Changes in WordPress 2.8.1 over 2.8:

• Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
• Dashboard memory usage is reduced.  Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
• The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
• A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
• Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.
• Translation of role names fixed.
• wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title.
• Upload error messages are now correctly reported.
• Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed.
• Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed.
• SSH2 filesystem requirements updated.
• Switched back to curl as the default transport.
• Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload.
• Stricter inline style sanitization.
• Stricter menu security.
• Disabled code highlighting due to browser incompatibilities.
• RTL layout fixes.

In other news, the annual WordPress plugin competition is on in full force. Check out the new entries already available in the plugin competition blog.

If you’re a plugin author, remember to read the rules and regulations before you submit your plugin.

Oh, we’ve sponsored $100 to the plugin competition prizes. There are already more than $3000 in prizes to be won. If you’re interested in sponsoring a prize you can send Mark an email.

If you’re like me and would like to learn a way to make a backup copy of these images on your local hard drive then you’re on the right path of the road. I have recently discovered a new software that lets you export your Picasa photo albums as Jpg images.

Picada Independent Album Exporter lets you download all your albums uplaoded on Picasaweb with preserved desired pictures order. After launching the application simply

• Select the album you want to export
• Choose destination directory on your local hard drive
• Choose naming convention and
• Choose resize settings

Once done click “Export Picture Files” and that’s about it.

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IconFinder

Just as the name suggests, IconFinder is a free online web service that lets you search over 90,000 web icons by using your desired keyword. There is also an option to find these icons by browsing them by icon sets and tags.

Since it filters the resutls by icon size, background color it becomes an easy to use online tool for finding icons. You can download any icon with just a click of a button in PNG and ICO format. What I like the best about IconFinder is that it lets you search and download icons without even registering on it.

Last but not the least it gives you additional information of icons including its license type, publisher, different sizes and other icons from the same set.

IconZa

Iconza is unique in its own way. Unlike many other web services it offers customizable chameleon icons and lets you pick your color and size. Meaning it will allow you to customize icons to fit any website and design. As soon as your icon is ready you can easily download any specific icon or the whole set of icons that matches your preferred colors.

Customize and Download your free icons with Iconza.

IconPot

Iconpot offers a list of web development icons that be used for both free and personal commercial. As soon as you will hit the website you will notice these icons are categorized in a way you can find your desired icon in a matter on minutes.

For example if you are looking for “Hand” icons you will jump to the “Hand Icons” part and download your desired icon easily or lets say you’re looking for “Project icons” simply browse through the page and you will find various web and project related icons in PNG format related to your niche.

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SocialSafe.net is dedicated to doing just that, billed as a facebook backup tool, Socialsafe allows you download your photos (even tagged ones), friends and profile info, onto your harddisk.

Not only does this provide a backup but all the content is downloaded in such a way that you can view your content offline as well!

The software requires the Adobe Air platform to run and is $2.99 to purchase(because of the low cost there’s no trial version.) The good part is that although Facebook is currently the only website supported the development team are working on supporting a lot more social networking websites in the near future!

Key features include

• Download all your photo albums and photos you’re tagged in.
• Backup your friends and profile info.
• View and browse your Facebook profile offline.
• Let friends know that you’ve downloaded the photos.

Check out SocialSafe.net

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Today’s BOTS is no exception! Designed as a Massive Multiplayer online game (aka MMOG), BOTS story sets you as one of the many robots who need to defend cyberspace from `corrupted sectors’ that are turning your BOT buddies into nasty goons. As with all MMOG’s you have the ability to Buy, trade, upgrade/customize your Bots battle ability and of course, destroy anything that isn’t part of your team!

The graphics are pretty neat I especially liked the unique camera angle that was positioned just right for me (ie. not too far away with tiny characters on-screen and clutter, and not too close to limit my field of view)

The bots themselves are ok too of course any games merits are based on its gameplay and BOTS gives you three fun modes of play:

Player vs Viruses: the closest thing to an `arcade game’ for an MMORPG! You can either play alone or with many players (ie co-op mode)  against computer controlled opponents (the Virus Bots) as you progress and earn experience and Gigas points which increase your level, the enemy bots often drop goodies after being defeated.

