All I Seem to do is Post About Updates Here is WordPress 3.2

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Well WordPress 3.2 is here and dutifully I have updated to the new version and this is the first post. The new dashboard looks great and is much easier on the eye. It’s hard to judge how much faster this version is as I am logged on at work and our net connection isn’t always ticketyboo.

As I am now getting used to the upgrade went on without a hitch, I have some sort of PHP memory allocation problem which means that since version 3.1 I have to disable some of my plugins during the upgrade but that is a minimal hassle. The spellchecker did hang but I cannot be sure if that is the XP machine with IE7 that I am using or the new  version  of WordPress.

I have now switched to the full screen editing mode and I must say I like the uncluttered look. I was confused with the slide away title bar. However as with all things new there is a period of adjustment.

That’s probably enough for now.

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The video is a collection of photos that I took in Europe in 2008 whilst on holidays there. The video itself was created with the Animoto web site. this is a remarkable video site and for a few dollars a year you can create and share your videos with music and it is all rendered for you.

Testing the new WP iOS app v2.8

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The brand new iOS App this is the quick photo feature. The app seems to load more quickly. There has been quite a history of various buggy implementations. However the App seems to improve with each iteration. This seems much slicker. Not that I blog much from the phone my hands are too big and eyes too old.

Upgrading WordPress to Version 3.1.1.

I have for the first  time since the introduction of the automatic upgrades to WordPress struck a problem I kept getting an error message “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted

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(tried to allocate 3096504 bytes) in /home/stefanra/public_html/blog/wp-includes/class-http.php on line 1426″

First I thought that it was an issue of not having enough memory on my blog, upgraded and no difference same error.

I posted on the official WordPress forum and within a day a helpful past with this link

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/253495#post-1017842

Seems that the error is related to how much memory php assigns to WordPress, I deactivated a small herd of  plugins (19 to be exact)  and voila successful upgrade.

Thanks to forums !!!!

 

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Internet Explorer version 9

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Well here we go Internet Explorer 9. I must say it’s the prettiest version of this software i have used. It certainly noticeably quicker than the previous version and am almost reluctant to say this but a bit smoother than my current favourite browser chrome version 10. I’m not quite ready to abandon my favourite yet but I’m very happy so far with this new version of Internet Explorer having just installed the RTM version. I dabbled with the beta release and the release candidate version and had not experienced any problems with either.

So it looks good performs well I got the dashboard of my blog open hammering away with Dragon NaturallySpeaking all is good.

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Jetpack for WordPress

Well I have been playing with another plugin for the blog this one written by Automatic the people behind WordPress. It add a range of features to a self hosted WordPress blog that are usually found on the wordpress.com hosted blogs. It does require the you link to a wordpress.com account but this doesnt seen to hurt, apparently we leave our digital footorints all over the web anyway so another isnt going to matter.

The feature that I really liked and wanted was a share button at he end of post and now I have it. It is easy to set up if you read the instructions which I didn’t on the first round.  It seems to work a treat now all I have to do is wait for the comments and recomendations to roll in!

Jetpack also adds site statistics to the blog,which be nice when I get lots of traffic. I now have a widget which pops in my last five tweets from Twitter thanks to this plugin. I also have a gravtar thingy that I set up. There are also a few other things like an intelligent spell chack and a markup language. The best bit is  that all of this is free

Thanks to WordPress and Automatic for this useful plugin.

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Upgrade to WordPress 3.1

Looks like the upgrade has gone without a hitch. The mobile theme works anchors a weigh!

UPDATE

I have now messed around with WP 3.1 and so for so good. I can however report that the site is a little messed up in Chrome 10 beta. What i mean is that when scriolling up and down the images or content dont always scroll smoothly. I have noticed this on my laptop mostly (which is a new machine) . However this is not a problem in Safari or IE9 RC. This is most likely a function of Chrome rather than WordPress. I am bit addicted to Chrome as I was to Firefox when it first appeared, so I am always using the beta versions with the risks that associated with beta releases.

All my plugins are happy but I cant really say that I have pushed all the new features yet. I would like to the media gallery upgraded as I find it a bit clunky. I am no html wizard so I guess that I will wait for the forthcoming releases.

