This is a test post to check out the QuickPost WordPress Plugin which I’ve just installed.

I just upgraded geoffarnold.com to use WordPress 2.5. The process went pretty smoothly; the only glitch was that the mobileadmin plugin that I was using isn’t 2.5-compatible. I shall have to see if there’s a new version available… hmmm, it looks as if the answer is no.
The most noticeable change with 2.5 is that the administrative UI has been entirely revamped. OK, I agree that it looks more stylish, but I’m pretty disappointed. In particular, the Write Post page (which I’m using to compose this piece) is poorly laid out. Ideally I want the basic elements to be easy to use: the text editor, the Categories panel, and the Save, Preview, and Publish buttons. These are the features that I use every time; other stuff, like the status, tags, posting time, and so forth should go below the fold, out of the way. If there’s space available, give me a bigger edit box, not swatches of colour to tastefully highlight controls that I rarely use.
This seems to be turning into a rant. So be it. Take a look at this gratuitous waste of screen real-estate:

This is the upper left quadrant of the screen in which I’m composing this post. It starts with a grey stripe which only serves to provide a link back to the first admin page, the Dashboard. No, wait, it also lets me log out, visit the WordPress site, or visit my own sub-page in the Users area.
Secondly we have the blog name, and a Visit Site button. People managing multiple blogs might need this; I’d rather banish the Visit Blog link to the grey stripe and lose the big title, with the wasted space next to it.
Then we have the menu/submenu structure. This is fine, except that I don’t see why some menu items are banished to the right side of the screen in small font. It’s a single menu; keep it together.
Next we have Write Post in a big font. I know I’m writing a post: the words Write and Post are helpfully shown in orange just above. Again, a waste of space.
Then we have a header for the Title box, and finally we actually have some content, about a third of the way down the window. For some reason, the title text is about twice as large as the body text. It doesn’t need to be.
Let me show you the full window that I’m working with:

(Click the thumbnail to see the full-size image.) As you can see, the text box in which I compose and edit the actual blog entry is about 30% of the height and 60% of the width of the screen. ((These are the dimensions on my PowerBook, with a 1280×854 screen)) And this is all wrong!! The point of a Write Post screen is to write. As much real-estate as possible should be given over to this function; the few essential controls should be kept small (but clear); everything else should be swept out of the way.
Fortunately, WordPress is open source, so I’m going to be able to redesign this page the way I think it ought to look.
UPDATE: I guess I’m not the only person who dislikes the new admin UI. My rant is pretty mild compared with some of the comments here in the WP forums.

After all, if I can’t play with my own blog, what can I play with?
I’ve been updating some of the plugins and widgets that I use to customize WordPress. While I was doing this, I decided to add a new feature which some of my colleagues at Amazon have been working on: “Context Links”. The idea is that a bit of Amazon JavaScript scans my HTML, looking for a few interesting phrases which can be linked to Amazon products. The phrases are marked with double underlines, and mousing over will trigger a small product popup.
In the past, I’ve tried various pop-over plugins, like the notorious Snap!, and the reaction has been overwhelmingly negative. The problem with Snap! is that every link triggers a pop-up with a thumbnail of the page, which really gets in the way if you simply want to click on a link. Hopefully Context Links will be more acceptable. The feature is still in beta, and I’m doing this more to help out my friends than anything else. (I’ve never been tempted to try to monetize my blog.) You won’t necessarily see any of the links: I get the impression that there is a lag between my changing the page and a new set of links being generated. (I’ll have to ask the author.)
The other big change that I made was to add in the All-in-one SEO Package, a plugin which rewrites the page titles, cleans up the meta tags, and generally does everything it can to make the site as clean as possible to Google and the other search engines. Right now, this is what Google sees: almost every entry is prefixed with “Geoff Arnold » Blog Archive » “, except for a few links to the old Movable Type entries which I’ve left in place. ((They’re duplicated in the new WordPress blog, but I can’t figure out how to easily forward the old URLs to the new pages, because the database keys don’t line up neatly.)) I’ll check agan in a few days to see if anything’s changed.

From the Comments page on this blog’s dashboard:

Akismet has caught 30,138 spam for you since you first installed it.
You have no spam currently in the queue. Must be your lucky day. 🙂

This came after I’d bulk-deleted 265 comments, trackbacks and pingbacks which Akismet had identified as spam, pushing me over 30,000. I hit 20,000 back on June 25 last year, which means that since then the spam has been rolling in at over 45 comments a day.

Coincidentally, the day after the big grommit upgrade, xkcd captures the Gestalt of the upgrade. I’m glad Steve was installing Solaris rather than OpenBSD….

Steve has been migrating all of the accounts on grommit to the new SuperMicro box, and it took a couple of hours. Everything should be working now (and working much faster!).
Apart from installing the new box, Steve made a raft of useful changes:

• Installed OpenSolaris Nevada, build 75
• Replaced uw-imap with Dovecot
• Upgraded Squirrelmail
• Moved from PHP4 to PHP5
• Cleaned up and regenerated all keys and certs

Many thanks, Steve.

Two WordPress contributors have written a plugin that detects an iPhone and provides an alternative, optimized administrative UI. It’s very cool and easy to use.
I’m also planning to install running ContentRobot’s iWPhone plugin, which provides an alternative theme for iPhone users who visit the site. Other users should see the usual theme.

I get a fair amount of blogspam here, as you can see if you look at the Akismet statistics at the bottom of the page. Oddly enough, at least 90% of all the spam is associated with a single entry in my blog: a brief administrative posting from August last year, in which I announced that “I’m temporarily moderating all comments”. Occasionally I will disable comments on that entry, but whenever I re-enable them, the spam returns. Weird….

I just upgraded geoffarnold.com to WordPress 2.3. It seemed painless; let me know if you encounter any oddities. ((Steve: if you want to upgrade any of the other grommit blogs, you’ll find the WP2.3 distro in ~geoff/tmp.)) I’ve change the default feed from RSS2 to Atom; if you need to select a particular style, there are links at the top right.

I mentioned recently that I’ve started using Google Reader to cope with the dozens of blogs and other feeds that I read each day. As Art pointed out, Reader has a feature whereby you can tag individual items as “Shared”, and they will then show up on a publicly-accessible page. I’m taking this one step further, and adding a sidebar item to my blog that shows the last 10 few items that I’ve shared. Enjoy!