On my company blog, I blogged about my initial thoughts on WordPress 2.5 beta 1. I have since then updated to WordPress 2.5 beta 1 and have been pretty darn happy with it so far. All my plugins on jappler.com made the upgrade without any issues and this morning when I logged into my web site, I noticed that one of my plugins had been updated since I last logged in and with WordPress 2.5 - you now have the ability to do “one click” installs. You need to provide WordPress with your FTP user name and password, and with that, you can have WordPress manage your plugin updates. No more manual downloading, uploading, etc… Nice work WordPress team! Stay tuned for more WordPress 2.5 related posts.

It is funny how you sometimes seem to always return to the same color. I recently decided to repaint my office (the only room we did not repaint after buying the house) from a boring beige to something a bit richer that would of course look nice with my desk and most importantly - my Apple equipment. I wanted something that would really give some life to the room as well as make the brushed metal of my 23″ Apple display really stand out. I combed through a number of paint samples and came out with a can of paint that I later realized was extremely close to the jappler.com background color…with a tad of thebareminimum.com mixed in….which is extremely close to the desktop image I have been using on my main computer for a few years. All in all, I really like blue!

I wrote a detailed process on how I upgraded and cleaned out jappler.com to go from WordPress 2.2 to WordPress 2.3. If anyone is interested in the process, check out my “Updating from WordPress 2.2 to 2.3” blog post on my company blog.

It has almost been two years since I moved all my sites to Liquid Web for my hosting needs and am still very happy with them. If you take a look at my hosting category, you can see I have been around the block a few times. I have had a few issues, BUT, everyone who I have spoken with is very knowledgeable, helpful, and always been on top of the issue. If you are interested in a new web host, I highly recommend Liquid Web.

A big thanks to Demitrious for sending a link that made my 4th of July: Feedburner Free for Everyone. I have been using Feedburner for quite a long time now and have had some clients using their pay service which I was almost considering - now I do not as it is available for free. Now I can have “control” of my feed once again while still using Feedburner to manage my feed.

Over the past few months I have been busy working on client web sites and have neglected jappler.com. I have been using WordPress for a few years now with this site and had a number of plugins, CSS styles, and other items that needed to be pruned while I wanted to spruce up and clean up some other layout items.
Summary of the jappler.com tune up:

Went through all my plugins and disabled and removed anything that could be replaced with a template tag
Removed all old and un-used CSS styles
Removed CSS code that I could do better or that was not needed
Re-validated my code
Added the rounded corner/drop shadow boxes around my content
Re-arranged my post meta information (author, date, tagged, comments, etc)
Began organizing my categories better
Removed any duplicative code and either used a WordPress function or an includes file to handle the content/code (links, search, etc)
Created a WordPress 404 page with my old 404 standby
Went through my pages and cleaned up the text and updated any outdated information
Re-organized my sidebars and their content
Removed any un-used images

Every once and awhile it is good to clean up your sites so they do not become overly bloated. Don’t know where … [more]

I finally sat down and looked seriously at Yahoo! Pipes to try and figure out how or if it could be useful to me and my clients. I wanted to make something useful so I decided that it would be nice to have a “master Jen feed” which would include the RSS feed from this site, my company’s web site, as well as from my son’s web site. Within five minutes, the master feed was created and in my RSS feeder. While this might not be the most advanced thing Yahoo! Pipes can do, I am definitely considering grouping a number of my RSS feeds together and making more “master feeds”.

For anyone who is interested: Jen’s master feed. If you are not using RSS yet - please…it is 2007, even MS IE 7 supports RSS. Time to get on the bandwagon!