WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has just announced the release of version 3.3 of the WordPress blogging/cms software. It looks like the majority of the changes are cosmetic inside the admin tool including some updates to the help for new users. The big feature I noticed in their overview video below is the new ability to easily import a tumblr blog into WordPress.

The one big update I’d love is the ability to set the “add an image” option to always be set to “by URL” because I use (and I assume others do too) Amazon S3 for storing images.

You can update your WordPress software to 3.3 now by using the auto-update function with the administration interface.

Here’s the features overview video for WordPress 3.3 from the WordPress team:

This morning Google announced that they have moved the Google IO conference from May to June 2012. The blog post on the Google developer blog has all of the details on the new dates. Google I/O 2012 will now take place from June 27-29, 2012 in San Francisco.

No details yet on when registration will open for the event – last year the registration sold out in minutes so you better be quick this year.

I attended the event last year as a paid attendee and thought it was ok overall – way too crowded. Frankly it seemed like most people went for the stuff they handed out which included a Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet and a Samsung Chromebook.

I wonder how Google will deal with the people who already booked travel and have to pay fees to change their tickets/hotel bookings.

I received the email below from the Nokia Developer Launchpad team. If you are building an app for either the Series 40, Symbian or MeeGo platforms, Nokia is offering to review your mobile app to help increase the user experience. It looks like there are only 40 reviews available, so you better contact Nokia asap if you want your app reviewed.

Here are the important pieces of the Nokia offer: (more…)

Google’s latest attempt at social networking, Google+, now has a new first-cut at a developer API. The Google+ Platform blog has info on the release of the new API.

Startup blogger Robert Scoble put together a list of some of the feedback on the new API – it seems the reaction is mixed. RSS creator Dave Winer says Google “doesn’t get it”. Why am I surprised that a company who has a VP, Bradley Horowitz, post on Twitter that he only cares about Twitter users with over 100,000 followers might not fully understand how to promote a new API to developers?

The Google Plus team notes that they are using the follow existing standards and best practices where they can:

• Our API methods are RESTful HTTP requests which return JSON responses.
• Our payload formats use standard syntax (e.g. PoCo for people info, ActivityStrea.ms for activities).
• We use OAuth 2 for secure trusted access to user data.

The Google Plus API is located here if you want to start to play with it.

Back in late 2008, I wrote about my first experience using the CodeIgniter framework. Since then, I’ve enjoyed using the framework with PHP — it reminds me of my days programming in ColdFusion.

Today EllisLab and the CodeIgniter team have released the 2.0.0 version of CodeIgniter.

Here’s a list of the main changes from 1.7.3 to 2.0.0:

• Support for PHP 4 is gone, PHP 5.1 is now a requirement.
• CSRF Protection built into the form helper
• Drivers
• Application Packages
• Scaffolding, having been deprecated for a number of versions, has been removed.
• Removed the deprecated Validation Class.
• Plugins have been removed, in favor of Helpers.
• Added routing overrides to the main index.php file, enabling the normal routing to be overridden on a per “index” file basis.
• Added $route[‘404_override’] to allow 404 pages to be handled by controllers.
• 50+ bugs fixed

They also note that this new 2.0.0 version has moved CodeIgniter into a, “much more community-oriented framework than it has been in the past.”

I can’t wait to play with the new version and try out some of the new features and functions.

Blogging software WordPress has posted an update to their software that they are calling a “critical” update. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg posted about the update this afternoon and suggests you download and install the patch as soon as possible.

You can see the full changeset that is part of the 3.0.4 WordPress patch on the WordPress Trac.

If you run WordPress on your own server, you can use the auto-update to download and install the 3.0.4 version with the patch or you can download the software from wordpress.org.

Last year Google released Page Speed — a suite of tools to make webpages load faster. There is a Page Speed extension for Firefox/Firebug which helps web developers see how their web pages and web applications are being loaded and the time it takes for each piece of the page to load.

Today they announced the release of mod_pagespeed, a module for Apache Web Servers. Google notes, “(the module)…perform many speed optimizations automatically. We’re starting with more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that address various aspects of web performance, including optimizing caching, minimizing client-server round trips and minimizing payload size. We’ve seen mod_pagespeed reduce page load times by up to 50% (an average across a rough sample of sites we tried) — in other words, essentially speeding up websites by about 2x, and sometimes even faster.”

Google is working with GoDaddy to get mod_pagespeed installed on all of their webservers.

Here’s a simple video from Google to show you a basic webpage and the difference in loading time with and without using mod_pagespeed.
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Google had a grand announcement the other day that many people probably didn’t even notice: Google Search over SSL.  If you’re not sure what this means, Wikipedia has a decent article on SSL but here’s a quick blurb:

…Secure Socket Layer (SSL), [is a] cryptographic protocol that provides security for communications over networks such as the Internet. …SSL encrypts the segments of network connections at the Transport Layer.

In English this means is that SSL protects data between your computer and the server that you’re connecting to (in this case, Google’s servers).  While I agree that securing your connection is smart for those times when you’re browsing on an unprotected hot spot, there are also some technical implications that this has on your browsing experience.  Google pages may load slower and many of the links to services that your normally get won’t appear (at least until they have SSL enabled too).

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The other day, AJ Batac posted on Friendfeed about Pubwich, an “open-source online data aggregation PHP application.” I was intrigued, so I decided to check it out. The application is still very young, with a lot of work to be done, but it’s a great idea.

Initially, I was hoping that Pubwich would actually aggregate data from multiple sources into a single interface (the way Friendfeed does), but I soon learned that it actually just allows you to place information from multiple sources on a single page. Still, though, I think it’s a great idea and shows a lot of promise. In my case, at work, we have five Facebook fan pages, a Twitter account, a Flickr account, a YouTube account and at least two major RSS feeds. Rather than simply providing our users with links to each of those accounts, Pubwich provides me with an easy way to show our newest information to our visitors in one place. (more…)

Moogo lets you create professional looking websites with a range of design and layout options for almost any type of content site. There are a wide range of options inside the Moogo portal and site creation is very quick and easy. It’s just three simple steps and if you can use Microsoft Word, you will be able to use Moogo.

The only thing you need to decide with Moogo is what features you want to use. Moogo offers you a Free Website with minimal options and features, something very basis if you are not ready for a full web presence. Then there are paid options ranging from $4.99/month to $14.99/month. I wont go into explaining the offerings for each of the paid plans, but I will explain the steps on how to setup the Personal Website plan:

Selecting a Layout

The first step is all about selecting the correct layout for your site. Moogo offers a variety of layouts from which you can select the one that best suits your needs. Assign the headers, the header is the top image on your page and you can select from a variety of categories, from Interests to Information Technology. You can preview your selections on the right side to see the picture of what the page looks like.

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