Player vs. Player – your standard deathmatch or team deathmatch mode.

PvP Base Mode: Similar to Capture the flag except you need to go the extra step and really destroy the opposing teams camp!  The best part? The Game is FREE! Sign up now to kick some Bot!

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Sure you can place tweets on your personal space for others to view but after a little while you’ll realize you need to talk with other on topics that are current, primarily because that’s how you’ll meet other people too!

However, for a content heavy site like Twitter it boasts one of the most weakest search functions I’ve ever seen on any website. You’ll always get a very limited number of results and at the rate twitter posts update themselves your search results will most probably outdated by the time you read them!

That’s where Scoopler comes in, in essence Scoopler is how Twitters search engine should’ve been!

All you need to do is put in a search item in scooplers Search field and hit enter, Not only will scoopler track the number of searches you’ve made , it also display the hot topics currently being discussed on twitter and the best part is the `live update’ feature! After every 10 second or so Scoopler updates itself to see if there’s anything new being added that matches your search terms. (which in Twitters case is almost always true!)

The new information is then automatically scrolled down and you can keep tabs without hitting `search’ every minute just to follow the flow of a conversation!

But the update doesn’t just stop with twitter Scoopler also checks digg, del.icio.us, Flickr and others and if it finds anything related to your search it scrolls it into the result page!

Its an amazing utility that Twitters creators should seriously consider implementing themselves!

The site has a very straightforward interface, just type in the URL of the webpage you want to print out and the webpage opens with Printwhatyoulike’s sidebar which contains easy access to print options that paper print fans beg for!

The first thing you’ll notice is the instinctive highlight mode, where a red outline highlights whole paragraphs of text or can even intelligently outline a whole page of text!

In addition to the highlight mode you also have the ability to isolate your highlighted selection for printing or can remove parts that you don’t want printed, the ability   to fit to width , resize, Autoformat, remove backgrounds and images and even save files to either an HTML or PDF format are a few of the many options available!

Another cool feature is the ability to save clippings so that you can later rearrange and print them (however this function requires you to register on the site so that your clippings are saved for later retrieval)

All of these feature focuses on what you want printed rather than putting up with ads, empty areas and decorative yet useless headers, footers images etc. This also means you’ll be printing on less paper since you’re focusing on only the text (perhaps with a few necessary images of your choice) and you’ll be using less toner and less paper which ultimately leads you to saving your money and into helping the environment by having less trees cut down for your printer paper needs.

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Say hello to GDocBackup, an open source, freeware Google document backup utility that  backups your documents by exporting them into a readable file format onto your hard disk.

The brainchild of Italian developer Fabrizio Accatino, GDocBackup’s main attraction is its simplicity! It only asks for your GoogleDocs username and password and folder on your harddisk where you’d like to store your documents. You also have the option to choose the output format for each document type and also route your data through a proxy server for security.

Designed using both the NET 2.0 and Mono platform GDocBackup works on both windows and Linux.

Download GdocBackup

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No Mouse is an add-on for Firefox that’s made for the Keyboard king/queen who rather control all their browsers activity using super fast shortcut keys than reaching out to the mouse and hunting for that click-able area! Links, Hyperlinks, images…heck! Anything on a webpage can be accessed now using the keyboard, it gives a series of shortcuts which can be used with the Number keypad for tasks that you usually need to perform with the mouse.

However the feature that’s especially useful is (what I call) the `jump’ feature! After installing and enabling the add on go through a Google search and you’ll notice that each link will have a number next to them.

Just type in the number and the link will be instantly highlighted, press enter on said link and you’re in! With practice this becomes second nature and soon you’ll be wondering how you ever did without this little plugin.

Install No Mouse now

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Today, I have stumbled upon another Twitter application that allows you to schedule your tweets for future. TwitMessenger publishes your scheduled tweets automatically.  The whole process is quiet simply. All you have to do is

• Log on to TwitMessenger and login using your Twitter account details.
• A new page will show up that will let you schedule a new tweet. Type your text in the content box
• The scheduling can be done for one hour interval starting from 1 hour to maximum of 48 hours.