The other issue I have had is with video uploaded from the WordPress app on my iPhone. Here Chrome and Safari shine but not Internet Explore 7 or 9RC. The video sample is here I have used the new internal linking feature of WordPress here.

 

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More testing of Word Recognition Software

It would almost seem that I’m having a bit of a feast of posting on the blog. It’s not that I’m trying to enter a novel writing competition but rather I am testing Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 11. This is my third post in two days. The two previous posts were both done using the admin pages of my WordPress blog but this one I’m writing within Word 2007 and publishing from within Word. I can add at this point that Dragon NaturallySpeaking correctly added WordPress in its camel case. In fact trying to use the word font made the font dialogue highlight that’s probably because I paused before using the word. But otherwise I must say that the trial is going quite well.

I can certainly pump out quite a few words very quickly using this software. It does seem strange sitting in the study by myself talking to the computer but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to type as fast as I’m writing this. There is always the danger when using this sort of software that you write as you speak.  If you are not watching the screen and reading could go a long and get  some very strange  or misspelt words. And there’s absolutely nothing stopping you having run-on sentences.

Setting up the software didn’t take very long at all, a matter of about 20 min. The program seems to be able to localise to some of the more common versions of English including United Kingdom United States, Australia and New Zealand. I’m not sure whether it would cope will that Irish or Scottish accent but since I don’t have one of those I guess I will never find out. After each use the program takes some time to shut down and this might be to do with the program updating an individual’s profile. The program is certainly built around individual profiles so I imagine several users would be able to access the software on one computer.

Thinking about your writing certainly helps; I’m writing this as I go. This means that I have to  halt think and then proceed. However I have now written about 400 words in the space of about 7 or 8 minutes. I think this would take me quite a great deal of time if I were actually typing. My typing is certainly beyond the hunt and peck method of using two fingers, but my typing is certainly does not have any sort of secretarial speed. I think it would be difficult using this software in an open office or even in a shared office. But working alone as I am now it seems to work quite well. There is some background noise I can hear but the microphone obviously isn’t picking this up so there is not any interference. I can report that Dragon NaturallySpeaking didn’t try to type the sad lamenting meow of our cat.

So here I am nearly up to 500 words the accuracy is quite good it does misunderstand some words but if I speak like a radio announcer and I mean  a proper radio announcer like those found on public radio there is no problem. I haven’t mastered all the complex commands that come with this program  it is possible to change words, delete things, highlight things and even control the computer with this program however my main reason for using it is to speed up my typing. Inevitably this may lead to more blog posts.

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Pea Zip a freeware archiving program

I have been using WinRAR some years now and generally find it to be quite a good program. However every now and again I get error messages. Generally speaking whatever I’m  un-archiving seems to go okay despite the error messages. Recently I was an un-archiving something that I had downloaded and struck a problem with the an archive that had

WinZip Icon
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very long filenames. My usual course of action is to Google for an answer. It turns out that this is a known bug of the WinRAR program. It seems it has a bug with filenames that are more than 260 characters long. Arguably filenames of this length are a little extreme however they do exist as I found out.

I searched around on the net and tried a couple of other archiving programs in trial mode. One was the venerable WinZip, which is now up to version 15, and this didn’t seem to solve the problem. Another program I tried was called Win7  or something like it. The latter program had a quirky interface and I just gave up.

I continued searching via Google and eventually came across a program called Pea Zip  which is an open source archiving program. This program has a fairly straightforward interface and after installing it successfully  un-archived what I needed without any errors. It did run noticeably slower than WinRaR rather but ultimately it did what I wanted it to.  I was then able to use what I downloaded without any trouble.

I’m not sure that I will use it to replace WinRAR completely it does however offer another option for un-archiving files. I notice that there is a WinRAR version 4 in beta so maybe this will solve the problem. however Pea Zip  offers a cheap alternative. I’ve installed it on my Windows 7 64-bit system without incident, and there are versions for most current operating systems including Mac and Linux. So go on over and visit their website at http://peazip.org/and give it a whirl.

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