Guess who’s not using his brand new Droid Razr? | ZDNet http://zd.net/sKC3Za

Christopher Dawson of ZDNet uses 2 pages to document how horrible Verizon’s service is. Sigh.

WordPress 3.2 is out – Handle with Care

If you spend any time in your WordPress site, you may have noticed that version 3.2 is available for an update.

If your website uses a slideshow/slider, this update will probably break it. Right after testing the new version on our Focus Web Works site, I upgraded one of our clients. The first thing we noticed (after the cool new look for the dashboard) was that her slideshow stopped working.

I’ve since done quite a bit of research and discovered that most slideshow/slider plugins are not working.

One more thing… It turns out that the WordPress developers group has decided to sunset Internet Explorer 6.0. This means that you should avoid upgrading if a large portion of your clients use IE 6.

If either of these situations are a concern for you, we recommend that you wait on that upgrade or at least contact us about your options.

Sincerly,

Nohl Lyons

I built this for a presentation last week, but I’ve had lots of requests to see it again. This is a demonstration of how a web site is built using WordPress.

WordPress has been updated again. This time with some interesting new features.

Really there are two keys that will make managing you site easier.

1. Vastly easier linking within a site

2. A handy administrator bar to speed navigation while updating a site

There are also hundreds of minor improvements under the hood, but item 1 and 2 above are the ones that will help you out every day.

New intra site link example

I found a nice explanation of how to use the new linking feature here. Basically when you are editing a page or a post, you can easily highlight a word or picture, click on link and then search your own site for a post or a page to link to. Click! and you’re done.

The other helpful addition is an administrator bar that stays at the top of the screen while working on your site. This is really handy when you are reviewing the pages of your site and you want to jump in and edit a page, or just straight to the dashboard, or even review comments left on your site.

I might note that the Admin bar seems to have redraw issues with Google chrome. It draws the bar on the screen multiple times.

Click me for big version

Apple just announced the new Macbook Air. Ordinarily I would yawn this off, but this time they did a few interesting things to get my attention.

1. They made it weigh less then 3 pounds
2. It’s less than an inch thick
3. It uses flash memory instead of a hard drive soldered on to the motherboard
4. It’s almost all battery
5. Price starts at $999

In a net shell, you get a notebook with 5 – 7 hours of battery life, that would fit in a notebook. It has a full size screen with a dedicated graphics chip. Everything loads super fast. Virtual memory is super fast. It wakes from sleep instantly. No moving parts to fail (except for the keyboard).

I could easily see myself carrying one of these around all the time. It’s super light and could get me through a work day just about anywhere.

I’ll probably post more on this as my thoughts gell.

July 10, 2010: Google’s YouTube.com announced that they now support up to 4k resolution. This is 2 times the quality that IMAX uses on their giant 25 foot movie screens. Clearly YouTube is planning for a super hidef future.

July 10, 2010: Google to invest $100 million in online game developer Zynga. If you’re not sure who Zynga is, just think Farmville, or Frontierville, or one of the other time sucking highly addictive games found on Facebook. Personally, if Google wants to replace Facebook, they need access to entertainment. Since they recently introduced a mini Pacman game on their Google page, it looks like they see the value of games as a revenue stream and a draw for pages with advertising.

Sometimes you can’t be there to explain something in person. Sometimes it’s just plain easier to show people then to tell people. Sometimes you need to show something to many people, but they can’t all be there at once.

A great solution is a screen cast. That’s where you record a session on your computer and then share it on your website for others to see. You can share a PowerPoint presentation or even steps to setup email. Higher end solutions let you add custom artwork, audio and your branding.

Contact Nohl at Focus Web Works to learn how you can do this too. The software is free. We like Jing

Here’s an example (Just click on it to play):

Big news for WordPress users. Version 3.0 has been officially released and is available for immediate update.

There are many new features, but like a new operating system, some plugins and themes may not be fully compatible.

So far I have not seen many issues, however, some themes and plugins that really pushed the envelope seem to be failing. I’ve seen some slideshow plugins stop working alltogther.

Before you upgrade, check for updates and 3.0 compatability. Lots of developers are releasing updates like crazy.

Please watch for future posts where I showcase handy WordPress plugins and themes.