Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 will be released, as will Ubuntu 9.04, a long-term release that features a newer kernel — which I’ve read has solved a bug that causes BitTorrent activity to kill WLAN connections — as well as the Ext4 filesystem, which I understand nothing about other than that it is better than Ext3. I will also likely install the 64-bit distribution to take advantage of my new 4GB of RAM, and spring for a 1TB hard drive to complement these two OS upgrades.

WordPress 2.8 is also slated to be released, whose features include these three that I’m especially looking forward to:

• Add CodePress syntax highlighting to Theme and Plugin editors
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab
• Autosave post/page when pressing Control/Command+S

This already exists in the form of a third-party plugin, which I’ve actually used successfully before on another blog. I’ve always found upgrading manually to be easy and problem-free, though incredibly tedious. Because I don’t use many plugins or alter any core WordPress files, I think automating the process will be a safe option for me, one that I’ll trust more in the hands of the core development team. Still, I’m sure I’ll wait till it’s been thoroughly tested in a couple versions before using it on this site.

WordPress 2.5 comes out in less than two weeks! I read something about the “Media Uploader” on the development blog, and, curious, I searched for more details, and came across this WordPress 2.5 Beta demo site. The login name is admin and the password is demo.

Aside from the stunning visual overhaul, there are several immediately noticeable vast improvements in some of the features:

• Customizable thumbnail (and medium) image sizes — this has been requested forever, and WordPress finally listened. Used to be that every image you uploaded was copied and resized to a width of 128 pixels for automated thumbnail creation, which made a potentially cool feature virtually useless. Now they just need to introduce cropping.
• Better private post protection — keeping posts private is so unintuitive in WordPress 2.3. The post needs to be marked as “Private” using a radio button, but hitting the “Publish” button instead of the “Save” button after editing a private post stupidly disregards that preference. Now privacy is indicated by a checkbox that flips privacy on and off and keeps it that way.
• Tag management — I guess we all knew this was coming. It seems like the developers were so eager to get tag support out the door that with 2.2 or whatever it was they didn’t mind that you couldn’t edit any of the tags you create when you publish. Tagging a post just threw tags into the dark recesses of the WordPress database, where they became inaccessible except as part of a tag cloud on your site. But now we have an interface to delete, add, and edit them just as we do categories.

It’s pretty sweet. The media uploader is particularly awesome. I can’t wait to install it. The designers still assume all their users can’t read fonts smaller than 16pt. I guess they’re trying to ensure they look Web 2.0 enough. And it looks like the Shuttle Project isn’t going anywhere after all.

The same goes for archives; certain Blogger users, for example, apparently turn archive links off, so all that’s easily visible are the last ten posts or so on the front page. But, of course, as is especially the case with something as prefab as Blogger, the archives are accessible through a very predictable URL schema.

And what about comment feeds? These are even more scarcely linked to, but in many cases do exist.

Here are the ones I know so far. I plan to update this post as I discover more. This is as much for my reference as it is for yours. So, bookmark it, and, y’know, subscribe to the comments. If you know of any other schemata, please comment. And if you’d like to create your own feeds from any site, give Feed43 a shot. It’s a bit tough to learn, but I’ve successfully made several useful feeds with it.

MySpace

• All blog posts: http://blog.myspace.com/blog/rss.cfm?friendID=[friendID]

WordPress

Note: Sometimes WordPress is installed in a subdirectory of the root domain, typically named “wordpress”, “wp”, or “blog”. If none of the links below work, try inserting these or other directory names (e.g., domain.com/wordpress/feed/).

• All blog posts:
  • /wp-feed.php
  • /wp-rss.php
  • /wp-rss2.php
  • /wp-atom.php
  • /feed/
  • /rss/
  • /rss2/
  • /atom/
  • /?feed=rss2
  • /?feed=atom
• All comments: /wp-commentsrss2.php
• Single post comments:
  • [permalink]/comments
  • /?feed=rss2&p=[post ID]
  • /?feed=atom&p=[post ID]

Blogger

• Archives: /YYYY_MM_01_archive.html
• All comments:: /feeds/comments/default
• Single post comments:
  • /feeds/[postID]/comments/summary (RSS)
  • /feeds/[postID]/comments/default (Atom)
    The value for postID can be found in the post’s page source, within a URL that contains “post-edit.g”
• Posts within a label:
  • http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/[BlogID]/posts/summary/-/[labelName] (RSS)
  • http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/[BlogID]/posts/default/-/[labelName] (Atom)

Flickr

• Photos:
  • http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=[userID]&format=atom
  • http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=[userID]&format=rss_200
• Contacts’ Photos:
  • http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_friends.gne?user_id=[userID]&format=rss_200
  • http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_friends.gne?user_id=[userID]&format=atom
• All comments received: http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/activity.gne?user_id=[userID]
• All comments left: http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_comments.gne?user_id=[userID]
• Favorites: http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_faves.gne?id=[userID]&format=rss_200
  See http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/. A person’s user ID is visible when you hover over “Block this person” in their profile page. It will look something like 12345678@N00.

