• Small Business Summit 2007
  Tuesday, February 13, 2007
  Crowne Plaza Hotel, New York City
• The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines
• Essential Tools Every Blogger Should Have
  Good suggestions in general, but…
  • Most laptops on the market will do (we personally recommend AMD 64 based machines), just stay away from the “crippled” chips out there (if it is a $500 USD laptop, there’s probably a reason for that)
  • Unless you’re doing a lot of design work (coding, graphics, video, audio, etc), two monitors would be overkill
  • Adobe Photoshop is an excellent product, but if you only need to edit photos, GIMP (open source, GPL) should do fine and there are other free or cheaper options out there
  • Of the WYSIWYG editors, Adobe/Macromedia Dreamweaver is at the head of the class, but give Nvu (open source, MPL) a spin first to see if that meets your needs (and budget)
  • Most digital cameras on the market these days will suffice, but the Canon DSLR’s are quite nice if you have that sort of budget and want to carry around a large camera
• Want People to Read Your Blog? Go With a Full Text Feed
• Zune Goes Discount, Contributes to $289 Million Loss for Microsoft
  Does any Microsoft product these days make an initial profit?
• Web Design Contracts: Why Bother
• 25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines
• WordPress Plugins: Bible Verse of the Day, Our Todo List & Share This 1.4

WordPress 2.1 Ella was released last week with a host of additions, updates & bug fixes as well as an improved API for plugin development. While the new features aren’t what we’d classify as “must haves” for everyone, they are very handy, especially if you post to and/or manage multiple blogs.

A few things to note are:

• You must have MySQL 4.0 or newer
• Some plugins may no longer work
• Some themes may need updates

Here’s the run down of user features that what we really like:

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again. — In order for this to work make sure to give your post a title before writing your post.
• Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post. — Very nice if you want to easily switch between WYSIWYG & HTML views.
• The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs. — This is a major time saver if you ever need to move your WordPress blog to another server or a different domain.
• Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking. — Very nice and now there’s no longer a need copy and pasting from a different word processing application.
• You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system. — If you’re using WordPress as a CMS this will save you a few steps. Of note, this is located under the Options > Reading tabs.
• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. — From our testing, yes, this is much faster tha the 2.0.x line of releases.
• Pages can now be drafts, or private. — Another nice CMS feature. Next up, an approval system?
• The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio. — Looks nice.

Other than that, there are some major back-end code changes that we won’t bore you with the details of, except to say that if you’re a WordPress plugin developer you should really take a look under the hood and find out what had been depreciated in the API and what has been added to the API.

If you desire WordPress consulting help in migrating from WordPress 2.0.x to WordPress 2.1, please contact us. Up until WordPress 2.2 is released we are offering a flat rate upgrade of $50 USD for any WordPress 2.0.x based blogs that do not have modified core WordPress files. Any broken plugins and themes that need to be fixed may increase the cost, and we will let you know that before performing any additional work. All other WordPress consulting will fall under our normal rates.