The Next Web

Delicious is about to lose a bunch of users

Written on July 29, 2008 – 11:32 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,

For months now Delicious has promised to launch their new website with some updated features, a brand new design and improved security. Another big change will be the new domain name. Although it has been active for a while now the main domain was still http://del.icio.us once they will switch to the new design the official domain name will be http://delicious.com.

Interestingly enough the switch will not go unnoticed by most users. As Delicious writes on its blog:

After months of work, the new Delicious is almost ready to come out of the oven. When we release it, you’ll be automatically logged out of your account and will have to log in again, due to some changes we’re making behind the scenes.

They have some helpful instructions for people who are currently logged in but might not know what their password is and for people who might not remember which emailaddress they used to register for Delicious. If you have an account there and plan to use it after the switch I recommend reading that blogpost now and following the instructions to make sure you can still login later.

My guess is that a large part of its users won’t return after the switch and will turn out to be ’sleeping’ users. But since Delicious doesn’t openly disclose its traffic and numbers we won’t ever know what the real effect will be of their update.

I hope you like that post!

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delicious, delicous, design, update

14 Comments »

Wordpress 2.6 adds revisions, Gears and Tumblr style blogging

Written on July 15, 2008 – 12:05 pm
Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor

Matthew Mullenweg has just announced Wordpress 2.6, the latest update of this popular blogging platform. The release is almost a month ahead of schedule, and it seems that Wordpress is maturing into a full functioned content management system. These are our top three favorite new functions:

1. Revisions

Wordpress finally offers the ability to review post updates, something similar to what we already know from Wikipedia and Google docs. No more banging your head against the wall when you save a mistake by accident. For now, simply scroll down to the bottom of the admin panel, and review or compare the revisions to restore your work. But perhaps more obviously, the revision system is a version-control blessing to all multi-audited weblogs out there.

2. Gears integration

We are about to enter a internet world without the Digg effect! Gears, formally known as Google gears is a open source browser extension initiated by Google, and should allow faster speed for your blogging experience. In future developments, Wordpress should be able to periodically synchronize the local server data with the Gear network. Gear enabled blogs should be able to work, even when the server is not present. Cool new development and we can’t wait to see this implemented fully, for now, it’s just a way to store the cache of the javascript and CSS on the client’s computer.

3. Press this!

Finally, we noticed the reappearance of the “Press this!” button. The function makes it easier to blog about anything on the web, by simply clicking a bookmark link when you are on a page that you want to share, similar to Delicious and tumblr. The cool thing is that Wordpress made it really easy to add photo’s from the original article, and pull quotes from the article with ease! Add some text and you are ready to publish!
function; which allows editors to quickly post any webpage to their blog using a bookmark.

Check out the release video

Some other cool new functionalities

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Customizable default avatars.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

blogging, gears, update, wordpress

5 Comments »

26 days left until end of life for PHP 4

Written on January 9, 2008 – 1:56 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,

Don’t worry. If you server runs PHP 4 it won’t stop working on February. But don’t expect any upgrades or support after this date from the official PHP community. It is time to upgrade to PHP 5 and to make sure you (or your webhost or server admin) do so the community is not looking back and now focusing fully on PHP 5.

So if you want to impress your local geek, nerd or sysop simply walk over and casually say: “I assume we are running PHP 5 now?”.

For documentation on migration for PHP 4 to PHP 5, check this migration guide. There is additional information available in the PHP 5.0 to PHP 5.1 and PHP 5.1 to PHP 5.2 migration guides as well.

Check the official countdown clock here:
http://www.gophp5.org/

The illustration shows a slightly upset and clearly tired PHP4 on the right (blonde) and fresh, smiling and ready to go PHP5 (brunette) right behind her on the left. Right?

end of life, php, update

10 Comments »