Two days ago, AF-Design’s blog moved to WordPress’ SVN access which brought version 2.7-hemorrhage up. For any who are comfortable and familiar withe the existing WordPress administrative screens, I suggest you take a look at the proposed wireframes. Much like anything, it takes some getting used to, but there are some really great usability things coming along. One feature I really like is the quick edit for posts. If you’re like me (and I suspect a number of others) I often mis-categorize or tag a post and it provides a nice quick interface for making the updates.

WordPress Administrator Screenshot

Of course running bleeding edge software right from the repo isn’t without cost. So far I’ve been bit by a few items that I know of:

1. Comments are disabled by default for new posts created with the QuickPress.
2. Pingbacks are disabled by default for new posts created with the QuickPress.
3. Saving changes to already published posts seems to create an invalid page reference which would throw an error in the admin. Not sure what the root cause was there. I’m hopeful r9078 takes care of it.
4. Images are automatically wrapped with a caption [ caption ]…[ /caption ] by default (see above screenshot) and the uploader (as of r9078) doesn’t have a way to turn that off, so it requires manual deletion of the comment code.
5. Alignment of the image doesn’t carry over from the “Insert Media” feature

I think the Automattic WordPress team is doing a fantastic job and am looking forward to a stable version release.

Google Analytics does a great job keeping track of visitors, sessions, geographic locations and with the addition of the Benchmarking feature, even compares your traffic to other blogs of similar size and topic. However, there’s a problem. It counts you too! If your using a fancy plug-in to manage your Google Analytics account, you won’t need this. I, however, have been tweaking and tuning my template over time and have my it all stuffed right in header. Today I made a minor tweak to my WordPress template it to suppress my views when I’m logged in and updated to the new tracking code from the old Urchin based code. This snippet is from my ./wp-content/templates/header.php file.

<?php if($user_ID != 1){ ?>
<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-123456-1");
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>
<?php } ?>

Be sure to add the id (or id’s) you want to suppress and to put the correct Google Analytics account information (the UA-123456-1 bit) in your code.
Happy tracking

The blog has been picked up by spammers. We are now receiving daily spam comments. This would be inconsequential, however, until only a few days ago I had a site map that did not include the blog entries thus preventing it from being indexed by Google. I removed that map around the 19th and so Google has since indexed the blog pages. I believe spammers are using Google (and possibly other search engines) to locate sites running WordPress and other blogging software and adding them to their bots in hopes the blogs are unmoderated. I know nothing earth shattering here, but curious that until I was indexed by Google’s search engine - not a single spam comment. I noticed a similar effect on my personal blog when I removed the registration requirement (still moderated) for posts.