Apostolos Dountsis

As you may have noticed, the site layout got a refresh. I hope that you like it and as always I welcome your comments (especially the negative ones). I really like this layout as it fills the 97% of the web browser and it feels more relaxing to the eyes.

Also, the version of WordPress that powers the site was updated to its latest version (2.5). This new version features a lot of drastic changes to the maintenance interface (Dashboard) and its internal mechanisms.

“WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.” -More

For one, the Dashboard got a complete make-over. Actually, I prefer the new color scheme and re-arrangement of the menus and options. The only complain would be the huge orange “Right Now” Header that I could live without as it obscures my view every time that visit the page.

Also, the extensions can be automatically updated with the press of a button and guess what… It works! I tried it on 4 plugins and all of them were updated successfully. My only suggestion is to disable the plugin manually before clicking on the update button as it seems that it does not do that automatically!

Finally, the site feels faster but it could be that Dreamhost decided not to slow down my site as they usually do with no explanation. Sending a ticket to them corrects the issue, but that happens for the next 12 hours. After that, the site tends to slow down again but this is another story…

An updated version of the Social Bookmarks 4 WordPress plugin is now available. This version does not include any new features. It addresses the AJAX hide-show and the Nifty 404 bugs.

You can download it from the usual location.

The latest beta of the Firefox has hit the internet. I grabbed the Windows and the Mac OS X builds and installed them on my PC and Mac Mini respectively. Beta 4 is robust and polishes the new Firefox interface. It is almost ready to get out of the beta phase.

The only real downside is that a lot of extensions are not yet compatible, so you may have to reside on the Nightly Build Tools to enable them (and hope that they will work fine).

Also, the Mac OS X version is extremely fast and I can dare to say that it matches the speed of Safari.

ArsTechnica has posted a first look at the new version.

The release notes and the download link can be found on the Mozilla site.

In 1984, Infocom released a text adventure game interpretation of the Douglas Adams’ book with the same title. It was designed by series creator Douglas Adams and Infocom’s Steve Meretzky and was first released for the Apple II, Macintosh, Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST and the IBM PC. It was Infocom’s fourteenth game. More info on the original title can be found on Wikipedia.

The other day, I stumbled upon the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 20th Anniversary Edition, a flash version of the game that the BBC has made available on their site. This version has even won an Interactive BAFTA award!

I spent a half-hour playing that version (while waiting for a system to get compiled) and I have to admit that it a great way of bringing to life this classic masterpiece. I recommend it to all adventure gamers and to everyone who wants to try out a piece of gaming history. Let’s hope (because that’s the only thing that we can do) that we will see similar releases to other classic adventure games.

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How many times you have stumbled upon a theme or a plug-in that you want to test on your site? WordPress does not offer a preview feature so the only option is to make it live which should not be the prefered (and only) option while testing or in general experimenting with new features.

In this article, we will investigate how we can setup a copy of our WordPress powered site on a local machine will serve as a development and test environment.

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