Last.fm

• All you need to know is at Audioscrobbler Web Services.

deviantART

• http://backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=by:[username]%20sort:time%20-in:scraps
• http://backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=gallery:[username]%20sort:time&type=deviation
• http://backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=by:[username]%20sort:time%20in:journal
• http://backend.deviantart.com/rss/journal/[username].xml (broken)

LiveJournal

• All blog posts:
  • http://[username].livejournal.com/data/rss
  • http://[username].livejournal.com/data/atom
• Comments:
  

  No, comment feeds are not available on LiveJournal. The FAQ I have referenced above explains how you may propose this as a suggestion to LiveJournal developers.

YouTube

• Favorited videos: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/[username]/favorites?v=2

Other

If you can’t identify the blogging platform used on a particular site, just give these a shot. They’ll work probably two out of three times.

• /feed/
• /rss/
• /atom/
• /rss.xml
• /atom.xml
• /index.xml
• /index.rdf
• /index.php?atom=1

Thanks to Blogger Buster’s three-part series on Blogger feeds for a bunch of tricks.

Most of the design was done first in GIMPShop, something I’ve been meaning to learn to use and actually made a lot of progress in today. IrfanView and Microsoft Paint just weren’t cutting it anymore.

The new comments section is pretty nice, with entirely image-based form fields, but unfortunately the arbitrary comments thing mentioned in the last post is going to take some more work that I really don’t want to do right now.

Also, Internet Explorer is a complete asshole.

All I did was create a “Page” (a technical WordPress term) called Arbitrary Comments, then, in the sidebar, call that page and load its comments with these simple lines:

<?php query_posts('page_id=120'); ?>
<?php the_post(); ?>
<?php comments_template(); ?>

I also implemented a PHP trick from Libertà to sort the retrieved comments in descending order of creation, as all good shoutboxes do.

Shoutboxes are an interesting new medium. And they really are new, I mean, nothing like them has ever really existed in the past. A comment in a shoutbox is a message that is ostensibly addressed to the owner of the shoutbox, but is intentionally public. The closest thing to this that I can think of are those dry erase boards people put on their doors in college, with a pen hanging from them so that anybody walking by could write something. Bystanders aren’t exactly part of the audience of the message, but there’s clearly something more compelling to this than email or private messaging.

It’s certainly one of the biggest draws of MySpace. Their commenting system makes every profile organic, alive, interactive. People attract comments more often than they update their profile themselves, and that’s one of the main reasons to check people’s profiles, which is about all you really do on MySpace. And there’s something more friend-like in opening up your personal page to the impulses of those people you’ve told MySpace are your “friends,” extending trust in the mutual creation of a page that is intended to define you.

I remember trying out Vox a couple months ago, which seems to market itself as something like MySpace with a heavier focus on blogging. I thought it would be perfect, but I soon realized that, at this point, unless your social networking site allows arbitrary comments, you’re not using a social networking site — you’re using a blogging site with tenuous little connections between members. And nobody cares about your fucking blog.

The migration was easy enough, but the customization couldn’t have been possible without these sites:

• UrbanGiraffe’s WordPress Theme Guide: A great hands-on dissection of the internal workings of WordPress
• Catsudon’s guide to Andy Skelton’s Blogger importing tool: Quickly fleshed out my WordPress site with plenty of XHTML-invalid posts from my old Blogger site
• Web Design Group’s Guide to CSS: Useful, but limited, as I came to discover

…and of course all the WordPress documentation and codex.

Like I said, there’s still much XHTML invalidity, due entirely to Blogger, but I’ll be fixing this slowly (standards, standards, standards). Some formatting quirks I’ll be ironing out as well, so there may be varying degrees of garbling in the near future. I could say more, but I won’t, but I will say, “If you’ve thought about switching to WordPress, do it, if for no other reason than that you’ll learn so much about css and php in the process.”