Reviews

» Finally Upgrading to 2.7.1

February 24th, 2009 Sammy Russo

Yes I’m a bit behind the times as 2.7 has been out for well over a month now. As I have mentioned in the past, I usually wait for the first bug release before I change over.

This release has been fairly bug free. It took the Development Team quite a while for their first update.

So now that I’m finally upgrading, here’s what I think about Wordpress 2.7.

I like the fact that you can search and install plugins directly from the interface.

I love the new Dashboard.. yes it took a little getting used to but doesn’t everything! After using it for several days now, I find it very user friendly.

The ability to upgrade to the latest release of Wordpress is nice but… you still have to backup the database and the files. Yes there is a plugin for the DB backup but not sure on the files. A suggestion would be to integrate Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin which will handle the full upgrade and a complete set of backups.

There are some new features, ones that I have yet to tried like Gears! The way I understand Gears is it helps speed things up from a development standpoint of view by caching copies on your local drive.

Summary… its a great release. I haven’t found anything that broke within the 20 or so Wordpress sites & blogs that I maintain, it’s more user friendly and packed full of great new features.

Thank You Matt and the Wordpress Development Team.

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» Chrome – The New Google Browser

September 9th, 2008 Sammy Russo

Google announced the Beta Release of the their latest tool.. a new web browser called Chrome. So Google the search giant enters the browser business. Being the Google power user that I am, I of course downloaded a copy and have been playing with it for several days. I haven’t messed with many settings.. pretty much been using it out of the box for a while. I also haven’t looked whether or not it is going to allow additional toolbar widgets and such.

» Desktop Blogging Software Review: ScribeFire

August 3rd, 2008 Sammy Russo

Earlier in the Spring I posted a review of BlogJet, I can’t believe it’s taken me 5 months to finally get around to writing my review of ScribeFire.

When I decided to start writing my desktop blogging software review series, ScribeFire was the second desktop tool I tried. And I have to admit, in the beginning I was very skeptical. I used it a couple of times and it just didn’t feel comfortable. But that’s all changed now. I recently gave ScribeFire another look and have been using it more regularly and I’m really growing to like it.

Features Which Set It Apart

Split screen view. It splits the browser in half so I have a web page in the top half of the browser window and the ScribeFire Editor on the lower half.
ScribeFire is Add-on Extension to FireFox.
Add categories to the blog from the editor… can’t do this with BlogDesk.
Choose to publish as a Post, Page or Draft.
Toggle between Visual and Code editors without going to the main menu.. it’s on the WYSIWYG interface.
A current archive of Posts and Pages which you can edit without having to go into the WordPress Interface.
Work on multiple posts at a time with the use of tabs for each individual post.

All-in-all I really like using ScribeFire… it’s easy to use, it’s feature rich and it’s free. For the last 5 months I’ve actually been using BlogDesk as my primary desktop blogging tool but over the last 3 weeks I’ve been using ScribeFire more and enjoying it.

Do have feedback about the ScribeFire Desktop Blogging Tool? if so, post comments and share your experience with others.

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» A Great New Anti Spam Bot Plugin

June 7th, 2008 Sammy Russo

I came across a great new plugin this morning.. I’ve been looking for this exact plugin for a while now. The plugin is called is_human() by Nick Berlette. With one tiny snippet of code placed into the comments.php file and you have catpcha security integrated into you site. Upon activation it automatically embeds it self in your Wordpress Registration page.

I have a blog called Tehachapi Daily which is completely open to the community to post to the site. They are granted contributor level access immediately upon registration and get worried sometimes about all the spam registers I get. Now with is_human(), I’ve got Catpha security.

Thanks Nick for developing this new plugin.

Download is_human()

Posted in My Favorite Plugins, Reviews | 2 Comments