Thought Garage

Windows Live Spaces, the Microsoft’s Blogging platform will be shutdown early next year (16th March to be precise) and is offering to migrate your current blog to Wordpress.com . The email I received announcing this is quite confusing. The email subject says ‘Changes coming to your Windows Live Space’. I expected that it may have been upgraded with more features.  But they are simply shutting it down, and they appear to have trouble saying it. We are very excited to announce our collaboration with a premier and innovative blogging service, WordPress.com , to offer you an upgraded blogging experience. We'll help you migrate your current Windows Live Spaces blog to WordPress.com or you can download it to save for later. On March 16th, 2011 your current space will close . With the new release of Windows Live services, we've made a series of changes and improvements across our products. We chose to partner to provide our users with a fantastic blogging solution. However...

Trying to download a Wordpress plugin and saw this cute error thrown by Wordpress. When something doesn’t work in software, you often get annoyed and may well get infuriated some times. But errors like this immediately put a smile on your face and let you forget all the hassle you have been going through. More over, you are more likely to love the software, a bit more than ever. Goshdarnit! Something has gone wrong with our servers. It’s probably Matt’s fault. We’ve just been notified of the problem. Hopefully this should be fixed ASAP, so kindly reload in a minute and things should be back to normal. Yet another reason to love Wordpress.

One of the best features of Wordpress is the ability to upgrade to a newer version by just clicking on a link from the dashboard. So, whenever I see a new version available, I just go ahead and upgrade to the latest version. Just a couple of days of back I upgraded to 2.8.5. Everything went smooth, no issues what so ever. Later in the day, when I published a post from Windows Live Writer, I suddenly found that the post actually lost all HTML formatting. Didn’t know what happened. I quickly searched for any 2.8.5 problems with XMLRPC. But did not see anything other than some comments that XMLRPC has been updated to work better. I did a full reinstall. But didn’t fix the problem. I did a full installation of latest Wordpress in a separate folder, but that also had this problem.  I checked an old blog I hadn’t upgraded in a while, but I found that also had this issue. I was quite baffled. Before I did the upgrade everything was working fine. I published a post on 30th of October...

When it comes to rendering, the world’s fastest browser, my favorite Google Chrome still has some rough edges. I mean, really some rough edges. It has trouble rendering rounded corners on WordPress login page. See how a WordPress login page is rendered on different browsers. I am on Microsoft Vista. Google Chrome : Not happy with round edges and shadow Issues: Round corners are not transparent enough and shows thick black edges. And somehow shows a much wider shadow (compared to Apple Safari) Apple Safari : The Best Finest and quite crisp when it comes to rendering content. See how the it stands out from the page and just enough shadow. Firefox : Just Fine Renders round edges fine but completely misses out on the shadows. So the form looks more like embedded in to the page rather than standing out floated (like in Apple Safari) Internet Explorer 7 : Completely ignores round edges, but better than Google Chrome IE completely ignored round edges and has the same...

Upgrading Wordpress installation is now just a breeze. Just one click away. I logged in this morning to the dashboard and it alerted me that a new version is available and gave a nice sweet button to automatically upgrade. It just took 5 seconds. No downloads, absolutely. I love it. I use a shared hosting service, and normally it takes a week before they make a new version of the software available so that I can use their one-click upgrade. Now no more waiting. Just click a button. It is easier than anything else you do on Internet. How cool! Thank you Wordpress team.