If by any chance you have scheduled a tweet and later you decide that you don’t want to post that message then you always have the option to delete your scheduled tweet any time.

With TwitMessenger, you can schedule multiple tweets as well. The service will probably come in handy when you are going away from the computer for a day or two and still want to update your followers with important tasks,

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However once in a while a software developer comes by with the heart and common sense to produce a simple yet amazingly effective software that the corporate bigwigs couldn’t figure out, Benjamin – of silent development is exactly that type of developer and his open source AeroFoil is exactly that type of software!

Aerofoil is a stand-alone utility that automatically disables the Windows Aero Glass interface and also allows you to switch off Windows PowerPlans and windows sidebars when the laptop is on battery. What does that do? It increases your battery life that’s what!

Designed to be 5~6 times more minimal and optimal than its competitor `Vista Battery saver’  AeroFoil will give you the same features except with a smaller memory footprint (which means less memory and processing power will be used and that means less power will be consumed from the battery!)  Once run it will place an icon in the system tray where you can right click instantly can access features such as disabling the Aero intrerface switching to an Auto power plan and even the option to Hibernate is there!

Here are some of the other features:

• Allowing you to manually disable Aero Glass.
• Optionally managing Aero Glass user interface.
• Optionally managing the best two power plans.
• Optionally managing Windows Vista Sidebar.
• Optionally showing a quick hibernate button – hibernate and power management were greatly improved in Vista.
• Much more efficient – Aerofoil is 100% unmanaged C++.
• Much smaller than older versions and other similar software.
• UPX compressed meaning Aerofoil.exe is as small as it can be.
• No configuration file – everything is done with the installer.

Check out AeroFoil

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It has happened to me before that while I’m writing an article, it disappears due to any technical issues. It could be a PC crash, light fluctuation etc. But now I have found a free tool that records absolutely anything I write.

Livetyping is an excellent text recorder that records text as you type. It really doesn’t care if you enter typos or what so ever. To get started all you have to do is log on to LiveTyping.com and start typing in the content box to record your text. Once you are done with that you can either post the article on your blog or simply share it by forwarding a link. In addition to that you can choose from 4 available fonts, mention the speed of virtual typing so that it doesn’t miss on anything and finally set the width of the result picture.

Aftering entering your text click and you will be able to get links for

• Picture
• Code for a site or blog and
• code for a forum

Here is how it looks

LiveTyping doesn’t require any registration but if you want to store your Livetypings online so that you can replay them at anytime later then simply go ahead and register for a free account on the website.

Check out LiveTyping and Record your Text online.

The website looks like a combination of Flickr and Youtube when you first look at it but you might be fooled into thinking that its nothing more than that until you notice the service’s motto!

Watchitoo main focus is not that you just upload your photos and videos and leave it for others to find, far from it! Watchitoo’s point is that as soon as you upload your content (be it video or images) you can view them with your close friends or relatives – simultaneously! (That’s `instantly’ in case you’re wondering…)

What advantages can this have? Way too many! You could watch your favorite show with your friends without any of them ever leaving the house. You can even switch on the Video chat feature invite your friends to join you so that you  can talk and watch the show just like you were sitting in the living room!

Maybe you just came back from vacation and want to share your photographic mementos with your family members? Get them to sign up / log into their watchittoo.com account and easily share and view your photos online while directly text or video chatting to them at the same time!

As they say, the possibilities are endless, and you still get to be near to those dear to you! As the sites motto puts it – Whatever I watch, you watchitoo!

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To get started log on to Flickorama and as soon as you do that a “Flickr Search” box will appear at the center of the page. Enter your “Keyword” and click search

After processing your query it will come up with the search result page and from there you can view these images anyway you like. You can also set the number of picture you want it to display on each page.

In addition to that there is a “Advance Search” option that lets you search a specific type of media files including images and videos and sort these media files by

• Interestingness
• Date posted
• Date taken
• Relevance

Check out Flickorama

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Are you eligible?

