involves … Read more

WordPress is a free blogging platform available to everyone. WordPress has two components, one is a free, Web-based blog-hosting service called WordPress.com. The other is WordPress.org, which provides users with software to run a more feature-rich version of the blogging tool on their own servers.

Both services offer a very easy way to blog, with administrative options to work collaboratively on one or several blogs using the same log-in. Bloggers can write their posts in a WYSIWYG editor, or switch over to a code view on the fly.

The service is best known for its community-created themes and … Read more

I spent some time this weekend updating my personal blog to WordPress 2.5 which was released Saturday. I've been a WordPress user for a while now, and it's worth noting that version 2.5 is one of the biggest updates since the release of version 2.0 back in late 2005. There's a huge list of upgrades on the official WordPress blog, but I thought I'd go over a few of my personal favorites so far:

One-click plug-in upgrades: Like software on PCs, third-party WordPress plugins are updated constantly. The one thing you had to … Read more

Matt Mullenweg, creator of blogging platform WordPress, said in a blog post on Tuesday that "the future is social."

With that, he announced that WordPress parent company Automattic has hired designer and developer Andy Peatling, who has created a WordPress-based social network called BuddyPress.

BuddyPress, meanwhile, has become part of Automattic's arsenal. The project's home page has been replaced with an Automattic logo and the teaser "BuddyPress will transform a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a social-network platform."

Mullenweg was a featured speaker at last week's Future of Web Apps conference in … Read more

MIAMI--The way people have been talking about e-mail at the Future of Web Apps conference, you'd think it were a cell phone carrier or a domestic airline. It's antiquated, it's backward, and everybody hates it.

Kevin Marks, a Google engineer and Technorati veteran, said in a talk about the company's OpenSocial project and Social Graph APIs that e-mail is a "strange legacy idea."

"E-mail has died away for a group of users. For the younger generation, they don't use e-mail," he said, talking about the young Web users who have started … Read more

This post was updated at 4:49 PM PT with a clarification from Matt Mullenweg.

MIAMI--"I'm Matt Mullenweg, and I'm famous for eating 108 Chicken McNuggets and surviving," the eccentric 24-year-old WordPress founder said in his talk at the Future of Web Apps conference, explaining that he's no longer continually the No. 1 "Matt" in a Google search because the dancing viral-video star "Where The Hell Is Matt?" gives him a run for his money.

At FOWA, Mullenweg was slated to talk about both the physical and psychological "architecture&… Read more