Global Nerdy

Aaron Brazell, b5media’s Director of Technology has a blog entry on his blog, Technosailor, titled 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.5. It provides a brief overview of ten features of the very-soon-to-be-released WordPress 2.5, which are quickly summarized below:

1. New admin user interface. “By far the most comprehensive change in this release was the complete rethinking of how WordPressers do their administrative tasks. Happy Cog Studios was enlisted to do usability research and testing – with the emphasis being on usability research.”
2. New menu layout. “One of the first things you’ll notice is the change in the administrative navigation. It struck me as very Movable Typeish. I don’t know if the idea came from them or simply that Happy Cog had such thorough user research that it made sense. Either way… it makes sense.”
3. Changes to the way you add widgets to sidebars. “Another MASSIVE shift in philosophy has been in the Widgets page. Before, you could drag and drop widgets into position. You can still reposition widgets by dragging within a sidebar, however, WordPress is relying less on Javascript “bling” for this release.”
4. Dashboard overhaul. “…it is completely modularized, and though there is no “tight” way of adding your own, plugin authors can create their own dashboard widgets. The architecture is primitive at this point, but will improve offering a much easier way for plugin authors to do their thing without feeling like they are ‘hacking’.”
5. Improvements to the visual editor. “I don’t use WordPress’ visual editor, but I’m told it is a vast improvement over the older version. The TinyMCE team has worked closely with WordPress on this release as well.”
6. Flash-based image uploader. “For those of you using a lot of images in your post, the image uploader has been completely overhauled as well. Namely, you can uplopad and insert multiple images at once via a new Flash-based uploader. This will gracefully fallback to the original uploader if Flash is not installed, so never fear.”
7. Auto-upgrading of plugins. “By default, it will try to upgrade plugins that are already in the WordPress plugin repository by writing the new files out to the existing plugins. However, this is an inherent security risk as it would require your plugin files be writable by the world.”
8. Custom thumbnail sizes. “In WordPress 2.5, thumb-nailing became a whole lot more useful. You can not only set your thumbnail dimensions globally, you can also have a “medium” sized thumbnail, a la Flickr and an option to crop an oversize image instead of just resizing.”
9. New tag management interface. “It works like Flickr tags where tags can be added via a list of comma separated tags or via a “type, click, add” mantra. In addition, the UI has a tabbed interface which allows for the selection of tags by checkboxes and by most used tags, useful to say the least.”
10. Password strength indicator. A small enhancement, but a useful one for less security-savvy bloggers.
11. Bonus: New timestamp interface. A nice enhancement by b5er and WordPress contributor Mark Jaquith. “By default, a new post has no timestamp module. Instead, it’s a publish immediately, or you can click a link if you really do want to modify the timestamp. When editing a post with a timestamp, there is also no ‘Modify Timestamp’ checkbox that caused so much confusion for so many years. If you modify the existing timestamp, it’s assumed that you actually want to change the timestamp!“

So far, only Release Candidate 1 of WordPress has been released. If you’re feeling bold, you can download it from here and give it a try.

With great power comes great responsibility: This could very well be the greatest movie re-enactment photo ever.

Those of you who follow my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century, know that I’ve had my hands rather full with a transition to a position at b5media (where I’m the Nerd Wrangler) and attending South by Southwest Interactive, where I’ve been doing some serious work with serious people…

Anyhow, I’ll be back tonight and the regular posts to Global Nerdy shall resume tomorrow, March 13th. See you then!

The table below caused much snickering amongst my Dungeons and Dragons-playing peers in high school:

Is it a description of Jarvis Street south of Carlton at night, or perhaps a random sampling of H&M’s clientele? Actually, it’s the Random Harlot Encounter Table from the Dungeon Master’s Guide, First Edition, written by the late Gary Gygax. It’s part of the section on random encounters in cities and towns. One of the possible encounter types listed was “harlot”, and stickler for details that Gygax was, he wrote this sub-table which described the sort of sex trade worker one could stumble into in a Lord of the Rings mileu.

Here’s what it says:

Harlot encounters can be with brazen strumpets or haughty courtesans, thus making ti difficult for the party to distinguish each encounter for what it is. (In fact, the encounter could be with a dancer only prostituting herself as it pleases her, an elderly madam, or even a pimp.) In addition to the offering of the usual fare, the harlot is 30% likely to know valuable information, 15% likely to make something up in order to gain a reward, and 20% likely to be, or with with, a thief. You may find it useful to use the sub-table below to see which sort of harlot encounter takes place:

00 – 10 Slovenly trull
11 – 25 Brazen strumpet
26 – 35 Cheap trollop
36 – 50 Typical streetwalker
51 – 65 Saucy tart
66 – 75 Wanton wench
76 – 85 Expensive doxy
86 – 90 Haughty courtesan
91 – 92 Aged madam
93 – 94 Wealthy procuress
95 – 98 Sly pimp
99 – 00 Rich panderer

An expensive doxy will resemble a gentlewoman, a haughty courtesan a noblewoman, the other harlots might be mistaken for goodwives and so forth.

All in all, Dungeons and Dragons prepared a lot of us for business in the high-tech world.

Needless to say, some of us didn’t quite get what this table was until we looked up “harlot”. You have to remember that this was the late 70s and early 80s, a decade before the World Wide Web, when you had to scour the woods and ravines for free porn. (For some reason, Toronto’s ravines were full of discarded porn magazines. That’s why Toronto guys my age are pretty good hikers.)