Upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.7 Beta 1

Upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.7 Beta 1 several minutes ago. So far so good. I like the look of new Dashboard and its overlook of important parts, however my aesthetic sense is hurt. The worst selection of fonts and sizes ever in the history of WP, the width of the sidebar is disproportionate, font face families are different, non-matching colors… In other words, just like a sample from a “what you have to avoid at all costs” article.

Hopefully, they will fix that soon. Otherwise, great job!

Ubuntu 8.04 is Out

It was Clean Thursday yesterday and hopefully you were cleaning your hard drive for a great new Ubuntu 8.04. It made it to the download sites in the evening and since then they creak under a heaviest load.

Have you ever wondered why they version their releases in that strange way — …, 7.04, 7.10, 8.04? I never mulled over that, but yesterday I was enlightened. Look at the numbers closely: 2007.04, 2007.10, 2008.04. Alright, now it does make perfect sense, doesn’t it?

While we are at it, let me explain briefly how I partition my hard drive to aid quick and painless system upgrades. Keeping in mind that Canonical releases a new version precisely once a half year, it is judicious to keep OS on a separate partition so that it can be easily replaced, while your home directories stay intact. This is how I do it:

• / (root) partition — 5 Gb
• /home partition — 5 Gb
• swap partition — 2 Gb

Every time a new version of Ubuntu comes out, I simply format the root partition and install the release there from a Live CD. Certainly I need to restore all apps later, but it’s not a big deal actually as I maintain a nice list for this matter.

I know Ubuntu has a mechanism to upgrade itself to a newer version through the Updates manager, but, in practice, being upgraded in this fashion, OS doesn’t unveil its full potential, and more like “mimics” the previous version. I compared the two in the past and am inexpressibly happy about the discovery.

Hopefully this information will be valuable in the light of upcoming wave of upgrades.

Upgraded to WP 2.5

Finally upgraded my blog to WP 2.5 today. Looks so sweet that I can’t help sharing it with you.

The administrative part is completely reworked, and it was a stressful experience to see the updated Dashboard, but eventually I’m getting used to it (sort of).

Basically I like the AJAXy Write Post page packed with nice “Add media” section, dynamic tags and categories, improved editor and many other things. It became much lighter and noticeably easier to use.

Give it a spin, it’s worth it!

• Short screencast on new WP 2.5 look and some features
• Download page

By the way, I find it a lot easier to maintain and upgrade when WP is installed by checking the code out of the Subversion repository. The whole upgrade process takes counted minutes as it involves running a single command to update sources and opening the database upgrade page in the browser. Check the WP on Subversion page for more details.