Eligibility is limited to anyone who joined Facebook before usernames were publicly announced at 3 p.m. (EDT) on June 9, 2009. These users will have the chance to claim usernames at 12:01 a.m. (EDT) on Saturday, June 13, 2009.
This limitation is temporary. All users who joined Facebook after the cut-off will be eligible to claim usernames on Sunday, June 28, 2009.

I made it a point to grab my username before it was taken. So henceforth, you can find me on http://www.facebook.com/ajaydsouza. If you plan on adding me, then do drop in a message so I am able to identify you.

If you’re looking to find your own username, then head over to http://www.facebook.com/username/

What username did you select? Were you able to get the one you wanted?

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BackupPC (Graphical User Interface)

BackupPC is a high performance free backup software suite for Linux that comes with a web-based user interface. It features clever pooling of identical files, no client-side software, and a powerful Apache/CGI user interface. BackupPC is highly configurable and easy to install and maintain.

BackupPC incorporates a Server Message Block (SMB) client that can be used to back up network shares of computers running Windows. It also supports DHCP clients as long as the client is registered with a name service such as DNS, Active Directory, or LDAP.

afBackup (Command-line)

afBackup is a free Client-Server Backup System that allows many workstations to backup to a central server. t is used to maintain archives on a backup server host or in a file. Archives can be created, extracted or their contents be listed.

It features

• Authentication of the client is performed before it can take over control
• Several servers can be configured for each client: the actual server is chosen by availability
• Multi stream server, several clients can store to one server at the same time
• Remote start option -> centralized administration
• Access restriction for the streamer device -> security
• Client-side per-file processing -> reliability. If the files and directories were first packed and then processed, by the server a single faulty bit in the processed stream would make the rest of the backup unaccessible for restore
• Built-in compression (requires libz)
• Data stream is written to tape in pieces of configurable size -> fast finding of files during restore
• Tape position logging for each file -> fast finding of files during restore
• Tape capacity is fully used
• Flexible tape handling and configurable append mode
• Full/incremental backups and verify
• Raw partitions can be saved
• Ordinary users can run the restore for their own files and directories, but only for these
• Emergency recovery on different catastrophe levels
• Command output saving feature: useful e.g for databases
• Cartridge locations database maintained
• Support for media changers
• Client access to cartridge sets can be restricted

Flyback (Snapshot backups)

FlyBack is software for system backup and restore, which offers similar functionality to the Mac OS X Leopard’s Time Machine. FlyBack is a snapshot-based backup tool based on rsync. It creates successive backup directories mirroring the files users want to backup, but hard-links unchanged files to the previous backup. It has almost all of the required technology already built in to recreate it. This is a simple GUI to make it easy to use.

Key features include

• Uses crontab to automate backups and cleanups
• Has a graphical user interface (or can be run from a console)
• Scans the entire directory structure when performing a backup
• Selectively delete specific backups, yet retain files stored in previous backups
• Offers a chronological view of a file system, allowing individual files or directories to be previewed or retrieved one at a time

rsNapshot (Synchronisation)

rsnapshot is a filesystem snapshot utility for making backups of local and remote systems. It can take incremental backups of local and remote filesystems for any number of machines. rsnapshot makes extensive use of hard links, so disk space is only used when absolutely necessary. rsnapshot is written entirely in Perl. It should work on any reasonably modern UNIX compatible OS, including: Debian GNU/Linux, Red Hat Linux, Fedora Linux, SuSE Linux, Gentoo Linux, Slackware Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, and even IRIX.

Key features include

• Uses rsync to transfer data
• Can be used over ssh
• Supports multiple levels of backup such as monthly, weekly, and daily
• Stores previous versions as actual files and hardlinks to save space
• All versions of the backup are accessible as plain files
• NFS mounted user restores
• Filename filters
• Removable media

CloneZilla

Based on DRBL, Partition Image, ntfsclone, partclone, and udpcast, CloneZilla allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. It offers 2 type of backup programs including CloneZilla Live and Clonezilla server edition. It is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla Server Edition is for massive deployment, it can clone many more than 40 computers simultaneously.

