One of the joys of working for a media company is knowing that Media Watch is constantly breathing down your neck.  And they really do notice (or at least get told) everything.  Drive published a story last week about how the Ford family is debating whether or not to maintain their controlling share in the Ford Motor Co.  The article was sourced from The Age, but a very small  article summary was added at the top:

Some of Henry Ford’s ancestors are considering the sale of their shares in the struggling motor company.

It is good to see that the elderly are still respected at Ford.

[tags]Drive, Fairfax, Media Watch, Ford[/tags]

I saw a trailer for Team Fortress 2 ages ago & I thought it could be great.  These videos leave me with little doubt that it will be a heap of fun.  Make sure you watch the second one all the way through, the rocket-jump gymnastics at the end is classic.  Definite party game, good to see a FPS that isn’t taking itself too seriously too!

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We’re now up & running on WordPress version 2.2 ‘Getz’.  It was a rather simple upgrade path, but I must stress follow the instructions, including doing the backups and the deactivating all of your plugins. 

No obvious changes to the front end, this site should look exactly the same as it did before. I’ve taken this opportunity to cull a whole bunch of no longer used plugins that were sitting in my plugins folder, I’ve really got to remember to deactivate & delete plugins once I’ve decided I’m not going to use them anymore.

On the topic of plugins, I’ve tested my Bible Verse of the Day plugin, Feed Locations plugin and Noembedder plugin and they all seem to be working nicely. No changes or updates needed.

I have, however, just checked in a beta of the Verse of the Day plugin that supports the new Widgets feature. OK, so it’s not new, it’s just new to the WordPress core.  Anyway this has been on my todo list since the Widgets plugin was released, and now seemed a good time to try it out. It’s surprisingly simple to implement & works very nicely.

The Verse of the Day content on the sidebar here is now being generated by the Widget, not the wp_votd() function.  If you’ve already upgraded to WordPress 2.2, or you have the Widgets plugin installed, I’d really appreciate a few beta testers to give this the once (or twice) over before I check in the release. You can download a zip file here.  It contains 2 files that both need to go into your /wp-content/plugins/ folder, overwriting any earlier versions of those files. Thanks in advance!

If you get sick of the beta & want the old version back, you can re-download it here.

[tags]WordPress, WordPress 2.2, Blogging, Plugins, Getz, Verse of the Day[/tags]

On behalf of the entire WordPress team, I’m proud and excited to announce the immediate availability of version 2.2 ‘Getz’ for download. This version includes a number of new features, most notably Widgets integration, and over two hundred bug fixes. It’s named in honor of tenor saxophonist Stan Getz.

WordPress Development Blog - WordPress 2.2

So much great stuff in this release, built in widgets, full Atom 1.0 support (finally), plugin sandbox for testing new plugins & heaps more.  Lots of new hooks & other features for plugin developers too, which is great.  For a full list see the post above, and make sure you check out Technosailor’s 10 things you should know about WordPress 2.2 post.

As always, congratulations and thanks to Matt and his team for all their work.

[tags]WordPress, Getz, Plugins, Blogging[/tags]

I could sit and watch this site all day: Flickrvision, it’s fascinating just to literally watch the world go by.  From David Troy, the man behind Twitervision.  Here’s my Twittervision site.

[tags]Flickr, Twitter, Google Maps[/tags]

I’ve been a bit quiet here lately, I’ve not had a lot of time to keep up with reading my ever growing list of RSS feeds or even write much (non-work) code.  But I wanted to take a minute to mention a freelance job I finished recently.

It was a site re-do project for a charity organisation called ‘Lifestart‘, which is a parent co-op helping families with Down Syndrome, Autism or other developmental issues.  This is a great work, because I know, from the experiences of a few friends, just how difficult it can be as a parent of a child with Autism.

From their about us page:

In April 1996, eight families came together with a vision. They believed a better way could be found to support children with intellectual disabilities and developmental delays and their families. They wanted a program that would help parents regain a sense of power. This vision became Lifestart Co-operative Ltd., developed by families working in collaboration with professionals to develop a program focused on the needs and priorities of families.

They wanted a site that could be easily and rapidly updated with the latest news & events, but with also contained a lot of fairly static content about their services and how to get involved.  What has been developed is a modified version of WordPress that has blog content on the homepage, and the more infrequently updated content on the menu.  WordPress is great for sites like this.  The editing interface is very simple to use, with image uploading and re-sizing built in, and an extensible hook API that makes it simple to add in editable content areas within pages, like the blurbs at the top of each of their pages.

I’m really pleased with how this site turned out.  It’s got a very comfortable feel to it, and I love the images in the top masthead.  There are a few different ones throughout the site, all with different drawings done by some of the kids being helped by Lifestart.  If you can help out this worthwhile cause, you can make a donation or your business could sponsor a Lifestart event.

[tags]Lifestart, Charity, WordPress, Autism, Freelance[/tags]