Key features of CloneZilla

• Free (GPL) Software.
• Filesystem supported: ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, and HFS+ of Mac OS. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux, MS windows and Intel-based Mac OS. For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are saved and restored. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.
• LVM2 (LVM version 1 is not) under GNU/Linux is supported.
• Multicast is supported in Clonezilla SE, which is suitable for massively clone. You can also remotely use it to save or restore a bunch of computers if PXE and Wake-on-LAN are supported in your clients.
• Based on Partimage, ntfsclone, partclone, and dd to clone partition. However, clonezilla, containing some other programs, can save and restore not only partitions, but also a whole disk.
• By using another free software drbl-winroll, which is also developed by us, the hostname, group, and SID of cloned MS windows machine can be automatically changed.

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• New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
• Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
• Browse the theme directory and install themes from the admin interface
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
• Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
• Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment 
• Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
• Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation

What’s noteworthy about this particular release is the sheer number of support tickets both opened and closed (over 790 in total), which means that the developers have made a conscious effort at listening to what the users’ feedback and issues are and trying to get them resolved.

The new upgrade process in use since the last few iterations make it extremely easy for a blog owner to upgrade and there’s absolutely no reason not to. As is usual with all upgrades, backup your files, customisations and of course your database before attempting to upgrade just in case, Mr. Murphy happens to be hanging around…

Recently, I have discovered a new website that plays an important role by adding watermarks to your  images and protect it from others. WaterMark.ws is an easy to use web application that allows anyone to  add watermarks to photos online in a few simple steps.

To protect your images you can either use text or image watermarks. What makes it different from rest of  the web services is that it lets you add watermarks to multiple photos at one. You can easily customize  watermakr type, text, size, position, colors and style.

The website offers two type of accounts.

Free Account : It comes With a limit of 0.5 MB per photo and doesn’t let user save his/her watermark  preferences for future.

Paid Account: Paid account offers additional services such as

• Watermark larger photos with no size limits.
• No upload limit! Upload as many photos as you want.
• 400% faster batch processing than downloadable software and more

Simply log on to the website, upload your image and add the required info. You don’t even need to  register on the website to add watermarks.

Check out WaterMark.ws

Ibrii

Ibrii is a free web service that allows you to create personal notes by clipping web content. It lets you clip videos, pictures and text on the net and save it in your Ibrii account. Your saved item can be directly viewed on ibrii without going to the original site. It is simple, it is fast and it will help you save a lot of time.

Check out Ibrii

Snipd

Snipd is an easy to use web clipping service that lets you clip snippet from a website, be it text, images or videos. The service works through a bookmarklet that puts mouse-over clipping icons on text, images, or embedded Flash, and stores all the content on a Tumblr-style page, though you can change the privacy settings for all or individual items.

Check out Snipd

ClipMark

Clipmark is one of the services I personally use to save content for blogging. It allows you to discover lots of interesting stuff favorited by thousands of other web users. Clipmark lets users save webpages, partial text blocks, images, videos, and even bites from several webpages in one note.

In addition to that it offers a Firefox extension that makes it much more easier to clip content from different web pages. Furthermore, popular and highest voted clips are also featured on the website’s home page creating in itself a good destination for daily read.

Check out ClipMark

Thumbtack

Based on Javascript, Thumbtack is another online bookmarking service  by Microsfot that helps you collect clips from webpages or bookmark full webpages and organize them within its interface. Similary to Clipmark, it provides a bookmarklet which can be used to save content from the internet. You could also copy paste content directly to its interface.

Check out Thumbtack

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It is an excellent free tool that lets you add glow to your text within a matter of seconds. To get started all you have to do is

1. Enter your text
2. Select Glow options including

• Style
• Size
• Animation type
• Glow effeccts and more

Once you’re done with that click “Make Text” and generate your own glowing text. This is how it looks

After generating your logo you can easily download it to your computer or get the embedded code for webpages and forums. Furthermore, you can always choose the background that suits your text and website template.

In addition to that you can choose a ready made template for quick results. Click on a sample graphic templates or select the text style from the options at the top left, then press ‘Make text’ to make your own glowing text!

Check out GlowText